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Saerdna posted:I thought TC&TC was a fun read, although pretty badly written. It seems like China is never sure what voice to use in any of his books and always picks one that is never quite natural. I really liked that there was nothing supernatural, although it took some suspension of disbelief to accept this city could ever exist - it would have been pretty easy to cross from one city to the other without being detected, and smugglers especially would have done it all the time with impunity, and people would commit crimes in one city and then go back to their own to evade police all the time as well. By my read, Mieville is obviously interested in hidden social control - look at the militia from the first two Bas Lag books. He likes the idea that hidden spooky forces can force people to police themselves much more strongly than open and overt forces, and I think that this book is him taking that idea and pushing it as far as he can. So it's deliberately pretty out there in terms of whether it would happen in reality. On the other hand, the idea of unseeing things that don't fit into your world can be read as a pretty drat vicious criticism of the way that most of us go about our normal daily lives in urban areas, and I don't think it's too off beat. I think he wants us to ask how many different cities we live next to and don't see.
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Jun 17, 2009 18:47
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Oasx posted:Just finished TC&TC, at first i was a little disappointed that there was no fantastic element, just because i have come to expect that from Miéville, but i was pretty happy with it at the end, interesting premise. They appear out of nowhere because they've perfected that manner of walking that makes everyone assume they belong to the other city and so they're unseen. I guess they somehow drop that when they want to "phase in" to one city versus another. As for the coverage, I think he did some hand-waving there. There are a couple of lines about Breach having a lot of cameras and such, but it's never really addressed much.
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Jun 19, 2009 18:50
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soag.242 posted:Getting a major Pratchett vibe from this. It also sounds to me like a weird version of Foucault's Pendulum. Which is also awesome.
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Feb 13, 2010 18:13
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Turpitude posted:Definitely, I would say the whole Greenhouse sequence in Perdido was a huge wink to Aliens. I enjoyed much of the book in the same spirit! Personally, I can't stand King Rat. The basic idea is fun, but it's too obviously some kind of weird fanfic to the 90's rave scene. The surprise "In drum and bass, you don't dance to the melody. You dance to the BASS" bit made me roll my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head. It just seemed like an extension of the weird self-importance that people really really into a music scene often develop.
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Feb 23, 2010 20:28
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Iacen posted:
It's a totally different book - it's China trying to play with hardboiled detective fiction, and it's not set in New Crobuzon or anything. It's a low slower-paced than the Bas Lag books, and it has a totally different feel to it. I think The Kraken sounds like it's closer in style to his earlier work, but ultimately the question of whether TC&TC is something you'd like or not comes down to whether you like the idea of a more sedate and less overtly Weird noir story.
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Apr 8, 2010 19:23
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SaviourX posted:Planescape is the specific setting for DnD where the planes meet or are explored, and the art style and creatures created for it are echoed quite a bit by what shows up in PSS, that's all. I don't think it's as much Mieville copying planescape as the fact that planescape comes out of the whole "new weird" zeitgeist that Mieville comes from too. That mix of steampunk and urban settings and hardboiled tropes with fantasy isn't limited to either planescape or Mieville. But he definitely brings in D&D poo poo in Perdido Street Station - look at the "adventurers" who show up towards the end of the book.
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Apr 26, 2010 21:15
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LCQC posted:Looking For Jake is worth a look if you like short fiction, and it has a range of his styles. Or even if you don't like short fiction - I typically don't like short stories and particularly anthologies of shorts, but Looking for Jake is an exception for me.
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Apr 13, 2012 21:31
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Captain_Indigo posted:Yeah - it's interesting that people think of PSS as having a 'bad ending' (in terms of outcome rather than quality) because in a way its almost a classic 'good ending' - the bad guy is destroyed by the protagonists, though the gallant hero must pay the ultimate price for his victory. Even Yagharek isn't a bad ending - its just a twist. It is sad that Yag was not the person you thought he was - not sad because he is punished. The interesting thing to me about The Scar is that the ending changes the focus of the book, to me. Instead of being mostly about Bellis and her journey and the things that she sees, it's more a story about Uther Doul and how he responded to what he saw as a threat to his society. To me, the ultimate reveal changes the entire structure of the narrative. I didn't like it at first, because it felt like he pulled the rug out from under me kind of quickly. But in retrospect it's grown on me.
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Jun 15, 2012 18:59
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Railsea question: "That Apt Ohm" feels like it must be a reference to something I'm missing. Given the eventual reveal about the godsquabble and the creditors waiting at the end of the world, I feel like there must be some reference that I'm supposed to get but I can't work it out. What does everyone else think?
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Jul 25, 2012 23:07
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Notahippie posted:Railsea question: Holy poo poo, somebody figured out that "That Apt Ohm" is an anagram of Topham Hatt, the controller from Thomas the Tank Engine.
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Aug 7, 2012 00:00
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shrike82 posted:Thanks for that. Never knew much about the money situation for genre writers. I'm pretty sure that once you get that famous you have a lot of other potential income streams - speaking fees and teaching classes and that kind of thing. So they're probably doing better than the raw contract for their books would suggest. It's not a great field to go into if you want to be rich, though.
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Aug 17, 2012 18:59
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anilEhilated posted:It's not. It is way more relaxed and less serious than his other books and generally a much more grounded urban fantasy. King Rat is legit pretty bad.
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Sep 17, 2015 23:02
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Mordja posted:Also, was I the only one who felt faintly embarrassed with the D&B motif? Not the only one. I thought it was cheesy in general, but the way it was used in the big climactic dance made my roll my eyes so hard they about fell out of my head.
