In China Miéville’s Iron Council, haints are apparitions occurring around the temporal fringes of a future disaster: premonitory visitations heralding mass death. They are the ghosts not of the past, nor even of the future as such, but of a temporal rupture: the future disappearance of the present.

The spectral voices of Burial’s drowned London are emanations of a (worryingly plausible) catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet. What if the affect they carried were not that of a future survivor’s “devastation” after the event, clinging even to past hurts as the only point of connection with a lost existence, but rather a foreshadowing unease, a sense that time is running out?