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I couldn't get into Kraken either which is weird because I have loved everything else I've read from Mieville. There was something about the book that felt a tad too much like Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" where Oh ho ho! It turns out London is weird and kooky and YOU didn't realize it now did you??. On the other hand, I'm reading The City and The City and am loving it to bits, though The Scar is still my favorite book of his so far.
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# ? Apr 12, 2011 04:56 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:23 |
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Junkenstein posted:I think I had so much fun reading Kraken because it felt like Mieville had so much fun writing it. He really did, but don't expect more books like that in the future. He's said that Kraken was his last "comedy" for a while.
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# ? Apr 12, 2011 06:05 |
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I liked Kraken a lot but I feel like I would have loved it if it was a different story in that setting. Mieville does that kind of thing so well, having side concepts or things he mentions briefly that you'd love to read a whole book about.
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# ? Apr 12, 2011 10:42 |
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I love how Kraken really increases the weird as it goes along. It starts off just hinting at some strange, magical side of London, then Gus and Subby appear, and it's clear that we're going to see some crazy stuff, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's so many ridiculous yet cool concepts after that, I just found myself smiling and shaking my head every couple of pages and what he came up with. Yeah, of course it owes a lot to Neverwhere and stuff, but I'm a sucker for that kind of magical London crap, so I was obviously going to love Kraken.
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# ? Apr 12, 2011 13:35 |
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Embassytown is so good! It's very high-concept and really loving melancholy. The complete opposite of Kraken. I'm still processing the ending (normally not a fan of many of his endings, barring TC&TC.) Can't say Avice is my favorite protagonist ever, but it's not a bad thing. She's just as alien to me as the Hosts. I think people stuck in love with Bas-Lag will probably enjoy this one more than TC&TC and Kraken. The world is huge and each planet could probably house a different novel.
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# ? Apr 13, 2011 02:58 |
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I'm really looking forward to Embasytown. I loved all of his other works that I've read... well, except TC&TC... I honestly could NOT get into that one. Seriously, I tried to, but I just couldn't 'get' it. I really loved all the Bas-Lag novels, and even Kraken, however. Fingers crossed with this one, though!
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# ? Apr 13, 2011 05:45 |
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I chose to read The Scar now. While it's not as crazy-weird as Perdido Street Station, I am enjoying the story so far. At around 120 pages in, I still get the feeling that the story is yet to begin, which is GREAT. PSS and Un Lun Dun have taught me that the book is in scene-setting, character building phase and I should expect that about halfway through the poo poo will hit the fan. The city of Armada sounds very interesting. When I'm done with China's books, I'll be well ahead on my target of reading 26 books this year (I'm a slow, lazy reader).
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# ? Apr 15, 2011 17:49 |
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Oh yeah, The Scar luxuriates in its world-building for quite a while, but once the story gets going it really loving gets going. Jealous. I want to read the Scar again (for the 4th time). I'll probably get to it in a couple of months.
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# ? Apr 15, 2011 18:07 |
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The Scar is definitely my favorite so far, I just finished The City and The City which was great. I love that Mieville doesn't waste time with exposition and you have to figure out poo poo that's casually mentioned by yourself.
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# ? Apr 15, 2011 18:44 |
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Beige posted:I chose to read The Scar now. While it's not as crazy-weird as Perdido Street Station, I am enjoying the story so far. At around 120 pages in, I still get the feeling that the story is yet to begin, which is GREAT. PSS and Un Lun Dun have taught me that the book is in scene-setting, character building phase and I should expect that about halfway through the poo poo will hit the fan. The city of Armada sounds very interesting. For added entertainment, write down now what you think the climax of the book will be.
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# ? Apr 15, 2011 19:53 |
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http://io9.com/#!5792672/china-mievilles-embassytown-hurtles-you-through-a-linguistics-thriller-on-another-planet io9's review. Warning, they get a little bit spoilery, such as revealing the weird nature of the Host's language, and the human Ambassadors. These things are revealed only about a quarter of the way into the book but if you want that to be a surprise, don't read the review. It's akin to being spoiled for the nature of the dual cities in The City & The City. Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Apr 16, 2011 |
# ? Apr 16, 2011 02:18 |
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Writing reviews is really tough. Because you want to tell everyone what you liked, but you don't want to spoil. But there's so many ideas going on, the io9 review didn't even really hint at the things I liked best. I don't think they even accurately explained the nature of the Hosts or the Ambassadors. But you've got to give some plot description. Personally, I don't even read reviews of authors I like a lot because I know I'm going to buy the book anyway and want to go in clean. Then I return to reviews to see what other people said. As an aside, I really want to re-read The Scar, but don't have a lot of time for re-reads of old favorites. So I thought I'd give an audiobook a try, to listen to as I'm going about my soul-crushing office work. But there's no audio! drat. Had to "settle" for PSS and the reviews say the recording skips chapters later on, despite being unabridged. What a shame. You'd think Random House would want to fix that somehow. However, I kind of like the narrator. Almost sounds like China.
