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There's also stuff like Richard Morgan selling film rights for a million bucks, so that's a potential route too. It gives one hope (at selling out hurrrf)
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Aug 17, 2012 22:14
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SaviourX posted:There's also stuff like Richard Morgan selling film rights for a million bucks, For what? Please say Altered Carbon
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Aug 18, 2012 13:55
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Yup. I thought it was in the paperback's author notes?
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Aug 19, 2012 09:21
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I might be wrong but I think he's also sold the rights to Market Forces.
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Aug 21, 2012 13:12
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Some huge article by China about "the future of the novel" http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-the-future-of-the-novel
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Aug 21, 2012 18:20
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 Limited edition Railsea cover by Vincent Chong, the same guy who did the (much more interesting) Embassytown one, below:  Although I like in the Railsea one that you can see some unearthly beast swimming around in the clouds. edit:  And while I was googling, I found this awesome sketch of Yagharek done inside someone's copy of PSS, by Edward Miller, the artist responsible for the UK covers of PSS and The Scar as well as the other Czech covers I posted earlier:
Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Aug 22, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 09:10
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Hedrigall posted:
This is loving fantastic. I almost want to re-read Embassytown right now with that picture in mind. The mental picture I had was much more bright and clean.
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Aug 23, 2012 01:09
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I'm a new reader to China Mieville, and I'm reading Kraken at the moment (about 2/3 the way through). While I'm enjoying it, I definitely find it very vague and that half the time, it seems the author just throws more things / names / magics into the mix without much rhyme or reason and without explaining things, and it bugs me. Can anyone say whether this is a recurring trend in his other books? I really do like the subject matter (cool monstery magic stuff sitting just under the real world surface), but not sure if I could stick with him if his style is like this all the time.
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Aug 24, 2012 02:51
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PotatoManJack posted:I'm a new reader to China Mieville, and I'm reading Kraken at the moment (about 2/3 the way through). While I'm enjoying it, I definitely find it very vague and that half the time, it seems the author just throws more things / names / magics into the mix without much rhyme or reason and without explaining things, and it bugs me. Kraken is essentially him having fun and just throwing whatver he thinks would be cool onto the page. Having said that, I'm not sure if the Bas Lag books would be any better for you. He doesn't do 'worldbuilding' in the traditional sense, he doesn't explain where everything comes form and you can forget about things like worked-out magic systems. Maybe try Railsea? It sets its concept up (trains=ships) and sticks with it in a generally logical manner.
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Aug 24, 2012 09:57
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So glad I discovered this thread and this author. Just started reading Perdido and so far I'm hooked. Again, does the order count, Perdido, Scar, Iron Council? Thanks.
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Aug 24, 2012 16:58
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Mr Underhill posted:So glad I discovered this thread and this author. Just started reading Perdido and so far I'm hooked. Again, does the order count, Perdido, Scar, Iron Council? Thanks. Order doesn't matter except for maybe a few very minor references. I read Perdido, Scar then Iron Council. I left Iron Council for a whole year after reading The Scar because I was saving it for the next time I craved a Bas-Lag book.
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Aug 24, 2012 17:36
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Hedrigall posted:Limited edition Railsea cover by Vincent Chong, the same guy who did the (much more interesting) Embassytown one, below: So this is interesting to me, because I like Railsea much better as a cover, but agree that Embassytown is more interesting as an illustration. I wish books could still have lots of interior illustrations, so we could get detail like that in the Embassytown piece, without ending up with a weird, cluttered cover.
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Aug 24, 2012 19:16
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Since I read IC first, then The Scar, I pretty much flipped my poo poo when there was a throwaway line about Spiral Jacobs. I think he keeps little things like that in mind now and then, and adopts them into whatever new thing he's working on.
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Aug 24, 2012 20:42
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SaviourX posted:Since I read IC first, then The Scar, I pretty much flipped my poo poo when there was a throwaway line about Spiral Jacobs. I think he keeps little things like that in mind now and then, and adopts them into whatever new thing he's working on. Even better is somewhere in Perdido Street Station he mentions a woman who killed her baby and ended up remade with its arms sticking out of her head. Iron Council spoiler and that woman is Toro holy poo poo.
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Aug 29, 2012 17:14
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Even better is somewhere in Perdido Street Station he mentions a woman who killed her baby and ended up remade with its arms sticking out of her head. Iron Council spoiler and that woman is Toro holy poo poo.  What! That is absolutely crazy.
