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I'd forgotten I'd ordered this! What a nice surprise.
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Aug 10, 2016 08:12
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I read all of his first books up to Iron Council, which was waaaay too preachy, even for a socialist like me. Any recommendations for the next read?
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Aug 11, 2016 22:18
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Embassytown
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Aug 11, 2016 23:25
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What's the new book called/about? I know I could google this but I'd like to know y'alls opinions.
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Aug 12, 2016 08:08
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Here is a short piece about China Mieville from The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/china-mieville-and-the-politics-of-surrealism
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Aug 12, 2016 08:27
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Grand Prize Winner posted:What's the new book called/about? I know I could google this but I'd like to know y'alls opinions. Uh basic gist, Surrealist artists set off a magic(?) bomb in Paris during the Nazi occupation in WW2. Cut forward to 1950, Paris is a war zone over run with a) Nazis still, b) terrifying manifestations of Surreal art and c) literal demons. It's crazy. I'm like a quarter of the way through, need to set aside more time to read! It does kinda require you to have at least a little knowledge of Surrealism, but there's an appendix which lists most of the artworks referred to, so you can look them up on Google images. Edit: oh the title! The Last Days of New Paris.
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Aug 12, 2016 11:35
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Oasx posted:I don't know how it is in the UK, but here in Denmark it would be quite expensive in taxes and fines if an order from the US got caught in customs. There must be local shops that import American books. In the glorious socialist state of Norway books are exempt from taxes when you order them from abroad  
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Aug 12, 2016 17:33
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Just in case anybody was hesitant about The Last Days of New Paris, the protagonists wind up fighting a demonic Nazi grafted onto a tank centaur-style, and he isn't even the final boss! It's a lot more fun than I was expecting, on top of being stuffed with wonderful Surreal imagery.
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Aug 16, 2016 05:08
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No word on a new novel yet, but here's a non-fiction book Miéville will release next year: https://outtherebooks.wordpress.com/2016/08/17/china-mieville-has-a-non-fiction-book-about-the-russian-revolution-coming-out-in-2017/
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Aug 17, 2016 08:35
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Why would you read the wiki page? Verso books consistently publish good books in this vein so no doubt it will be enthralling.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:37
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the_homemaster posted:Why would you read the wiki page? Verso books consistently publish good books in this vein so no doubt it will be enthralling. Reading one doesn't preclude you from reading the other.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:54
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Just finished New Paris- it was fun, with some great monsters- particularly, uh, the last one. It didn't grab me in the same way that Scar or Embassytown did, but then, I'm not overly familiar with Surrealism. (Embassytown is simply wonderful...) I remember reading that Mieville inte3nds to write one book in every genre, although I get the feeling he is simply making his own genre: Confused Person Wanders Around Weird City in the Company of Someone Who Is Slightly Less Confused, And The True Enemy is Capitalism.
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Sep 2, 2016 03:32
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True enemy in New Paris was fascism though. worse than literal demons from hell, those guys weren't so bad
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Sep 2, 2016 12:29
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Honestly, the last chapter is the only thing that saved the book from mediocrity.
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Sep 2, 2016 13:29
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I just picked up a copy of Three Moments and read it cover to cover (which I suppose one shouldn't do in a book of short stories). There were some clunkers - I didn't enjoy Keep or Syllabus - but overall I'm very happy to have read it. The man can write, god drat it. The Dowager of Bees was incredible. To me, that was the most compelling story. It felt well-contained and tight, with enough Mieville mystery to grab me. I've spent the last hour researching the history of playing cards thanks to this story. I want more! Something about it just makes me want to read more about that world and that idea.
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Sep 5, 2016 23:37
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Tree Bucket posted:Confused Person Wanders Around Weird City in the Company of Someone Who Is Slightly Less Confused, And The True Enemy is Capitalism. New thread title. Not a joke I really think that encapsulates his work, and this is speaking as a fanboy.