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# ? Apr 16, 2011 03:53 |
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I thought Kraken was his weakest work yet. For some reason novels where London itself is a sort of character leave me cold. I did love Unlundun though!
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# ? Apr 16, 2011 17:16 |
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For better or worse, Mieville is very much a 'London' writer, in the same way that, say, Dickens or Martin Amis are. For writers like these, London looms large in nearly every work that they produce, whether it's included as a conscious decision or not. It's neither a good thing or a bad thing but you can't take London out of their novels without killing them stone-dead. You just have to accept that if you read Meiville, you're going to get London in one disguise or another!
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# ? Apr 18, 2011 06:48 |
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Umiapik posted:For better or worse, Mieville is very much a 'London' writer, in the same way that, say, Dickens or Martin Amis are. For writers like these, London looms large in nearly every work that they produce, whether it's included as a conscious decision or not. It's neither a good thing or a bad thing but you can't take London out of their novels without killing them stone-dead. You just have to accept that if you read Meiville, you're going to get London in one disguise or another! I think he did a very good job of writing a distinctly not-London city in TC&TC.
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# ? Apr 18, 2011 07:07 |
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Really fantastic promo video for Embassytown! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDm_5iMGSN0 China describes some of the ideas in the book and the inspiration for such things. He also talks about the new covers, and answers some fan questions He calls the general setting of Embassytown "The Immerverse", and doesn't rule out the possibility of more books in that setting! Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Apr 18, 2011 |
# ? Apr 18, 2011 16:34 |
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Hedrigall posted:I think he did a very good job of writing a distinctly not-London city in TC&TC. Yeah, well I ignored that one, because it didn't fit into my neat little theory. Most theories don't quite fit the facts until you've chopped a few bits off of them.
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# ? Apr 18, 2011 19:09 |
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Tour dates: Tues., 5/24 – Harvard Bookstore,* Cambridge, MA @ 6:00pm Note: Event will be held at the Brattle Theater Wed., 5/25 - Toadstool Bookshop, Lorden Plaza, Milford, NH @ 7:00pm Thurs., 5/26 - World's Biggest Bookstore, Toronto, CA @7:00pm Sat. 5/28 – University Bookstore, Seattle, WA @ 7:00pm Sun., 5/29 – Powell's Bookstore, Portland, OR @ 4:00pm Tues., 5/31 – Barnes & Noble, Roseville, MN @ 7:00pm Wed., 6/1 – WORD Bookstore,* Brooklyn, NY @ 8:00pm *Note: This is a ticketed event held at Public Assembly. Purchase tickets here: http://www.wordbrooklyn.com/event/china-mieville
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 04:32 |
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And now, a shiny new short story in the Guardian! Look! Isn't that lovely! Go read it!
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 13:03 |
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MikeJF posted:And now, a shiny new short story in the Guardian! Look! Isn't that lovely! Go read it! Holy poo poo, this is awsome.
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 14:45 |
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nixar55 posted:Tour dates: Only weeknights on the East Coast? What's a guy who lives in Connecticut to do
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 15:56 |
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MikeJF posted:And now, a shiny new short story in the Guardian! Look! Isn't that lovely! Go read it! Nobody but Mieville could pick a concept like that up and run with it.
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 16:34 |
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MikeJF posted:And now, a shiny new short story in the Guardian! Look! Isn't that lovely! Go read it! I haven't read Cyclonopedia, but from what I've heard of it I can't help but detect shades of it in this story.
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 17:41 |
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Mrs. Badcrumble posted:Only weeknights on the East Coast? What's a guy who lives in Connecticut to do Well, if you live in CT, I assume you have a car, right? Boston or NYC isn't that far of a drive right? (Says the person who takes the subway everyday.)
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 19:23 |
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taser rates posted:I haven't read Cyclonopedia, but from what I've heard of it I can't help but detect shades of it in this story. I was going to reply to you about how Lovecraft is 'obviously' another big influence in that particular story, but then I started to wonder. If he didn't mention Dunwich at the beginning, how Lovecraftian would I think it was? There's still the gently caress THE OCEAN theme, the 'insane' bird, and the unnaturalness of the creatures themselves, but there wasn't really a feeling of dread. It was weird (in the sense of it being a Weird Tale), but not horrid. Its universe wasn't fundamentally opposed to the existence of living creatures, there was no despair, or terror stemming from a great lack of care and comprehension. On the other hand, the excesses of the modern world being rejected by the ocean and then coming back to haunt the living is Lovecraftian as gently caress -- if only they'd done more haunting instead of simply inhabiting the same space as us
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# ? Apr 22, 2011 19:58 |
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loving wow, I think this may turn out to be his most consistently well-reviewed book ever. http://www.sfx.co.uk/2011/04/26/embassytown-book-review/ Also, I found it interesting that Embassytown was apparently written after Iron Council but before the other recent novels!