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Aug 29, 2012 17:50
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Junkenstein posted:Kraken is essentially him having fun and just throwing whatver he thinks would be cool onto the page. Having said that, I'm not sure if the Bas Lag books would be any better for you. He doesn't do 'worldbuilding' in the traditional sense, he doesn't explain where everything comes form and you can forget about things like worked-out magic systems. I think that style of worldbuilding is better than Silmarillion style where Tolkein just lays out the history of everything. By referencing interesting things in the novel's world but outside the scope of the story being told, you get a feel that there's an actual world going on beyond the story, and it could be the setting for any number of concurrent novels that would be equally as interesting. For instance, in Railsea, brief descriptions of the crew of the Medes reactions to seeing trains of other nations, and of those other nations themselves, may not be as satisfying as just having those nations thoroughly explained, but it is more interesting. Also, I just read Railsea in about 2 reading sessions. I could see how it's YA, since it's like the New Crobuzon novels but not quite as dark and heavy, but it doesn't make it less good. I loved how Sham basically comes from a society of Captain Ahabs.
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Aug 30, 2012 00:25
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Hedrigall posted:Just finished Railsea. It was pure reading joy, and the ending revelations were hilarious. Like something out of Monty Python or Discworld. Just the idea that at the end of the known world is a race of de-evolved, animalistic, capitalist bureaucrats waiting to present humanity with a transport bill, that's utterly brilliant. I just finished Railsea too and this post basically sums it up. I loved it from start to finish, and it also seems like perfect gateway-Mieville for people who haven't read any of his books before. I loved the setting and the glimpses you get of the wider world; I spent a whole lot of time trying to puzzle out exactly where things where. Like someone else here I wondered if the Stonefaces would be Mount Rushmore, but I think they were actually Easter Island, and that Streggeye was based around there. The great mythical continent of Sowmerick was obviously South America, so I was thinking that the known world of Railsea must be the bed of the Pacific Ocean. Oh, and the Topham Hatt anagram is genius. I think I'll need to track down Embassytown next (having read the Bas-Lags, Looking For Jake, and The City & The City). I was actually in Edinburgh at the time of the World Writers' Conference where Mieville gave his talk on the future of the novel, but I wasn't able to be there on that specific day. I was in attendance at another of the events/debates, on Style versus Content, and came over all starstruck to be in the same room as so many authors I like. After the event I spoke to China briefly and he was really friendly and approachable; wish I'd had something with me for him to sign. John Charity Spring fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Sep 14, 2012 |
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Sep 14, 2012 03:03
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Hey, so I've read Embassytown and The City and The City, and while I thought they were both fantastic (in both senses of the word), what's up with his writing style? With so many sub-clauses and a flood of commas, it made both books a bit of a slog to get through. I hope I'm not alone in this and therefore some kind of reading retard!
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Sep 19, 2012 22:28
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gender illusionist posted:Hey, so I've read Embassytown and The City and The City, and while I thought they were both fantastic (in both senses of the word), what's up with his writing style? With so many sub-clauses and a flood of commas, it made both books a bit of a slog to get through. I hope I'm not alone in this and therefore some kind of reading retard! China Mieville is an awesome writer if you can get past his nearly insufferable pretentiousness. Fortunately he usually errs on the side of sufferable. On the other hand, quote:In trying to understand what it was precisely I found so intolerable, I recalled a song called “Fit But You Know It” by The Streets. Being smart, or beautiful, or strong, or confident, or epitomizing any other virtue is whatever. But you can push these things, you can grind them into another person, and we have social censure for this kind of behavior. His writing is incredibly smug. I can feel him leering at me through his typewriter, shoulders up, breathing hard. That’s when I stand up, walk over to the bookshelf, and place it with the others. No way. We have no shared history; I’m not going to bore through one of these things out of deference to some prior affection. I don’t owe him poo poo. http://penny-arcade.com/2012/05/14 Personally I think he's a brilliant writer and I've read about half his books, but I also think he'd be an even better writer than he is if he'd taken fewer literary criticism classes and/or stopped trying to mainline his thesaurus. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Sep 19, 2012 |
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Sep 19, 2012 22:33
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:China Mieville is an awesome writer if you can get past his nearly insufferable pretentiousness. Fortunately he usually errs on the side of sufferable. On the other hand, My eyes bugged out at Tycho giving somebody stick for being pretentious, smug, and lookit this big wordy. Might blade > cardboard tube. I am not tired of the way Mieville tosses out a really interesting idea with a single sentence, never to be touched on again, implying that there is a whole big drat world. That said, I don't care for him being cute either. Both Kraken and Railsea were not for me. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Sep 20, 2012 |
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Sep 20, 2012 04:58
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Unfortunately, that post was also about Neal Stephanson, and authored by Jerry loving Holkins, so take that with the biggest grain of salt. (the key here being the overwriting in the very snippet quoted) If you can't stand a more academic form of genre fiction, then don't read Le Guin or Dick or whoever either, because 'oh man they used words you use in papers, ugghhhh' is a gently caress poor excuse for not liking a book. That said, I found a hardcover copy of Embassytown at the local library sale poo poo yeah. Also time to get on Railsea.
