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 Railsea blurb blurb posted:From China Miéville, New York Times bestselling author of Un Lun Dun, a thrilling new young adult novel that reimagines Moby-Dick in an unforgettable and fascinatingly imagined setting. "moldywarpe" = mouldywarp?, a folk term for a mole So it's basically Moby Dick on land, with trains and giant moles. 
Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Dec 11, 2011 |
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Dec 11, 2011 15:39
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Sounds neat and fun, and I loooove Moby-Dick, but I'm kinda sad that it'll be a two-year wait between Embassytown and his next non-YA work.
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Dec 14, 2011 02:42
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Eh, I'm guessing this is a way of preventing burnout. If King took that long between books then they all might be as good as The Gunslinger.
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Dec 14, 2011 03:04
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I ended up using Embassytown in my English class for our research paper. (the subject was "Read a book you've never read and write a thesis"). To get a bit spoiler here, my over-all thesis was that Humans regard the concept of lying to be an evil thing, but lies and the over-all concept of abstract thought are so important to how we communicate with one and other and perceive the world. To the point where it's not until the Arieki can learn to talk in metaphor that they can be free of their addiction from EzRa I got a 93 on it.  It also probably didn't hurt that I figured out how to get Word '07 to replicate the Arieki speech. Mucktron fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Dec 15, 2011 |
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Dec 15, 2011 01:21
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Mucktron posted:I ended up using Embassytown in my English class for our research paper. (the subject was "Read a book you've never read and write a thesis"). I thought for a second that you meant Spanish Dancer's speech at the very end which, wow, what a thing. The speech in general was really fascinating, too. loving loved Embassytown. Here's my summary: An adventurer lady gives the gift of metaphor to some freaky rear end aliens
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Dec 16, 2011 17:24
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Hard Clumping posted:I thought for a second that you meant Spanish Dancer's speech at the very end which, wow, what a thing. The speech in general was really fascinating, too. loving loved Embassytown. I actually used a lot of Spanish Dancer's speech to support my thesis. There was something great about The line "Before the humans came, we didn't speak" going from a lie the Arieki told, to an actual metaphor to show how important the "gift" of lying was. But yeah, I worded it nicer, but a lot of my thesis did come down to metaphors are important and poo poo!!!
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Dec 16, 2011 22:56
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Mucktron posted:I actually used a lot of Spanish Dancer's speech to support my thesis. There was something great about The line "Before the humans came, we didn't speak" going from a lie the Arieki told, to an actual metaphor to show how important the "gift" of lying was. I've been moved by books before, but god drat that speech was something special. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.
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Dec 18, 2011 04:51
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I just gave up about 70% of the way through Kraken. The ideas are incredibly cool, but plot has gone nowhere in ages. The setting isn't bad--the London Mieville imagines is a little too Neil Gaiman-y for my enjoyment--but the characters are nothing more than surface level. Every character has a really nice setup, with interesting motivations, backgrounds, and personalities... and then they are given nothing to work with. The plot is: "Who took the Kraken?" asked about forty times, followed by a bunch of scrabbling around, punctuated by cool concepts #1 through #10. I have no emotional investure in any of the characters. As a reader, I only become attached to characters by what they DO after their introductions, not by who they WERE before the story began. No one has done anything, anything at all, unless you count fleeing in terror of Goss and Subby, asking who took the Kraken, tripping balls on squid ink, etc. Characters are merely a lens or a vehicle to get us to the next cool concept segment, which I freely admit are incredibly cool. Star Trek teleporter dude? Awesome. Statue jumper spirit thingy? Wow. But its all just special effects. When things finally do start to turn around, and Billy starts to grow powerful and take a stand, it comes out of left field. There is no build-up. One page he has no confidence, the next page he's Jason Bourne. I was hoping to read The Scar after this, having read Perdido Street Station and mostly enjoyed it, but I think I'm going to have to take a break from Mieville to rinse the bad taste out of my mouth. MartingaleJack fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Dec 20, 2011 |
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Dec 20, 2011 10:42
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BananaNutkins posted:I was hoping to read The Scar after this, having read Perdido Street Station and mostly enjoyed it, but I think I'm going to have to take a break from Mieville to rinse the bad taste out of my mouth. I would say don't give up just because you couldn't get with Kraken. It's a very different sort of book from most of his other works, and I would say since you enjoyed Perdido, go ahead and read The Scar. It's way better than Kraken, at least.
