On the voice
A note on the voice
These are science-fiction novels with a liking for literary fiction and the older, classical styles — worlds that are their own and do not stop to explain themselves. Most of the shelf reads plainly. The Cairn and The Far Roads lean furthest the other way: clauses laid side by side and joined with and, trade words used bare, the weight of a sentence carried in its last few words. The Cairn starts light and thickens book by book; the station ages and the prose ages with it.
Nothing that matters to the plot is hidden inside a word you would need to look up. The words that are meant to be looked up have pages: the glossary and the languages.
In its own words
That’s the seventy-fourth, and it’s sixteen days, and I’ve an asking on my day’s page that came in at the first bell over the allocation side’s name with the hour against it. What the Station Keeps
Four days on the ground and he had swaged eleven eyes, re-reeved a hoist block, put a new bail on a barrow and spliced the end of a line that was going to want the whole line doing inside a year. The Way Out Closes
The dock hand took the sling off him and turned it over twice and went away with it without saying anything at all, which was all the praise a swaged eye ever got. The Way Out Closes
I’ve brought the book up because the book is what it wants. What the Station Keeps