City of Saints and Madmen

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I tend to allow an author like David Mitchell to get away with loose or almost thread-bare connections. What remains obscure, even to those of us who knew him, is how and why [Martin] Lake managed the extraordinary transformation from pleasing but facile collages and acrylics, to the luminous oils—both fantastical and dark, moody and playful—that would come to define both the artist and Ambergris." In total, the United States has suffered 9 million cases of Covid-19 as of Friday, or nearly 3% of the population with nearly 229,000 deaths since the pandemic outbreak earlier this year, according to a Reuters report, October 31, 1996. Lake ’s tones are, as Venturi has noted, ‘resonant rather than bright, and the light contained in them is not so much a physical as a psychological illumination.’"

While there are still many physical book readers — myself among them — the option to have a book on a mobile device is just such a no-brainer. And while Ebooks are good for large publishers who can (and do) command a nice bit of change for their product, for a small writer, ebooks don’t offer much of any benefit over what Medium provides. And in fact, the tools that Medium provides, which I mentioned above, are absent from ebooks. Biotech: House Frankwrithe & Lewden somehow has an arms deal with the Gray Caps and they bring out fungal mortars and fungus guns that both use body-melting toxins in their ammo. Additionally Duncan has discovered that the Gray Caps have a powerful machine that is partially built with bodies. The most obvious marker, at first glance, is the self-awareness of the text, what the kids these days call 'meta'--where not only are you writing, you're also commenting on the fact that you're writing, making jokes and references, reminding the reader of the artificiality of what they are reading.Starfish Aliens: The giant freshwater squid probably aren't from outer space, but otherwise they fit perfectly in the description. They're strongly implied to be sapient, communicate with bioluminiscence and when people gather together to hunt them once a year, they in turn gather together to hunt people.

Alternate Universe: In The Strange Case of X, the writer of City of Saints and Madmen is from modern day Chicago and he ends up in Ambergris, where he's held in an asylum.

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We recall Captain Aylett’s Beerlight and Pilot Etchells’ Endland, whose mores and customs are at once so familiar and so strange to us. Since the great expansion, Captains DiFilippo, Constantine, Miéville, Gentle and Newman all return with alien currency from new worlds. Others with a taste for exotic geographies continue to seek the Unending Parallel. All have left accounts. Annoying Arrows: Averted, the whaling fleet that founded Ambergris were dangerous not just with sword and harpoon, but also were excellent archers. It was with these medieval weapons, that they conquered the early Gray Caps and held their own against marauding forces from outside. Serious cases of Covid-19 are also on the rise, as hospitals in six states report having the most patients with the disease since the pandemic began. The number of Covid-19 patients hospitalized has increased by more than 50% in October to 46,000, the highest since mid-August. Vichy Earth: It's only a city rather than the entire planet, but the Gray Caps aren't interested in genocide. They want control of their territories and are planning on expanding their gains. They don't have the numbers currently to hold their conquest and so they use human agents and half-human hybrids to enforce their rule. Curbstomp Battle: The Kalif's invasion was short-lived once the Gray Caps got involved. Janice saw a series of large explosions from the Kalifate's position and with that the bombardment of Ambergris stopped instantly.

But self-deprecation is only effective when it is honest, when it acts as a genuine reveal of character, not just a sarcastic defense mechanism--a schoolyard dodge, 'if I say it first, then they can't make fun of me for it'. All for Nothing: Dradin has spent all his money on a book for the woman he fell in love with, watching her through a window. He's also nearly sold as a Human Sacrifice to the Greycaps by Depraved Dwarf Dvorak who was supposed to be the middleman between Dradin and the woman. All that and then Dradin finds out that woman was nothing more than a doll propped against the window. The New Weird genre as we see it in Vandermeer, started off with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Also against the Gray Caps by Mazinkert and his people, culminating in a genocide. This turned out to be a bad idea.Fake Memories: The priest Dradin caught jungle fever which temporarily did a number on his sanity and so he misremembers the events that would be his Dark Secret. And let's not forget the squids. Or the squid cults. Or how we have a large portion of the most respected library in Ambergris devoted to books on the squids that range from naturalists to fairy tales to squid cults to conspiracy theories hinting that some of the most troublesome parts of a few popular squid plays were, in fact, written by a certain cephalopod IN HIS OWN INK.