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Sep 6, 2016 02:44
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Thursday Next posted:The Dowager of Bees was incredible. To me, that was the most compelling story. It felt well-contained and tight, with enough Mieville mystery to grab me. I've spent the last hour researching the history of playing cards thanks to this story. I want more! Something about it just makes me want to read more about that world and that idea. I feel exactly the same way. I want to write fanfic in that world  someone save me from myself Luckily - very minor The Last Days of New Paris spoilers - playing cards play a similar role in the book's plot so you get a tantalizing glimpse of the concept at least one more time .
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Sep 6, 2016 02:50
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Man loves him some cities and monsters.
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Sep 6, 2016 03:01
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Thursday Next posted:The Dowager of Bees was incredible. To me, that was the most compelling story. It felt well-contained and tight, with enough Mieville mystery to grab me. I've spent the last hour researching the history of playing cards thanks to this story. I want more! Something about it just makes me want to read more about that world and that idea. Something Mieville does exceptionally well is "here's a category of fantastical things, but I'm only going to tell you just a few examples". For example, the playing cards in that short story, or the creatures of Bas-Lag, or books in Armada's library in The Scar, or the heroes of Dial H... And so many other little lists and groups of things that make for exceptional worldbuilding. He leaves you wanting so much more, and gives the impression of an enormous world beyond the story. One of the reasons I love Mieville so much 
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Sep 6, 2016 03:11
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If you want more card-playing-fantasy, check out Last Call by Tim Powers. It's pretty drat good.
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Sep 6, 2016 09:53
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Tree Bucket posted:I get the feeling he is simply making his own genre: Confused Person Wanders Around Weird City in the Company of Someone Who Is Slightly Less Confused, And The True Enemy is Capitalism. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
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Sep 9, 2016 21:17
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I'm about 100 pages into Railsea and so far its so good, I went out and bought Kraken for $4 used. I don't think I "got" City and the City when I read it - it was a little boring and I didn't dig the ending too much, from what I remember - but I'm all aboard the hype train now. Gonna read the standalones before heading into Bas-Lag.
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Sep 20, 2016 02:56
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Hedrigall posted:Something Mieville does exceptionally well is "here's a category of fantastical things, but I'm only going to tell you just a few examples". For example, the playing cards in that short story, or the creatures of Bas-Lag, or books in Armada's library in The Scar, or the heroes of Dial H... And so many other little lists and groups of things that make for exceptional worldbuilding. He leaves you wanting so much more, and gives the impression of an enormous world beyond the story. One of the reasons I love Mieville so much Aagh. That bit in Scar where Silas is talking about the things he's seen in the Gengris, and he mentions... what was it... limb farms, salp vats, skin libraries and simply "the music." Just brilliant. Come to think of it, is it possible that this idea is at the core of Language in Embassytown? Us humans can't help but take a few scraps of names from these imaginary sets and have our imaginations start piecing together a world, while our poor hypothetical Ariekes simply never could...
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Sep 21, 2016 08:25
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Captain Hotbutt posted:I'm about 100 pages into Railsea and so far its so good, I went out and bought Kraken for $4 used. I finished Railsea about a month ago and Kraken was what got me my ticket on the Mieville train. I love both books. Nicely done, if I see any Mieville book for $4 I'll probably embarass myself somehow as I throw money at the cashier, giggling. I'm three chapters into Iron Council, so far so good.
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Sep 22, 2016 14:24
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Finished Last Days of New Paris yesterday. OK, but too short and felt more like a "I have a cool idea, let's write about it" than an actual story. Both this and Censustaker could easily have been incorporated in Three moments. It looks like Mieville is in a downward trend when it comes to stories. He hasn't managed to make a longer story since like Railsea and now he is mostly writing short stories. While they are good, I would like something other from him than a short story about some cool concept.
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Sep 29, 2016 09:23
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Just finished Census Taker. It was an interesting exploration of childhood memory & perception, and I loved the little hints about thd shape of the world; but I do feel it wouldn't have lost much if it had been written as a short story. Seconding Cardiac's comment- it would be nice to see another full novel from Mieville.
