This is the thread where we kiss China Mieville's arse.

I loved PSS from pretty much the first page, so it's probably not your thing. I like Carroll and Maguire, and I thought The Etched City was very strange and beautiful, but they don't come close to Mieville on the 'oh my god this is fucking mental' scale, which is what I want from fantasy, if I'm being honest (along with scary monsters). And Rowling better than Mieville? No no no no.

I put in Rowling because the first Harry Potter book absorbed me so much I ditched work to read it. I haven't read the others, though, since I could see the charm wearing thin fast and didn't want to spoil for myself what I felt her pull off.

Yeah, I'd probably still have Pullman ahead of him.

Did you think the Scar could be read as a critique of the current American administration? A state being led on a potentially very dangerous adventure for dubious, somewhat personal reasons... I wonder if it was deliberate at all?

As for best fantasy writer alive today; AFAIK Jack Vance is still among us, so you best check yoself before you wreck yoself. Also: Gene Wolfe, John Crowley, M. John Harrison (as previously mentioned), etc.

I have only read "The Scar", but I really loved it. I like the way the story kept going through transitions, so that when you thought it was going to chug along being about one thing it changed and started being about something else.

Currently I have become obsessed with "The City And The City", the one about the two cities that are (spoilers). I have not read it but heard an interview with Mieville on the internet, and it sounded amazing.

I'm reading "The City and the City" right now. It is totally ludicrously great. Never read any other Mieville before, guess I should now.

is this guy really that good? I haven't read fantasy/science fiction in years but I keep hearing this guy's name in the company of horror writers I like.

I read a short story in a collection somewhere. It's not for everyone (which is kind of a backhanded way of saying he's not that good that he can make me want to read more if I'm not into that sort of thing.)

so he has a new one out?

Yeah, Kraken is out at the end of June.

what no i saw it in the shops today

Where are you? b/c it's released on June 29 in the US.

Was a May 7 release in the UK.

I'm almost finished The City And The City... jesus, this is deadly stuff.

One thing I found a bit odd about this book, though, was how early he lets you know that the two cities are in the one place. I wonder did he consider writing it as a split narrative about different things in two cities where you only gradually realise that the physical location is the same, instead of just making it clear to the reader in the second chapter or so.

I thought at the end the big conspiracy reveal of C&C was a bit of a letdown, but really who cares about the plot anyway lol. Great ideas sci-fi. Excited about Perdido St Station and Kraken now.

i don't usually read fantasy or scifi but i just finished PSS and really loved it. all of the "endlessly creative" praises on the jacket are otm. maybe there's some truth to what was said upthread about flash over substance, but at the same time i like that he was able to draw in some bigger ideas (aesthetics, dialectics, etc) through the characters while also getting me to say wow that's just a fucking cool creature over and over instead of getting too didactic.

I'm about 100 pages into "The City & the City" and it's great. I don't mind at all how relentless it is about the central theme; it's such a great concept, I'm just glad he seems to have thought through all the implications.

Kraken was a bit light compared to C&C and the New Crobuzon books.

Am reading KRAKEN - which isn't like me at all - and I am quite enjoying it, in a would-make-a-good-episode-of-Being-Human sort of way. But I keep coming across sentences like this: “In the offices, workshops, laboratories and libraries of angry scholars and self-employed theorist-manipulators were screamed arguments between them and those non-human companions still around.” which reads like it has been machine-translated from German or something. Is English not his first language?

I tried to read Kraken over Christmas and ended up flinging it across the room in disgust after abt 50 pages. Apart from yes, the truly horrible writing I also thought the humour was the worst kind of sub-Pratchett pandering, and I didn't believe for a second in any of the characters, or in even in his depiction of London. Never read anything else by him, not likely to now.

i remember him being not-bad as a prose stylist! he has occasional failures of taste, i guess? i'd really like iron council (um, i think that's what it was called) if someone could take out all the stuff with (i think they're called) the handlingers

he was an academic, which maybe explains why he's okay with sorts of sentence that he should not be okay with, sometimes

(public school, cambridge, doctorate from the LSE. huh. never knew that)

ublic school, cambridge, doctorate from the LSE

classic trotskyist

i thought about making that joke, actually

wonder if he'll ever do a 'doctor who' ep

Hah - I thought it would have been a good Jonathan Creek...