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May 18, 2016 22:17
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Ceramic Shot posted:I could be totally wrong on that front, it even might just be basic jealousy on my part. Some of his positions just seem so much like a caricature of Marxism that it sort of sets the spider sense a' tingling in terms of what's motivating it. Sorry if this was a stupid derail! He has an actual PhD in Economics from LSE with a focus on Marxist theory. He's trained as a purestrain Marxist, and the line between academic Marxism and caricature is sometimes a little blurry. He is pretty heavily involved in more prosaic shoe-leather activism around political issues, though.
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Jan 24, 2017 21:01
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I don't think I'm jumping into Iron Council next. Might knock out another Dark Tower book, because I am a genre baby. Is New Weird as a genre basically dead, or just sort of resting. I'm not really sure what really unifies the movement, because when I looked into The Southern Reach books, they felt pretty far afield. I think most of the authors most associated with it have slowed down their output, so it's getting a little frayed as a (semi) coherent literary style. I've read some decent books by more novice authors that probably fit, though, so I think that it may be slowly developing as a style of modern Fantasy. None of the following are as good or as multilayered as Mieville, but check out the Library at Mt Char and Archivist Wasp as books that I'd argue fit into the New Weird. I don't think there's a good manifesto or unifying theme, but for me the central elements are that the books either engage with themes or set pieces which pose fundamental questions about how humans experience the world and how this shapes our attitudes and behavior; or alternately take something that we all experience but express its essence in ways that seem at first completely out of the ordinary (like the Remade discussion above). To me what I like about the movement is that it implicitly critiques the longstanding trend in fantasy and science fiction to just reskin Victorian boy's adventure novels, where everybody is just some variant of a character motivated by easily understandable and usually simplistic motivations. It may just be that as more and more authors write SF or Fantasy, some of the critique that the new weird offers will just be brought into the mainstream of writing and it'll be less coherent as a group of writers.
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Mar 7, 2017 20:43
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Sandwolf posted:Ah gently caress, I thought, $6 novella, why not start there. But if I'll appreciate it more down the line, I'll save it. It's not necessarily bad or even something that requires prior knowledge of Bas-Lag. It's more that it's more "literary" - it takes some work to unpack what the prose is pointing to, and it's not a straightforward narrative. It's a decent novella, and if you're into pieces that take more work then there's no issue with starting there. It's just that it's very different from his other work, most of which have much more straightforward narratives and simpler structures.
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Mar 27, 2017 17:35
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I really ought to get around to The City & The City, it sounds like it operates in a similar way. It's one of my favorite books of his. I'd say it's similar in that it's theory jammed into fiction, but instead of Le Guinn and linguistics it's noir detective story and Foucault's panopticon.
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Aug 30, 2017 20:42
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Microcline posted:
To me I think that's explicitly the reason why his Bas-Lag books in particular are grim and/or end badly - they're a Marxist critique of society translated into fantasy (with some digs at the left as well). I think he'd argue that happy endings are impossible, given how society is structured in that setting. To me that's one of the points of the books.
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Nov 7, 2017 01:22
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Eiba posted:
I read that more cynically - although plenty of characters explicitly draw hope from the fact that the revolution is coming, to me he was saying that the revolution is always a future that never arrives, because if it actually takes place in the hyper-capitalist society of Bas-Lag then it's doomed . I feel like he's a modern Marxist: he's fully aware of both how ineffectual a lot of the left is and also how bad authoritarian systems can be whether they claim to be capitalist or communist, and that comes through in his writing. But he's also fully aware of how bad modern capitalism is and in a lot of his books his characters are struggling against that. I think the climax of Railsea is great for that and also tongue-in-cheek: the enemy is a bunch of bankers who have been waiting for generations for their loans to be repaid.
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Nov 27, 2017 20:40
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Kurtofan posted:Is King Rat really not worth reading? It's a paean to mid-90's big-pants rave culture, which if you lived through makes the whole thing loving ridiculous because you know how dumb a lot of that scene was.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:59
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King Rat: Literally this but with magic
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Jan 17, 2018 21:37
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Bilirubin posted:Where did he do his degree and what year? I can probably fetch a PDF LSE, although I don't know the year. So his academic pedigree is pretty solid.
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May 23, 2019 21:50
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Tree Bucket posted:Mieville hasn't published anything new in a while. Do we know if he's stopped writing entirely? (Maybe he's spent the lockdown working on the fabled fourth Bas-Lag book!?!) It probably depends on what you like about Mieville. I don't think there's anybody that blends social commentary/big ideas with the new weird/cosmic horror in quite the same way that he does, but Hannu Rajaniemi is pretty good on the big ideas and kind of trippy writing, and Tamsyn Muir is good at the cosmic horror and weird settings interacting with well-developed characters.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:23
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FPyat posted:A guy I know thought Iron Council was Trotskyist propaganda. I guess I can see it as a literalized Permanent Revolution. Mieville has a PhD in economics with a Marxist focus, so it's hard to imagine that's an accidental parallel.
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Mar 31, 2021 15:51
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Gertrude Perkins posted:I agree with the above posts - his essays and nonfiction are good (London's Overthrow was particularly puissant for me when I first read it) but I want a nice chunky brain-scrambling novel. I've found I'm rationing the remaining books of his I haven't got to yet. Yeah, these days there's a thousand options for Marxist takes on whatever you want at whatever depth you want, but next to nobody writing Mieville style fiction.
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Jun 10, 2022 22:27
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