"Kraken" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For all their help with this book I’m extremely grateful to Mark Bould, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Melisande Echanique, Penelope Haynes, Chloe Healy, Kaitlin Heller, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter Lavery, Jemima Miéville, David Moensch, Sandy Rankin, Max Schaefer, Jesse Soodalter, and to my editors Chris Schluep and Jeremy Trevathan. My sincere thanks to all at Del Rey and Macmillan.

The Natural History Museum and Darwin Centre are, of course, real places-the latter containing a real Architeuthis-but the questionable versions depicted here are entirely my responsibility. For their extraordinary hospitality and behind-the-scenes access, I am enormously grateful to those who work in the real institutions, particularly Patrick Campbell, Oliver Crimmen, Mandy Holloway, Karen James, and John Lambshead.

The poem in chapter 19, “The Kraken Wakes,” is copyright Hugh Cook, and I am very grateful to his family for permission to reproduce it. Among the countless writers, musicians, artists, and researchers to whom I’m indebted, those I’m particularly aware of and grateful to with regard to this book include Hugh Cook, Burial, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, William Hope Hodgson, Pop Will Eat Itself, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Japetus Steenstrup.

The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you’re a big boy.

The sea’s full of saints and it’s been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and they’re still there now.

Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jelly fish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out; they spit up spirals. There’s nothing saints don’t do.

Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here comes another one! Now they’re fighting! Yours won.

There aren’t any big corkscrew saints anymore, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. What’s your favourite saint? I’ll tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? They’re all a holy family, they’re all cousins. Of each other, and of… you know what else they’re cousins of?

That’s right. Of gods.

Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.

Who made you?