I'm starting this really, really late, but if I don't keep a quote/note page, I'll try to jam it all into the review, and no one wants that.
(I keep my notes and highlights in Kindle as I read, but I don't trust them to actually permanently store them.)
Soundtrack: selections from the full soundtrack of Assassin's Creed Revelations (Balfe/Kyd). It totally, totally works. But not the main theme, because I've already used that in a different book.
"Our bodies are cauldrons ... and we become the magic we consume." [2%]
"That's the osteomancer's craft, to draw magic from bones. To capture and store it, to use the creatures' power, guided by human intelligence." [3%]
"It's important you make powerful weapons. That you be a powerful weapon."
"Why?"
"Because the Hierarch is making very good weapons." [5%]
"Southern California is a lie, Daniel. And Los Angeles is the heart of that lie. People came here for land and for weather. They came to build their little garden cities, and to pick oranges as bright as miniature suns. They came for oil and opportunity. And many of them came for magic. That's what they were promised, and that's why they came from the east, because this was billed as a newer land, and a richer land, and a more bountiful land. And there should have been magic enough. It came from the ground, and up from Mexico, and from across the Pacific, and Los Angeles should have been the paradise they painted on the orange crate labels. But for the Hierarch, it would be....in the Hierarch's realm, we're all human resources, from the highest osteomancer, to the average citizen, to the wraith slave." [15%]
Heh. Disney had "Imaginancers" and used "a potent distillation of osteomantic intoxicant" to addict people to his movies. I'm normally strongly opposed to this type of alternate history book. I don't believe in what Pratchett called (if I abuse his terminology) the Trouser Legs of Time. I don't believe that history could split way back in the past and that the two legs would still lead to nearly identical presents, with names and people merely altered rather than obliterated. I don't think the Trouser Legs of Time would lead to two nearly identical shoes--I think a fuzzy slipper on one side would be more likely. Or maybe a chicken leg. [19%]
Muahaha. There's a Baron Chandler. I can't help but be won over. [20%]
The mammoth was always dying. Mired to her shoulders in the lake of tar, she reached out with her trunk to the dry-grass shore where her mate and calf remained frozen in horror. The La Brea Tar Pits was a place where the skin of the world broke open to reveal the magic underneath, and the life-sized plaster mammoth sculptures emphasized a very important message: Do not fuck with tar. [27%]
Great civilizations might be born from guns, germs, and magic, but it was bureaucracy that kept them going. [27%]
Omg--Jared Diamond reference! I wonder if he's around.
"The jar was coated in finely ground firedrake scales, the only substance known to withstand seps venom, but even so equipped, there were a lot of ways he could screw this up. Spill the venom and it would eat through the jar, the worktable, the floor, the foundation, the fabled dragon heart at the center of the earth, and probably shoot up in an acid geyser on a quiet residential street in China. So, you know, thought Daniel, don't spill the acid." [38%]
"You could get away with that sort of thing when you controlled all the newspapers and radio and TV stations. He supposed the power to control what people believed was its own kind of magic." [46%]
SMAC: Los Angeles's Strategic Magical Assault Command squad. Snerk. [48%]
"The Hyakume was a beast made of eyes. Three dozen vat-grown eyes were planted into sockets in the wall, wired through optic nerves to a security station housed deep in the catacombs. The eyes kept a constant vigil. They stared straight ahead. They had no lids to blink. As a surveillance system, they were almost perfect. But they were stupid, mesmerized by their own mirror reflections in the Mylar, and as the crew walked the mirror curtain down the corridor, the eyes saw only themselves." [52%]
"Not everything in Los Angeles was built on magic alone. Some of it was built with slaves. With prisoners of war. They built the tunnels with their own bones." [52%]
"The things I ask my friends to do for me, Daniel thought. He could bring himself to ask Moth to die, but he shouldn't ask Cassandra to kill him." [56%]
"With his invisibility miasma extended to include Cassandra, she was in the most danger. She was in a ghost world, incapable of forming coherent thoughts, of making good decisions. It was as though she were invisible to herself, and her hand felt insubstantial in Daniel's iron grip." [57%]
"Los Angeles was beautiful when it burned." [58%]
"There was no luck. There was no fairness. There was no justice. There was the Hierarch and Szu and the Ministry of Osteomancy, and there was the Department of Water and Power." [59%]
(show spoiler)"I think when we're killing people, it's appropriate to question the well-being of the soul. The Hierarch actually ordered us to look into it once. We developed a chamber electrified with a battery built from an oni demon. The hope was to euthanize test subjects and store their spirit energy in the chamber. Unfortunately, we weren't able to conclusively prove the existence of transphysical manifestations. Though we did manage to kill a lot of test subjects. And that is how progress is made." [61%]
"He should have wondered why. He should have looked deeper. Instead, he just accepted. She loved him. Cassandra loved him. Jo loved him. Moth loved him. He didn't question it. He just accepted.. He just took it."[70%]
"Daniel was killing a person named Lopez, and the reverberations from this death would travel out in countless unseen directions, like a swarm of Jinshin-Mushi beetles creating earthquakes and toppling buildings in places Daniel would never see." [72%]
"Osteomancy isn't the only kind of magic. Los Angeles is driven by trade and consumption, so osteomancy dominates here. But labyrinths hold power everywhere." [76%]
(show spoiler)"But Daniel was still a thief, which meant he took things and used things he had no rightful claim to, because that was how he and his friend survived." [77%]
"The kindom runs on magic, Mr Blackland. But it's the wrong kind of magic. Osteomancy. A consumable. A nonrenewable." [82%]
(show spoiler)
People used to come here to drink coffee.
They played chess and checkers and backgammon and bridge and hearts.
They read Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times and the Chinese Daily News and the La Opinion and the Herald Examiner. They read the official hagiographies of the mages. They read westerns and detective novels and fotonovelas.
They wrote poems and plays and novels and screenplays and manifestos.
They did crossword puzzles and sketched and doodled. They met for first dates and blind dates and for immoral and unethical affairs. They fell in love.
They were beaten with clubs and shoved through plate-glass windows. They were arrested, and they bled, and they burned. [88%]
"So typical of Los Angeles, a city with deep magic in its bones and arteries, to express its power with film-set realities. Like the Hierarch, the city showed her true face to few, and to see it, you had to gouge the surface and dig." [89%]
"There are sources of power that don't rely on bones and mandalas. There is bureaucracy. There is administration. There is the idea of running things for no other reason than things need to be run. There is power fueled by sober responsibility. There is service." [93%]
(show spoiler)
I'll probably review it Friday or Saturday.actually, it's a netgalley book and doesn't come out until 10 June, so expect my review on 10 May or thereabouts. It's very good, but intense, and I'm currently mulling over what made it so spectacular. I'll need to let the book talk.
Hence the quote page.
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