China Mieville interview

"His world of Bas Lag is the most richly, obsessively imaged realm since J.R.R. Tolkien’s."

which someone who reads fantasy (say, me) would take as, "Conor Oberst is the next Dylan" (in other words, people who enjoy fantasy would know that trope's been threadbare since the late 60s)) but not really to anyone who's even read like The Dragonlance Chronicles, who'd find "good as/better than Tolkien" pronouncements not laughable so much as beyond passe.

I rant, I digress. That interview reaffirms how cool I think China M is. But I hope he's got better stuff in him than Perdido Street Station.

Not to be totally negative, some good new fantasy:

1. The Etched City--KJ Bishop
2. The Physiognomy--Jeffrey Ford

1. There's something inherently "wrong" (what exactly? and why? who isn't a geek who reads and writes?) with fantasy.
2. Nevertheless the extreme sales figures of fantasy, beginning with Tolkien, mean we have to pay some attention to it.
3. Let's concede that Tolkien is the standard (which I agree with), and then proceed to measure and qualify everything according to him (which is stupid--should "literary" novels be measured against Ulysses and/or In Search of Lost Time? should every single young "serious" writer have to the next/better-than Joyce and/or Proust?)

As I alluded to in my post above, there've been several next/better-than Tokiens (most being fine writers in their own right)--
-Mervyn Peake
-Ursula Le Guin
-Roger Zelazny
-Samuel Delaney
-Stephen R. Donaldson
-Anne McCaffrey
-David Eddings
-Terry Brooks
-Mercedes Lackey
-Gene Wolfe
-David Gemmell
-Robert Jordan
-George RR Martin
-Elizabeth Haydon
-Stephen Erickson

I'm sure I'm forgetting some; this has been going on for forty years. Enough already.

Okay. Sorry. I'm done ranting now. Talk about China.

Bas-Lag's imagining is a weird one, I think, in that most fantasy worlds are stalled before an industrial revolution; and in those which are not, the playing of the world seems to work in a less small r realist way, more referential or metafictive. whereas on the face of it all mieville's bas-lag (awful name) books refuse on the face of them to indulge in any of this kind of thing: possibly someone who knew anything about anything could relate it to the marxism.

the weird thing is that the first two of them depend so utterly on his well-publicised grudge against heroic fantasy, against tolkien - perdido and the scar both have here-is-our-epic-quest stories which suddenly resolve into deliberate foul, botched endings - 'the girl they fought to save gets her brain eaten, by the way the noble savage guy was a rapist' in the first one - and which resonate slightly if read in genre context (resonate slightly = 'fuck you, dad') but without that context are just, i don't know. getting into the sort of thing i find in most places as boringly 'dark' - but i don't know how much of that idea of stuff being boringly dark is from my training as a genre consumer, anyway. (comix yo.)

i suppose the iron council is into his actual politics and not his genre politics - it is very much different to the first two in ways which reading this interview might be constructive w/r/t thinking about, i guess -

they talk about his prose, which is interesting - i read the first two near enough to publication that i find them hard to think of at this level, though i remember i found them hard - i had to sit with the dictionary for perdido st station, i think. and i remember the prose being good, and interestingly weighted, and when i opened iron council on a bus ride in june the opening seemed fraught with semi-clunkers.. but some of the other parts are consciously different, and better. structurally it is a total mess tho: and he doesn't have any get-out-of-jail-free cards in that respect.

i was gonna start a general fantasy thread a while back with some of this stuff as the opening comments. had forgotten that.

I actually read David Gemmell above as David Eddings, and thought "you are completely insane, mr plissken". Though Gemmell isn't really that much better, at least not enough to make his books good-good instead of good-trash.

i do think the ending is meant to punish anyone who can get into a story about bugwoman and hawkman. bcz this is a more charitable take to me at least than thinking it is meant to be actually fulfilling, i guess

i think new crobuzon as ankh morpork is probably right even though i'm not sure if it's an insult.

plissken what are bishop and ford like? and did you really manage to post that last one in 2001?

Bishop and Ford are both worth your time. Refreshing adult fantasy, no corniness in either. Bishop's an Australian woman, and The Etched City is her first novel. It's got a vampy, gothic feel to it, reminiscent of Moorcock at his most sinister, but she's a better writer. It begins as something of a knock-off of Stephen King's Gunslinger, before improving quickly into like a Sergio Leone Western epic set in a made up world, and then going urban mafia fantasy. Along the way there are interesting metafictional touches that smack of Italo Calvino's Imaginary Cities and Cosmicomics. I only read Ford's Physiognomy, so I can't vouch for the rest of his stuff. The Physiognomy, though, is a pretty good first-person science fantasy, very reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun books. Perfectly pitched, erudite prose, describing really bizarre situations. It's short, too. Not to beat a dead horse, but I finished both these books in one or two sittings, whereas after four or five tries I gave up on Perdido Street Station.