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Sep 20, 2012 05:06
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Slo-Tek posted:My eyes bugged out at Tycho giving somebody stick for being pretentious, smug, and lookit this big wordy. Might blade > cardboard tube. The way he handles big ideas is why I've enjoyed his books but I feel it's despite his writing style. It ruins the flow when there are so many overly complex sentences; it's almost like he's trying to show you how clever he is in every single one.
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Sep 20, 2012 22:30
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He's complaining as though he's never even heard of Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe, or even Jeff Vandermeer -- Mieville's on the lower end of what could be considered 'pretentious literary sci-fi' if he thinks that sort of thing is really worth going all theatre-major-stereotype over. But getting back to pretentious things, there's an academic journal called Extrapolation who had an entire issue of essays analyzing China Mieville books in Volume 50 Issue 2. It looks like their digital back issues cost $26, but you might be able to get it via EBSCO if you have access through college. quote:Like someone else here I wondered if the Stonefaces would be Mount Rushmore, but I think they were actually Easter Island, and that Streggeye was based around there. The great mythical continent of Sowmerick was obviously South America, so I was thinking that the known world of Railsea must be the bed of the Pacific Ocean. Excellent catch! Based on that, the sea at the end could be the Mariana Trench?
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Sep 21, 2012 02:05
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BigSkillet posted:He's complaining as though he's never even heard of Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe, or even Jeff Vandermeer -- Mieville's on the lower end of what could be considered 'pretentious literary sci-fi' if he thinks that sort of thing is really worth going all theatre-major-stereotype over. Having read Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin, and most of the other names mentioned in the past few posts, I'm really going to stick with my "Mieville is great but needs to put down the thesaurus" position. Don't get me wrong: he's not nearly as bad as St'e'V'en E'rik'son or something, Mieville at his best has real literary merit (I'd personally put him about on par with Gene Wolfe but not quite up to the level of LeGuin, who's simply a better wordsmith). He's massively imaginative and his works have a lot of theoretical and political depth to them. He's a great idea man. But he also has the flaws of a great idea man: he falls in love with his Big Ideas and Big Concepts and Big Words to the point that he sometimes ends up getting in his own way as a writer. I'll admit I haven't read his most recent two or three books so he may be improving on that front over time.
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Sep 21, 2012 02:43
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Oh no doubt, he's an overly wordy, paper-writing Lovecraft-channelling mofo, and he seriously needs to learn to tone down some of it. But at least he knows what those words mean, and knows exactly how to construct his sentences/paragraphs/whatever to get his tone across. Reading Iron Council is like reading SF new wave from the '70s where people just wrote like crazy (while on drugs, but whatever).
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Sep 21, 2012 08:29
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BigSkillet posted:Excellent catch! Based on that, the sea at the end could be the Mariana Trench?
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Sep 21, 2012 12:57
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:But he also has the flaws of a great idea man: he falls in love with his Big Ideas and Big Concepts and Big Words to the point that he sometimes ends up getting in his own way as a writer. I'll admit I haven't read his most recent two or three books so he may be improving on that front over time. Have you read Iron Council? I was very frustrated with Perdido Street Station for close to if not exactly the reasons you describe, but IC is pretty much a "Big Idea" that works.
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Sep 21, 2012 14:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Having read Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin, and most of the other names mentioned in the past few posts, I'm really going to stick with my "Mieville is great but needs to put down the thesaurus" position. Totally agree. While reading Embassyville I'd sometimes read a paragraph and think it was really a work of art, especially given the context, but when he applies the same style to almost everything it's too much. I'd never have thought of comparing him to Kim Stanley Robinson; it's like Robinson's at the opposite end of the spectrum, with his ideas coming in simple language but complex concept with plenty of basis in the real world.
