ABSTRACT
Two trains collide: one side lined on its way from the past toward the future that was not to be; the second roaring through the terrain that never existed and never could. The collision occurs on the pages of China Miéville’s experimental fantasy novel Iron Council (2004) whose epigraph is taken from the writings of Velimir Khlebnikov, the greatest poet of the Russian avant-garde: “Erect portable moving monuments on the platforms of trains” (Khlebnikov 1987: 359).
