Scribble Orca’s Reviews > Aurorarama > Status Update

...the Midway was a poetic hodgepodge of architectural styles, but with an overall cheapness that made it more Fairground than Fairyland. Through dreary days or dazzling nights, it catered almost nonstop to all kinds of questionable tastes in mass entertainment. Panoramas, dioramas, oloramas, cycloramas, mareoramas, myrioramas, and panopticons took the spectators through all kinds of famous monuments and places...

He entered the pub, noted for its remarkable painting of a rather muddy and dark whale-hunting scene, asked for a Scores-by Stout and a Specksioneer Sandwich, and went to the Pneumatic Post Booth. There he wrote a message to Sybil to tell her he would be home late (though she would probably be partying somewhere), put it in a canister, sent it through the outward tube, and set about looking for William de la Whale...

“Exactly,” Nicholas said, wincing. “You’ve been there, haven’t you? You know what I’m talking about. Except the Silver Surgeons, they were against the Council then, and now, those phoque-in-iceholes work hand in hand.”

guargle.

These scenesters, whose metabolisms had borne the continuous impact of both the harsh polar winter and various compensating substances such as boilers, stokers, sand packets, snowcaine, zeroïne, nemoïne, phantastica, and opiates of all kinds, had started to assume a somewhat ghastly appearance, with waxen complexions and stares instead of looks.

Gabriel could see very clearly indeed what the fuss was all about...In the world of dark muted passions that is Academia, the witches’ brew that blends scholarly susceptibility with delusions of seduction is rather everyday fare, but here Corkring had obviously been scraping the bottom of the cauldron.
“It is simple enough. Sometime around the Flood, my colleague Corkring wrote a...derivative booklet on Coleridge."

"I wish to speak to you about a Masters student...Phoebe O’Farrell. She had chosen...to write a dissertation under the guidance of our colleague Mr. Allier titled “Stoned Landscapes: Laudanhomes & Hashishtecture in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Rêve Parisien’ ” (sic). For reasons that she may...wish to explain…she would like to ask you if…this dissertation can now be supervised by myself."

doublesnort

But, years ago, as the Blue Wild catastrophe had left parts of the city in (beautiful) deep-blue ruins, he had been obliged, like all the other scions of the so-called Arcticocracy, all the more because he happened to be the son of a profligate father whose legacy consisted of nothing but debts, to become, in his own bittersweet words, the Earl of Real.

He's read the Wake or I've Finnegone mad. Brentford...recognized the insignia of the Northern Light Brigade (Dorset Dragoons, Lancaster Lancers, and Sirius Scout Squadron), the Sea and Land Battalion (the famous Sea Lions), the Ellesmere Engineers’ Construction Corps, the Alert Armoured and Anti-Aircraft Artillery, the Boreal Weather Warfare Battery, and, in its own Tesla tower, the Tactical Transmission Team.

More puns in the first page of the prologue than Venice has c-anals.

As far as Gods go, the Sun may not have...the most impressive record. He has...none of the gift of the gab that runs in the Jehovah family and when it comes to throwing lightning bolts Jove-style, He is as inept as the average mortal...down to earth as He is, when one needs a God who is punctual, reliable, and handy around the house, and that is exactly the kind of deity one needs above 80° North, old Ray is..*snort*