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Dec 20, 2011 22:46
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Another Railsea blurb:Amazon posted:On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea—even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-colored mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it’s a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict—a kind of treasure map indicating a mythical place untouched by iron rails—leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters, and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.
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Jan 1, 2012 03:17
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Another news tidbit: China Miéville will be writing some comics for DC
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Jan 12, 2012 13:56
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Just finished reading Embassytown (pretty good!), and there's something I didn't get: It's mentioned that for the Hosts to hear Language the speaker has to be sentient, which is why even though Ehrsul is probably more fluent in the language than the Ambassadors the Hosts can't understand her because she isn't sentient - but how does this work with the datachips containing EzRa's voice the Terre use to placate the Hosts? Surely the "telepathy" angle doesn't work with recordings (or broadcasts, come to think of it)?
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Jan 16, 2012 14:50
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There's a scene towards the end where Bren and YlSib admit that the ambassadors misled the Ariekei about the sentience of humans with one body/mouth. I assumed that the ambassadors similarly misled the human populace in to thinking sentience was required to communicate with the Ariekei in order to maintain their power within the city, and to discourage any linguist with a copy of Audacity from trying to talk to them. If I recall, we don't actually witness any examples of a recording not working prior to the EzCal incident. Avice repeats a story about the original colonists' failure to communicate, but that could have been told to her by a teacher or caretaker employed by the same government as the ambassadors. I figured it wasn't that recordings weren't used because they didn't work, but that people were told recordings didn't work and so they weren't even tried. But I don't have the book on me at the moment, so I may be inferring from inaccurate details.
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Jan 16, 2012 19:16
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What does it say about me as a reader that I cannot understand much of whats being said in Kraken? It's the first Melville book I read since I put down Perido Street Station and never picked it back up. The dialogue is always throwing me off for some reason and its hard to develop a sense of place. China is a very confusing author that uses big words that sound made up.
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Jan 20, 2012 06:07
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Kneel Before Zog posted:What does it say about me as a reader that I cannot understand much of whats being said in Kraken? It's the first Melville book I read since I put down Perido Street Station and never picked it back up. The dialogue is always throwing me off for some reason and its hard to develop a sense of place. China is a very confusing author that uses big words that sound made up. I think Kraken is one of his worst books, mainly that the main character was so unmemorable. I really enjoyed his version of London and would like to read more books set there, but the whole Kraken plot didn't actually do it for me. If you're willing to give him another shot I'd suggest either The Scar, Un Lun Dun, or The City and The City. The Scar is probably my favourite and one that was easier to get into than the other New Crozbun books. Un Lun Dun is his YA book. It's fun and enjoyable and a pretty quick read. The City and The City is quite self contained and the setting is in a way more normal than most of his other books and that can help ground you as you only have to deal with one fantastical concept.
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Jan 20, 2012 13:41
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Option two have a wiki handy and look up the words you don't know. Word choice is a pretty large part of authorial intent and you might learn something new and interesting.
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Jan 20, 2012 14:11
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The problems your having might be partially based on where you live as well. Part of whats charming about Kraken (and I will defend it forever, even if the protagonist is a 1-dimensional shadow), is the combination of London lexicon and China's usual range. There is one sentence which I fail to remember, possibly when the girl cop is burning old VHS copies of The Sweeney to make ghost police - seriously, how can anyone not like this book, and there are a number of bizzare China-esque word muddled in with cockney slang and seventies London jive. If you live outside the UK, or even outside London, some of what you might be finding confusing, might just be to do with that.
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Jan 20, 2012 15:49
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I absolutely loved Kraken as well, although I am a sucker for London based urban fantasy or whatever. Yeah, there's not too much to the main character, but that's just because he's only there so we can be introduced to the world with him and through his eyes. Most of the other characters are pretty good, and I thought the plot was more than just an excuse to cobble all his ideas together. You can just feel how much fun China must have been having when he wrote it. I read it whilst commuting and several times I couldn't help but chuckle loudly and shake my head at some of the concepts. It starts off relatively normal, but from Goss and Subby's introduction on, it just keeps ramping things up and up. I almost let out an audible 'you've got to be loving kidding me' at the Tribble It IS very British, though. Maybe that has something to do with it's general unpopularity compared to most of his other stuff. Junkenstein fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jan 20, 2012 |
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Jan 20, 2012 16:22
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I didn't have a problem understanding Kraken, i just didnt like any of the characters or the story for that matter.