It actually gets quite a bit better after the first 50 pages I think, Ward! Though he is still rubbish with characterisation, dialogue, humour etc, yes.

i totally loved 'the city & the city', and now i'm afraid to read anything else by him ('tc&tc' really sounds like the odd one out).

Will I enjoy Kraken?

Yes. Ward's a grumpus.

the city and the city is wrecking my head atm, in a good way (i think)

finally got going with Perdido Street Station, what a fun, engaging read

Is English not his first language?

Certain they're dictated. Some sentences in whatever that one I read before were just unbelievable, impossible to write for anyone from primary school level up (not even necessarily bad writing as such, just 'how could you write those words down next to each other? It was some sort of 'had, had had clusterfuck I think). I've read two of his now - The City and the City and that one... hang on, oh god - Embassytown, that was it. He's becoming a real grudge read. The thing is I want him to succeed at what he does - his approach appeals - but I swear he can't write or creatively imagine for toffee.

Feel I must be RONG about some stuff tho, cos plenty of clearly more or less good/sensible people like him. Feel slightly embattled and defensive about my dislike. Makes me touchy and incoherent about him.

Watched Dr Who, Seas 5 yesterday where he calls Amy Pond "the girl who waited" and my first thought was "She's a metaphor!"

%handlingers%

Are his second and third novels better? Because by the time in Perdido Street Station the two main characters visited the bird people in the slums, I realized I just didn't care what came next.

ha I just got to this part and man I really couldn't be more into this book

let us know when you get to the ~handlingers~

Is Un Lun Dun any good? My daughter has been reading this, off and on, for a few months now.

i enjoyed it, more or less, but i don't have any particularly strong memories of it. it's a fairly decent version of that whole schtick, i think.

I swear he can't write or creatively imagine for toffee.

What does creatively imagine mean, here? Embassytown and TC&TC seem to have solid new ideas fundamental to them. Not perhaps to the level of the explosion in a fireworks factory that is Perdido Street Station or The Scar, admittedly.

ha I just got to this part and man I really couldn't be more into this book

His prose style and story are so dusty and grimy – I just like the way he writes. He conveys, effectively, the fantastically imbued darkness that people like Neil Gaiman and Terry Gilliam have represented brilliantly in other media.

Un Lun Dun is lots of fun. It's got girafffes!

i don't remember giraffes

the siri hustvedt novel i am reading has a plush animal called 'giraffey'

I liked how in the New Yorker SF issue he rhapsodized about a particular panel from The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher which happens to be panel that has also haunted my life.

Gonna read PSS real soon finally. It'll be my first Mieville.

i just got the city & the city from the library yesterday. will report back when finished. they don't have PSS anywhere in the library system alas

okay Perdido Street Station just got super awesome

The only one I've read is The City & The City. The central conceit of the novel is memorable enough that, well, you'll remember it - also he finds lots of interesting implications. It's just at the level of words & sentences that sometimes the thing feels a bit plodding.

gotta confess that i never finished city and the city for that reason

<I>okay Perdido Street Station just got super awesome</I>

Haha one of the thing I really love about it is that it's paced properly for a big book - it isn't front loaded with "here are my ideas, now I'm going to churn this handle here until it's time to write an ending", one of the significant characters only turns up half way through, and it has space to be unpredictable - nearly every time I thought I could see what would happen next, it happened immediately and then went careening on.

PSS/The Scar are probably my two favorites, although I read them in the other order. I (sadly) have yet to finish Embassytown or Kraken -- when I was on vacation, my mom actually started reading and borrowed Kraken. I haven't asked her lately if she's still reading it or put it down for a while.

