From the Bookshelf of SpecFic Buddy Reads…

The sea at its base spread flat and fell away from suddenly rising intricate blockness, black, angled and extrusioned.

In the glow of the thing's own flame they saw edificial flanks, the concrete and rust of them, the iron of the pylon barnacled, shaggy with benthic growth now lank gelatinous bunting.

Dughan turned and took in the length of Covehithe Beach. They were out of sight, but he looked in the direction of the graveyard, and of St Andrew’s stubby hall where services continued within the medieval carapace, remains of a grander church fallen apart to time and the civil war and to economics, fallen ultimately with permission.

“What do you want to see?
What is the nature of your enterprise?
When did you become aware of what the rope is?”

"The Earth is a thin-spoked wheel. Its spokes are irregularly spaced: we must look like the plucked remnants of some bicycle ridden by a ragged girl or boy. But only to God."

"You do not know how they live, those on the levels where people still live, those of the 1,200,000 floors of the Rope. These were isolated communities before you or your parents were born. We have only travellers’ stories. You don’t know what languages they speak, what they make or learn, to what they pray, what stories they tell their children as they look out of the portholes or call up external camfeeds on the Isabela Tower, Freedom Tower, and stare up at space, or down the perspective line of their shaft towards Earth as lifts full of foreign cargo rise and fall through their territories; how they mark it when those they love die; or if they are there at all, those people for whom the Rope is the world. The Rope is the world."

"What’s the first thing we learn about icebergs? That we only see the tip. Nine tenths of every one is out-of-sight."

"We all knew that what hung above London were icebergs."

"On the cover were photographs from an arctic mission which took place years before I was born, icebergs rising from the water. Next to each of those images was one of a mass over London. The frozen slopes and slices and cracks were the same. The crags overhead were close to identical to those that had once floated in the Antarctic.

“Look, they melt!” he said. “First they melt and now look they come back.”