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Jan 20, 2012 16:32
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I didn't have any problems understanding it either, the woman policeman made me cringe though, didn't like it at all. The three Bas Lag books and TC&TC are great and Embassytown is interesting, so even if you don't like Kraken I'd say its worth trying something else by him.
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Jan 20, 2012 17:14
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I have to agree with the opinion that the characters in Kraken are lacking. The City and the City had the same problem for me. I didn't care for these people enough to want to keep reading, they didn't seem real. By contrast I absolutely loved Perdido Street Station and Iron Council because the characters seemed a lot more filled out and the relationships were more interesting - the love story between Cutter and Judah in IC is beautiful. I do really enjoy Mievilles settings and landscapes and his monsters, and how the different creatures in his world interact with them (there are so many OMG WTF moments), but those alone just aren't enough to make me really sink into a book.
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Jan 21, 2012 14:18
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I just finished the first chapter of The City & The City for my first Mieville book and I'm extremely confused. What is up with the faux foreign prose? Between the bizarre/straight up wrong diction and disjointed train of thought (especially the last few paragraphs of that chapter), I'm having a tremendous amount of trouble slogging through just the words themselves, but this book gets rave reviews. If anyone's got some suggestions on how to approach this work, I'm all ears.
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Jan 23, 2012 19:39
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Duck and burger posted:I just finished the first chapter of The City & The City for my first Mieville book and I'm extremely confused. What is up with the faux foreign prose? Between the bizarre/straight up wrong diction and disjointed train of thought (especially the last few paragraphs of that chapter), I'm having a tremendous amount of trouble slogging through just the words themselves, but this book gets rave reviews. If anyone's got some suggestions on how to approach this work, I'm all ears. Could you give some examples of what exactly you're having problems with? I seem to remember TC&TC being pretty straightforward apart from the central fantastical idea, which you're not really meant to completely get straight away.
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Jan 23, 2012 20:08
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Junkenstein posted:Could you give some examples of what exactly you're having problems with? I seem to remember TC&TC being pretty straightforward apart from the central fantastical idea, which you're not really meant to completely get straight away. "When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrasz, that depressed zone." It took me a couple reads to understand what was being said, and I'm not even sure if it means what I think it means now.
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Jan 23, 2012 20:16
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Duck and burger posted:"When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrasz, that depressed zone." It took me a couple reads to understand what was being said, and I'm not even sure if it means what I think it means now. I'd say just keep reading. You're not really meant to know exactly what's going on there yet.
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Jan 23, 2012 20:48
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That was something I liked about both TC & TC and Embassytown, being thrown in the deep end and having to puzzle everything out from inferences and such. I should read TC&TC again, it'll be a completely different experience going in already knowing a lot of the lingo.
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Jan 23, 2012 20:58
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Duck and burger posted:"When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrasz, that depressed zone." It took me a couple reads to understand what was being said, and I'm not even sure if it means what I think it means now. I actually remember finding that sentence hard to parse when I first read the book too. It's also the only time I remember really having trouble with a sentence. Basically, the end of the first chapter only makes sense in the context of the very strange setting of the book, which hasn't actually been revealed yet, so I think it's supposed to act more as a slap in the face - letting you know that this is not the straightforward murder mystery it sounds like, but not yet revealing why. You wouldn't think twice about a similar sentence halfway through the book.
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Jan 23, 2012 21:06
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Duck and burger posted:I just finished the first chapter of The City & The City for my first Mieville book and I'm extremely confused. What is up with the faux foreign prose? Between the bizarre/straight up wrong diction and disjointed train of thought (especially the last few paragraphs of that chapter), I'm having a tremendous amount of trouble slogging through just the words themselves, but this book gets rave reviews. If anyone's got some suggestions on how to approach this work, I'm all ears. The prose was purposefully written to sound like an awkward translation from a Slavic language. I remember thinking just this when I first read it, then I looked up some interview where Mieville said as much.