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Sep 21, 2012 21:41
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Finished "Iron Council" yesterday. I thought it was great, I'd forgotten how beautifully Mieville uses language. I read "Perdido" about a year ago and got turned off of Mieville for a bit because of how bleak that ending was. Read "The Scar" before that, so there's the Bas-Lag series down. I hope he does write another at some point. Something about Tesh would be cool. What the hell is the "crawling liquid"? Overall they're great books. The endings are very poetic, if not happy. Though his characters always feel a bit distant, I guess because their reality is very different from ours. He also doesn't let the reader inside the character's heads the way an author like George R.R. Martin does. That's probably intentional. Gonna check out Embassytown, I want to see how he treats science fiction.
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Sep 22, 2012 04:55
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I don't get why people think bleak endings are negative, as mentioned by several others in this thread. I loving love'em. I'd rather take a forced bleak ending over a forced happy ending any day. I'm thinking of getting London's Overthrow, but I'm a bit hesitant. Not a big fan of non-fiction, unless it's put up in a crazy, semi-fiction way, like Hunter S. Thompson for example. However, it looks quite interesting and could be a good read.
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Sep 23, 2012 23:17
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I was enjoying Perdido Street Station, but the brutal ending is what made me love it. There was some stupid deus ex machina towards the end, and I was a bit mad about it, and I was starting to feel like it was just a formulaic adventure story in a weird setting. But that ending made it feel a bit more real. Forced happy endings are like, what is the point of reading a story if you know everything will get wrapped up cleanly and all the bad guys will suffer and all the good guys will live happily ever after? You know how it'll end right from the start. I can't feel any sort of tension at anything that happens. The hero is being attacked by bears? Who gives a gently caress, the hero cannot die. Basically the happier the ending of a book is, the harder it is for me to believe, and the harder it is for me to feel anything while I read it.
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Sep 24, 2012 23:31
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China gave an interview to a 12-year-old recently. It's honestly a better and more perceptive interview than many by adult interviewers - definitely worth a read.
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Sep 24, 2012 23:40
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This is pretty awesome.
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Sep 30, 2012 00:58
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Is that the cover from another country's edition, or just fan art that oddly included a promo quote?
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Oct 2, 2012 03:47
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BigSkillet posted:Is that the cover from another country's edition, or just fan art that oddly included a promo quote? It's the upcoming UK paperback edition.
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Oct 2, 2012 03:54
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I'm new to this thread but I wanted to ask a few things. I haven't finished the last Bas-Lag book yet but has he said any more about any more books in that world or the world of Kraken? Also to weigh in on the endings to his books, I read Kraken first and the ending to that was about what I expected - nothing ends up clean and neat, but it's satisfactory. And then I read Perdido Street Station. I think that I loved and hated it more than any other ending I've read in a LONG rear end time. I personally like happy or neutral endings but I couldn't fault him for anything in that ending because it all made sense. Like, what did you expect would happen? Everything was just carried out to its 'logical' conclusion. But he put a ton of work into building that world and making me care about the characters and then he sometimes-literally ripped them to shreds. It was almost painful for me to read. I read The Scar next and while it was the same feeling, I was at least expecting my dick to get punched this time so it wasn't as bad. I haven't finished Iron Council yet just because I haven't connected with any of the characters that well. I think that I love this man's writing, I hate this man's writing, and I cannot marathon read this man's writing because I'll end up curled into a ball. All at the same time. He does have a wonderful mastery of English as well, even if it's a bit pretentious. Sorry for just dumping all that out there, but I needed to share.
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Oct 3, 2012 03:54
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Darksaber posted:I'm new to this thread but I wanted to ask a few things. I haven't finished the last Bas-Lag book yet but has he said any more about any more books in that world or the world of Kraken? He has said that he will probably go back to the Bas-Lag books at some point, but is in no rush to do so. Don't think I have ever heard him mention the world of Kraken, given how divisive the book is, he has probably never even been asked.
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Oct 3, 2012 07:43
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Darksaber posted:I think that I love this man's writing, I hate this man's writing, and I cannot marathon read this man's writing because I'll end up curled into a ball. All at the same time. If you're looking to read more of his after the Bas Lag series, The City & The City is quite restrained as far as language and character-gut-punching goes. I don't even like detective novels in general and I thought it was excellent.
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Oct 4, 2012 00:32
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To my surprise, I think Railsea is probably in my top three Mieville books. Really enjoyable, and I put it away in two sessions reading on my computer (because I borrowed the ebook from my library, and Adobe Digital Editions couldn't be more convoluted to try and read on any of my mobile devices).
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Oct 10, 2012 04:02
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I am starting to think there won't be a new Miéville book til the second half of next year  Publishers have now put their upcoming books until June-July up in catalogues/Amazon listings/etc.
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Nov 4, 2012 09:04
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