Hedrigall posted:

Are you motherfuckers ready for a blurb?

The Natural History Museum's prize exhibit - a giant squid - suddenly disappears. This audacious theft leads Clem, the research scientist who has recently finished preserving the exhibit, into a dark urban underworld of warring cults and surreal magic. It seems that for some, the squid represents a god and should be worshiped as such. Clem gradually comes to realise that someone may be attempting to use the squid to trigger an apocalypse. And so it is now up to him and a renegade squid-worshiper named Dean to find a way of stopping the destruction of the world as they know it whilst themselves surviving the all out-gang warfare that they have unwittingly been drawn into...

Hedrigall posted:

Lovecraftian horror by the sound of it!

stupid ugly retard posted:

were those quotes seriously in it?

withak posted:

Doesn't it turn out that there is nothing at all supernatural about the situation?

Hedrigall posted:

Greg Bear wrote a trilogy of Halo books that were pretty well received.

I want Mieville and Alastair Reynolds to write a Mass Effect novel each _{and Vinge and Brin and so many others...}

quote:

It is a libertarian dream. Hexagonal neighborhoods of square apartments bob sedately by tiny coiffed parks and tastefully featureless marinas, an Orange County of the soul. It is the ultimate gated community, designed not by the very rich and certainly not by the very powerful, but by the middlingly so. As a utopia, the Atlantis Project is pitiful. Beyond the single one-trick fact of its watery location, it is tragically non-ambitious, crippled with class anxiety, nostalgic not for mythic glory but for the anonymous sanctimony of an invented 1950s. This is no ruling class vision: it is the plaintive daydream of a petty bourgeoisie, whose sulky solution to perceived social problems is to run away–set sail into a tax-free sunset.

Hedrigall posted:

RoboCicero posted:

I recently read This Census Taker (wasn't it 'The Census Taker' a while ago?) and quite enjoyed it, even if it's not in the same vein as many of his other books. If Mieville is trying to write a book in a different genre each time, he's certainly succeeding. A slower, more unresolved story about a boy who lives on a mountain with his father that focuses on atmosphere more than it does on concrete explanations. I enjoyed how everything in the world is just slightly askew, from the fact the narrator tells us the book isn't written in his first language, to how the seasons are named differently, to the fact that when you hear guns in the distance there is a sound for hunting, and a sound for killing.

There's some marvelously creepy stuff that goes on in there, but a lot of it is going to end up unexplained and never quite crosses over from unsettling. There's enough to give you some worrying vibes about the eponymous character especially given that Drobe seems to have previously been in contact with the previous assistant, the father's fury and fear considering that all of them should have been deactivated, and, of course, The Hope Is So: Count Entire Nations. Subsume Under Sets. Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize Interests. So. but it's a short book, and none of it is developed too much further.

It's kind of a shame! I'm still looking forwards to The Last Days of New Paris, but even in Three Moments of an Explosion there were a lot of stories that seemed to stop before the ending and I feel it again here.