I've read everything except Railsea (because my copy hasn't come yet), and Embassytown was the only one I never want to even look at again. Not a bad idea for a short story or novella, but dragged out with bullshit and completely pointless cipher characters.

My favorite by far is Iron Council.

I've also never finished Iron Council! I started but kind of got disinterested quickly. I was under the impression it's the lesser of the Bas-Lag books?

It is and isn't. Very different feel than the other two, but the ending haunts me.

Of course, I know most of you are readin Dial H - which is where his imagination with no consequences (not having to write more than a few panels) really comes to the fore.

Un Lun Dun felt like a kids version of Neverwhere to me which, I suppose, it is really. Kraken then felt like an attempt to make a more adult version of Un Lun Dun, which is why I wasn't really into it.

Embassytown was, to me, on the periphery of Bas-Lag to the point where I could see it being the same universe. The whole conceit of how the language works, for example, is comparable to how Khepri is 'spoken'.

It's interesting to see how other people react to PSS. I tried to make Frances want to read it by telling her that of the 10 or so plots about half of them are of no consequence to the main plot of the book, they're just stuff that happens in New Crobuzon. And I think that's why I like what he does so much.

is there any evidence in the city and the city that the two cities are actually physically disjointed? rather than just culturally disjointed and ~allegory~?

i read it as a set of deep-set cultural & political practices (the 'unseeing' etc.), nothing magical or sci-fi about it.

me too but i would have liked the book a little more if there were something definitely magical or sci-fi about it. there are some cool ideas in there but i would feel silly taking it seriously if the whole thing is like DONT U SEE as china mieville looks on smugly.

Yeah, I assumed the Venn Diagram of the cities was 40-50% mixed use.

finally read the city & the city - i liked it a lot, but i'm a sucker for detective fiction so i can't really come at it from an unbiased angle. i too assumed that there was nothing magical going on with the cities, though i like that he never outright establishes that

i thought the third city stuff required it? didn't read v attentively tho

His keynote speech on the future of the novel at the Edinburgh World Writers Conference was very interesting indeed. Nice to see a SFF writer get to take such a prominent role at a mainstream conference, but he was a smart choice, talking about technology enabling collective modes of authorship (while acknowledging writers have always worked collectively) and calling for a living wage for writers as a response to internet piracy. He ended up calling for the overthrow of neo-liberalism. Hurrah! He impressed in the other debates too, standing up for experimentalism in the face of a Scottish writer who was concerned style can exclude ("you can't second guess your reader" was Mieville's response), and making righteous claims for the validity of fiction that is about alienation and difference rather than recognition.
There's a transcript as well as a video of the full debate.
http://www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org/the-future-of-the-novel/china-mieville/

I would have liked City so much less if there were something magically or quantum mechanically disconnecting the cities. I was all set to despise it until realizing, about 100 pages in, that it was all just one physical space, and that the author was toying with our sense of how to individuate places. I don't think that there's room for interpretation on this point.

Ultimately, I thought that the premise was wasted on the plot. He could have been more ambitious.

so far i'm liking embassytown more than anything he's done since iron council, which i loved. feel like the more dude strives for literary respectability the more irritating he is. stick with thinky genre shit bro. also ditch the earring xoxo

Yeah, after I thought I was getting done with him Embassytown sucked me right back in.

I hated Embassytown with a passion. I have Railsea sitting here but haven't cracked it yet.

Took me awhile to get past the "translated" garble of The City And The City---the tuff cop reminding me of Triumph The Insult Comic dog puppet's accent, which puppeteer Robert Smigel credited to his East Euro relatives---and the penultimate imagery reminded me of Dave Chappelle doing Axl Rose's rubber ankle dance, while John Mayer played "Ev'ry Rose Has Its Thorn" (Chappelle Show). But overall, I got into it, even the surfacing of the TV thriller plotting---needed something meat 'n' potatoes like that, balancing the less successful and more successful reveries.

Not running out to get his others just yet, though my local library has Kraken, Embassytown, maybe more.