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# ? Apr 26, 2011 15:06 |
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Man, I really hate how it comes out almost three weeks ahead in the UK! Well -- at least I can pre-order it for 15 bucks on amazon. I definitely remember getting both The City and The City and Kraken from the UK at a much lower premium than 10 dollars + 3-7 weeks shipping though.
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# ? Apr 26, 2011 17:24 |
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# ? Apr 27, 2011 09:21 |
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reflir posted:
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# ? Apr 27, 2011 09:23 |
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My order shipped from amazon! expected May 4th
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# ? Apr 27, 2011 12:59 |
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Paragon8 posted:My order shipped from amazon! expected May 4th Two days before the original release date!
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# ? Apr 27, 2011 13:29 |
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haha, I know. I was tempted to go to the London signing but copies in foyles are 2x the price of amazon, and I'm not hugely into meeting celebrities anyway.
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# ? Apr 27, 2011 13:59 |
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reflir posted:I want to be part of this club. I want to be part of it so bad. Edit: At least I have Tiassa coming... which will take me all of one night to read. Double Edit: I think I might go live in Europe just for their novel covers.
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# ? Apr 27, 2011 21:03 |
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I think the best writer to contrast with China is J.K. Rowling. Rowling can spend a page on one flat, one-dimensional character and make you completely fall in love with them. She is excellent at creating compelling characters. However, the world she built just makes no sense at all if you look at it too closely, to the point of introducing plot holes into the story. China Miéville is kind of the anti-Rowling in that he has a pretty big problem with creating good characters, but his world-building is absolutely top-notch.
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# ? Apr 29, 2011 04:55 |
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I'm in two minds about posting my thoughts on Embassytown. On the one hand I have nothing remarkable to say and so won't bother, but on the other there is one really interesting thing that I wanted to point out that you'd usually find in the context of a review. So imagine I've written one, and then read this next block of text (spoilers obviously) I don't know if Mieville has done this on purpose or not (or if he's even aware of it), but essentially Embassytown is a retelling of Wilfrid Sellars' Myth of Jones. The Myth of Jones is one of the most famous thought experiments from the philosophy of mind, intended to undermine the intuition that a person has a sort of privileged access to, or knowledge of, his own experiences that is always right simply in virtue of him having it. I will quote here from Stich & Ravenscroft's article on folk psychology (What is Folk Psychology? S&R (1994)) because their summary is good and elucidates subtler points in Sellars' original account (from which they quote heavily): quote:To counter the idea that our claims about our own beliefs and thoughts are underwritten by a special, introspective faculty that guarantees the truth of those This whole process mirrors exactly what the Ariekei go through. From a state in which they can only speak of things that are true (observable properties distributed through space and time), a genius arises, who shows them how to represent counterfactuals (speak of things that are counter to reality), resulting in the realization that thinking can happen not just in the environment but also in your own head. Of course the similarities break down somewhat when you consider that Sellars wrote this story for people who could already represent and had ended up with the delusion that in some things they were like the Ariekei (i.e. that the experience you have of the redness of an apple must be true because you're having it, just like the Ariekei couldn't conceive of falsehoods (there must be a rock that was split and then made whole again because I'm saying it) before human Ambassadors showed up.) but other than that it maps perfectly. Anyway, there have been a lot of times where I've thought about Sellars' phrasing of 'a piece of anthropological science fiction' and wondered what it would be really like (as opposed to the dry account just good enough to serve a philosophical purpose that you find in Sellars), and now I know. reflir fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Apr 29, 2011 |
# ? Apr 29, 2011 16:31 |
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^^^ That's kinda cool I guess. For everyone waiting for their copies to arrive, why don't you go and read the first 58 pages for free!
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# ? Apr 30, 2011 02:35 |
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Finally picked up The City & The City - only 40-some pages into it but really digging it so far. Feels very different from PSS and The Scar, but I like that it is still prose that demands your full attention.
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# ? May 1, 2011 01:13 |
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I just bought Iron Council. I haven't read any of the other Bas-Lag novels but I'm told that won't be too much of a problem. The cover is nowhere near as cool as the one shown in the OP. However I'm a bit too busy studying right now to start reading a book, especially one as thick as Iron Council.
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# ? May 1, 2011 01:52 |
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FreudianSlippers posted:However I'm a bit too busy studying right now to start reading a book, especially one as thick as Iron Council. Studying is overrated, start it anyway.
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# ? May 1, 2011 03:03 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:23 |
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Here's some audiobook news: • You can listen to a sample of the Embassytown audiobook here. It's the first Miéville audiobook to not be narrated by John Lee, so it'll be refreshing to have a different voice for a change. However, listening to that sample, the narrator's voice seems way too... I dunno, wistful, and Shakespearean, which is not how I imagined Avice in my head. I'm dying to find out how the audiobook will deal with the Ariekei language; it's rendered weirdly on the printed page, and it'll be interesting to see how they pull it off. • The fifth book to be released in audio will be
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# ? May 3, 2011 07:06 |