Quoted By:
>reading Chasm City, hoping for more dramatic spaceship descriptions etc
>instead get Alastair Reynolds author fantasy about HAVING SEX WITH A ZEBRA
To be fair there is a good description of a skyhook / space elevator at the very beginning of the book; also space Jesus
(...)
I realised I’d seen her earlier that night, amongst the clientèle at the stalk. She had seemed beautiful and exotic then, but she was even more so now. Perhaps it helped that I was lying down in pain having just been shot, fevered with the adrenalin which came from unexpected survival. Beautiful and very strange - and, in the right light, perhaps barely human at all. Her skin was either chalk-white or hard-edged black. The stripes covered her forehead and cheekbones, and from what I remembered seeing in the stalk, a large fraction of the rest of her. Black stripes curved from the edges of her eyes, like flamboyant mascara applied with maniacal precision. Her hair was a stiff black crest which probably ran all the way down her back.
‘I don’t think I’ve met anyone like you before, Zebra.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Some of my friends think I’m rather conservative; rather unadventurous.
(...)
Zebra had entered the room silently. At first glance she appeared to be naked, but then I saw that she was fully clothed, but in a gown of such translucence that it might as well have been made of smoke.
She carried my Mendicant clothes in her arms, washed and neatly folded.
I could see now that she was very thin. Beneath the blue-grey film of her gown black stripes covered her entire body, following the curves of her form, shadowing her genital region. The stripes simultaneously suppressed and emphasised the curves and angles of her body, so that she metamorphosed with each step she took towards me. Her hair ran in a stiff furrow down to the small of her back, ending above the striped swell of her buttocks. When she walked, she glided, like a ballet dancer, her small hooflike feet more for the purpose of anchoring her to the ground than supporting her weight. I could see now that had she chosen to play the Game, she would have made a hunter of considerable skill. She had, after all, hunted me - if only for the purposes of ruining her enemies’ entertainment.
‘On the planet where I come from,’ I said, ‘this would be considered provocative.’
