The Gone-Away World

by Nick Harkaway

A prince who becomes too popular is best destroyed with insoluble opportunities.

And that right there is what you call a rhetorical ellipsis, the cheapest device in oratory and one of the hardest to do well. An ellipsis is like a haymaker punch you throw with your mouth, and the only tricks more low rent than that are making fun of your opponent’s ugly puss and bringing up something by saying you won’t mention it.

Honest faces lie and big boats sink where small ones ride out the gale. But ask me how I know, and I will not be able to tell you.

Old Man Lubitsch explains that this is normal in what is called politics, which is essentially the business of countries and big groups of people trying to make everyone see things their way. Since no one ever does, very little is achieved and practitioners are voted out and others voted in who reverse the process, so government (as Old Man Lubitsch explains it) is not so much a journey as a series of emergency stops and arguments over which way up to hold the map.

People don’t want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you’re a teacher you’re in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better.

where numbers of the dead are only numbers, stories of them evoke tragedy.

A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don’t want to and aren’t allowed to, so what we’re doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war.

The difficulty is what happens next, which is that various nations and groups of nations who are notionally friendly to one another and here for identical, similar or compatible purposes get into disagreements. The good kind of disagreement comes to an end with harsh words and apologies, but disagreements between men and women trained to kill and armed with the best weapons available, who know that they are disagreeing with people who are similarly trained and equipped, are generally the other sort. Giving someone a jolly good talking-to becomes an exchange of warning shots and suddenly there’s a minor battle going on. Minor battles become international incidents; international incidents foster distrust; distrust fosters conflict.

Sheep wander, and wandering is not a survival trait where there are landmines.

A cherry pie is not something which ages well. It is ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven, it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.

You are fucked. You are desirous of getting unfucked. Unfucking is considerably more difficult than fucking. The Second Law of ther-mo-dynamics—because if you were thinking even for a minute that you are better educated than I am and therefore superior, Bumhole, you were mistaken—does not look with kindness upon unfucking. The level of fuckedness in a system always increases unless something acts on it from the outside. Worse yet, Bumhole, you do not own your own fuckedness. You do not appreciate the fullness of the fucking which has happened to you. You cannot hope to amend your situation without knowing what it is.”

You don’t make strategy so that there’s one path to victory; you make it so that as many paths as possible lead to something which isn’t loss.