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Jan 23, 2012 21:58
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I am an unapologetic Mieville critic (I hated street station, for example), but I just started Kraken and so far I am LOVING it. Even if there is a completely unnecessary adverb in the very first sentence.
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Jan 25, 2012 18:56
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taser rates posted:The prose was purposefully written to sound like an awkward translation from a Slavic language. I remember thinking just this when I first read it, then I looked up some interview where Mieville said as much. I liked it before, but now I love it. It just all clicks. The only Mieville I've finished, so far, is King Rat. Right now I'm reading Perdido Street Station and The City x2 more or less simultaneously. Perdido just made the hard left a third of the way in. I'm thinking that Isaac's attempts to help the garuda fly are going to take up the majority of the book, with the grub being the miracle answer, and then LOVECRAFTIAN NIGHTMARE MOTHERFUCKERS EATING YOUR PSYCHE and I'm like whaaaaaat
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Jan 25, 2012 19:43
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China Mieville and Isaac Asimov accounted for exactly half of all the books I read last year. I've read three books this year so far and two of them are Mieville's. Sadly, although I like his books, none of them have gripped me as much as Perdido Street Station did, and that was the first one I read. Iron Council is being saved for when I crave a new Bas Lag story.
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Jan 26, 2012 20:08
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Still saving the last bit of The Scar for when my seasonal work is over. I started this book like 2 years ago. Yeah, that's how I roll. And say what you want about anything in Kraken, there's some poo poo in there that I either would have wrote or just think about or know someone that would act/say things similar to instances in the novel. Not that it makes it brilliant or anything, but even now I find myself saying "And yet, eh? And loving yet," at a lot of things.
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Feb 12, 2012 06:44
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Wow, Kraken really slows down at the end. What a disappointment! What started out as a fantastic urban fantasy unfortunately became another case of "China Mieville needs an editor." Oh well, fantastic first half.
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Feb 27, 2012 15:41
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Sexpansion posted:Wow, Kraken really slows down at the end. What a disappointment! What started out as a fantastic urban fantasy unfortunately became another case of "China Mieville needs an editor." Yeah, I still haven't finished it. The pacing seems to go all to hell when they finally find the kraken. That being said his depiction of London is spot on. The part where Billy goes to the Commonwealth Institute was great, I was reading that chapter thinking I know I've been here as a toddler but all I can remember is some stupid cow. Then the Angel of memory turns up and  I got my sister to read that chapter and her reaction was exactly the same.
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Mar 3, 2012 23:39
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If anyone who's grown-up enough not to QQ about Miéville's politics wants to read something explicitly political he wrote, it's up at http://londonsoverthrow.org/ - it's an essay, accompanied by photos, about London and the modern age of austerity.
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Mar 6, 2012 08:25
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Mrs. Badcrumble posted:If anyone who's grown-up enough not to QQ about Miéville's politics wants to read something explicitly political he wrote, it's up at http://londonsoverthrow.org/ - it's an essay, accompanied by photos, about London and the modern age of austerity. Weirdly I had just started playing Burial's Kindred EP when I checked this thread and then started reading that essay.. Ideal soundtrack for it, really. Thanks for that!
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Mar 6, 2012 22:53
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For further nonfiction Mieville reading, he has an essay in a new sci-fi magazine called Arc: http://www.newscientist.com/arc There's also a story by M. John Harrison in it, so that's almost like 1.5 Mieville stories total.
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Mar 7, 2012 03:45
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BigSkillet posted:For further nonfiction Mieville reading, he has an essay in a new sci-fi magazine called Arc: http://www.newscientist.com/arc Very nice, thanks for posting that! Margaret Atwood Stephen Baxter M John Harrison China Miéville Hannu Rajaniemi Alastair Reynolds Adam Roberts Bruce Sterling
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Mar 7, 2012 12:40
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Pan Macmillan's Australian site has this: They say cover not finalised, but it'll probably be that. Kind of a shame that they painted themselves into a corner with the rebranding. Now all the cover art has to conform to this style.
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Mar 11, 2012 05:46
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Started The City & The City the other day, and it's really good. I'm having a hard time picturing everything in my head, though - the different styles of dress, architecture and so on. I have a terrible imagination at the best of times but drat, China!
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Mar 14, 2012 17:18
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