Dylan Thomas

Prose

[The] morning fishwife gulls … heckling over Donkey Street, observe: …

Mrs Dai Bread Two,
gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees,
dirty pretty knees,
see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry,
high-heel shoes with one heel missing,
tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair,
nothing else at all but a dab of scent,
lolling gaudy at the doorway,
tell your fortune in the tea-leaves,
scowling at the sunshine,
lighting up my pipe; …

Miss Price,
in my pretty print housecoat,
deft at the clothesline,
natty as a jenny-wren,
then pit-pat back to my egg in its cosy,
my crisp toast-fingers,
my homemade plum and butterpat; …

Polly Garter,
under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby.
Nothing grows in our garden, only washing.
And babies.
And where's their fathers live, my love?
Over the hills and far away.
You're looking up at me now.
I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature.
You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. …

Polly Garter [Singing]:
I loved a man whose name was Tom
He was strong as a bear and two yards long
I loved a man whose name was Dick
He was big as a barrel and three feet thick
And I loved a man whose name was Harry
Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry
But the one I loved best awake or asleep
Was little Willy Wee and he's six feet deep.

Oh Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I'll never have such loving again
But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee
Little Willy Wee was the man for me.


Eli Jenkins:
Every morning, when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die.

And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!
Bless us this holy night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, goodbye — but just for now! …


Captain Cat:
I'll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

(Under Milkwood, 1953)

William Gibson

Prose

[Terror] should remain the sole prerogative of the state.

— The Peripheral, 2014, p 144.


Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts.

— The Gernsback Continuum, 1981.

William Gibson (1948):
[Molly Millions was a slim] girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. …
White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones. …
She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood. …

Her T-shirt was sleeveless, faint telltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms. …
Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. …
Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses, beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double edged scalpel in pale blue steel. …

[It was then that] I saw … that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets.
(Johnny Mnemonic, Burning Chrome, 1986)

William Gibson (1948):
[Contact] with “superior” civilizations is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy. …
[It’s] cargo cult time for the human race. …
We’re like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport; some of us actually manage to blunder onto flights to London or Rio, maybe even survive the trip and make it back. …
Flies in an airport, hitching rides. …
[We] can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years. …
There are things we send down the Highway (a woman named Olga, her ship, so many more who’ve followed) and things that come to us (a madwoman, a seashell, artifacts, fragments of alien technologies). …
We’re like pack rats in the hold of a freighter, trading little pretties with rats from other ports.
Dreaming of the bright lights, the big city.
(Hinterlands, Burning Chrome, 1986)

Arthur Doyle (1859 – 1930):
It was a September evening and … a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. …
Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare.
There was … something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light — sad faces and glad, haggard and merry.
Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once more.
(The Sign of Four, Chapter 3, 1890)