#MilitantFactionsQuotes 17: The first game takes place in a nondescript city on the shore of a great

#MilitantFactionsQuotes 17:

The first game takes place in a nondescript city on the shore of a great lake, its name unfamiliar, unpronounceable, lost to search engine. "City" makes the place grander than it is: just a rambling string of shacks and blocks without planning or purpose. As the bus weasels in from the parochial airport below sludge sky all the damprise apartment blocks along each side of the strafed dirt road absorb what little light has managed to penetrate this gloom - particles of light which made it through 93 million miles of harsh space only to be stymied by the reflective murk of a second-world industrial zone - and as the crew look out through brown-streak panes I sense a deflation, a sense we're on alien territory where each individual person, creature, atom wishes us and our descendents harm.

"Looks like Sheffield," jokes Kirk beside me, and everyone laughs: loud, uneasy. I know why he made the joke: an anchor of familiarity in this dead world, this otherworld, a way of making it seem familiar, as Disney or Pixar make savage creatures seem human. An anthropomorphism of buildings, almost racist in its assumptions, because Kirk and those who laugh (me included) are really saying: these people are unknowable.

-From "Psycho Blitzkrieg", one of the stories in Mark Piggott's fiction/non-fiction collection "Militant Factions" available in paperback or Kindle from Amazon.