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Thread for discussion of the story The Bastard Prompt .

The bastard prompt, when things are reversed... the opposite of what's usual...p233
No doubt this bit of theater lingo is in circulation, but on the other hand it could just be a fictional construct in this chronologically challenging story that speculates shaking up our sacred notions of cause and effect.
Once I felt I had sorted out what was going on CM surprised me again with where he went with it.

I always say, if you think Mieville made up some linguistic construct, check again!

I wish I had a better idea about what the actor group was doing at the end of the story, but this is my favorite because of the creepiness of the diseases, especially the girls in the children's ward throwing up each other's food.

I don't think the "actor group" was doing anything! They are just exactly what they claim to be, the Association of Standardized Patients (ASPs? Interesting...) It's what the spooks in the black limousine are doing. I don't think Tor knew what was going on, until she left with the spooks.

What do you think he actually quoted without citation?

I don't get it. He didn't quote anything, but he credited your father with initiating the Standardized Patient. What more would you want?

The disclaimer does not, I think, say that "everyone mentioned is fictional". I don't own a copy, but that's almost always boilerplate text from the publisher, and says something like "Names, characters, places & incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously." (That text taken from Miéville's Railsea which I do have at hand). So, there's no claim that your father was a product of Miéville's imagination, but he's taken something that your father did do, and used it in fiction. Because there is no quote, it's normal practice not to provide a reference (though in non-fiction, it might rate a line in a bibliography).

fwiw, I don't think there is an Association of Standardized Patients. There's an Association of Standardized Patient Educators, but that's not the same thing.

I don't think Miéville was at all disrespectful, and as I said in my comment above, it's not the actors who are doing anything wrong, it's the spooks.

And maybe there's no significance to the initialism of ASP, but it's Miéville, who never uses a word to mean one thing if he can make it mean two or three� so there probably is :-)