So I've read PSS and The Scar now, although in reverse order. Is Iron Council worth reading? Should I skip it and read that new one?

Iron Council was so much slower/ploddier than PSS. Still imaginative and interesting, but I wasn't as engrossed by it as the other 2 books. I was surprised how very standard police procedural/detective story The City & the City was, with this layer of disconcerting weirdness wrapped around it. I liked how the oddness had to be played out more in my own head, imagining wtf was going on with the interface between the cities vs. having all the nuances and details spelled out.

PSS ruled when I was on a plane.

is the new one, er, "in the bas-lag universe"? -- iron council more interesting than 'the scar', i think, which suffered mb from a lack of new ideas compared to perdido. it did suffer from the return of his single worst idea, though, the would-have-been-left-out-of-even-the-most-ridiculous-expansion-to-the-monster-manual "handlingers"

is the new one, er, "in the bas-lag universe"?

No, it's basically this actual planet, but a very odd country here.

haha: http://tristram.wikispaces.com/Handlingers?f=print

is the cover any less hideous in reality?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41XgIIutNRL._SS500_.jpg

love this guy. thought PES, Scar and Iron Council were terrific, a breath of fresh air in a lot of ways, and in that order prob. am excited for new one whenever it comes out in paperback

lol, PES. one track mind.

Still not entirely sure this isn't AI generated.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GDfdXcuXQAAgvBB.jpg

Article about the celeb novel.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/13/keanu-and-co-how-celebrities-became-bestselling-novelists?

"“Publishing is always a collaboration,” says Seaman. “When I’ve edited a book, it’s always felt like a partnership. If people are making an argument for a ghostwriter to be on the cover, where do you draw the line? Because often an editor could have a really heavy hand in shaping a manuscript.” This is true: Raymond Carver’s stories were cut to pieces by editor Gordon Lish to create the minimalist voice for which Carver then became celebrated."

Are there that many examples like Carver?

the manuscript for lord of the flies was famously rejected many times until charles monteith at faber told golding to cut off the whole first half (why they're on the island = nuclear blasts) and the last section (what happened after they got home); i think there were many other edits also

someone shd research and write a book abt this (v interesting) topic

then i could be copy-editor and make the book readable lol (i don't do fiction tho)

I've got this Library of America Carver doorstop, but haven't started it yet:

In gathering all of Carver's stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America's Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories.
But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish's editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.

to return to the "publishing is a collaboration" commentator, she is in my opinion more right than wrong (tho the valence varies greatly with budget set aside, and i suspect secret-partner-style editors are somewhat thinner on the ground currently): anyway i googled "novels saved by editors" and came up w/a pretty solid list of canonic authors whose editors did a good deal of recasting work at some point

for example the new yorker's gus lobrano (whose name i mainly know from admiring side-mentions in books abt the in-office world of the new yorker, and who nevertheless doesn't get his own wikipedia entry)*: the new yorker was of course famously interventionist and rewriterly in its heyday (when this overlapped with US canonicity), and the rewrites introduced for the magazine presumably largely survived into the book versions of the same material

*fvck poets, WE are the unacknowledged legislators, poets never stop getting acknowledgment

Did Lish continue to edit Carver's stories like that, or did Carver just start writing them Lish-style?

Best revenge against the poets - edit them after they're dead:

https://alexanderadamsart.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/changes-to-posthumously-published-poems-by-charles-bukowski/

https://i.makeagif.com/media/2-10-2018/sb5MG0.gif

Are there that many examples like Carver?

I've always heard that Pound's edits to The Waste Land are transformative. Re: Carver/Lish, it's a very intense story -- Carver has letters begging Lish not to cut stuff he likes, but Lish was probably right about how to make these stories something that would garner Carver a real rep.

That xpost LoA Carver collection not only includes Beginners, the manuscript that became What We Talk About..., and that finished product as well, its Notes on the Texts recounts the editing process , incl. long quotes from Carver's letters---think there might be a collection of their correspondence already published?---can't take anymore time with this tonight.

So many thats, and the its, what the hell? Sorry.

need an editor