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Sep 29, 2016 10:09
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He's really busy with politics-related stuff these days -- Salvage, his Russian revolution book, and who knows what-all manner of Red plotting and scheming. Considering that the world strongly resembles Homer Simpson's spice rack at the moment, I'm glad he is.
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Oct 2, 2016 03:56
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Super excited to see him today for a reading/signing at U of Michigan, and also tomorrow giving a lecture on Cities, Dreams and Nightmares.
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Oct 4, 2016 21:36
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Goddamn I am jelly. Hope there is a video or transcript?
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Oct 5, 2016 08:50
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the_homemaster posted:Goddamn I am jelly. Hope there is a video or transcript? I'm not sure if there is. Yesterday he gave 3 short readings, the first was a foreward to Moore's Utopia, the second was the start of a new novella, seemingly set in the prairie, and the third was a fiction/nonfiction about disavowed works and purposefully working on a to-be-disavowed work. He also did signings, I got Kraken, Embassytown and New Paris signed. Today there was a 3 part lecture with two professors and him, each giving a 25 minute speech on cities, dreams and nightmares. China's was very interesting, delving into the concept of the wall as a way to keep the monsters out, and how the wall informs the monsters to let them in, whether he is talking about city walls or mental walls. It was really thought provoking. I think tomorrow they're doing a conversation with him alone in one of the auditoriums, but I can't go tomorrow unfortunately.
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Oct 6, 2016 05:30
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Sorry deadthread, there isn't much news lately, but if you're jonesing for a Bas-Lag-esque story lately check out the graphic novel The Spire by Simon Spurrier. It's a murder mystery set in a weird fantasy city filled with many non-human races alongside humans. The whole setting gave me a huge New Crobuzon vibe. It's a great story, and it's one standalone graphic novel, not ongoing comic issues.
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Jan 23, 2017 13:56
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I found the Cities, Dreams and Nightmares lecture that China gave at Michigan. He starts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkCMlKPcCWM&t=2585s
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Jan 23, 2017 15:13
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OgreNoah posted:I found the Cities, Dreams and Nightmares lecture that China gave at Michigan. He starts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkCMlKPcCWM&t=2585s I listened to it. I dunno. I love his unapologetic geekiness, enthusiasm, and willingness to take genre fiction seriously in terms of scrutinizing it under a lens of literary criticism. In that lecture he even enthuses about the nationalist "pro Abe" undertones in the manga/anime Attack on Titan (which he calls Assault on Titan at least once for some reason). It's just hard for me to take him seriously as someone who cares about politics, intelligent and qualified as he may be. He strikes me as the kind of person who's chosen a side because it's fun and interesting to debate on an abstract level rather than out of real conviction. Which is a pretty pissy hair to split, I guess. It just seems like as he's gotten older his interest in writing seems to have gotten more and more politically preachy. I'm one of those people who loved The Scar and was disappointed by Iron Council though, so maybe I'm just prejudiced against stilt-spear pigs or something. It reminded me of Neil Gaiman's work "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" a little where the main character feels betrayed by C.S. Lewis when he retrospectively finds out that the Chronicles of Narnia were biblical allegory. With Mieville's Kraken too I felt that he'd sort of forgotten that good literature ("in my opinion" I guess) needs to be about character need, desire, and the opposition to those things. edit: I think it also explains why I really liked The Traitor Baru Cormorant more than some Mieville works even though the former could easily be labeled as a low-fantasy queer theory economic thriller: it was character-driven and explored an interesting, conflicted, striving character with specific, understandable goals. -- I had a question also, for people who've read This Census-Taker (I haven't): Does it seem to be riffing on Kafka's The Castle? I got that impression a little just from people's description of it, since the main character in The Castle is a surveyor from another village over, another profession whose job it is to assess the measure or value of things. In This Census-Taker the boy seems to meet a Census-Taker and is mistrustful of him, much as the villagers are mistrustful of K. in The Castle. Ceramic Shot fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 04:44
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OgreNoah posted:I found the Cities, Dreams and Nightmares lecture that China gave at Michigan. He starts here Ceramic Shot posted:It's just hard for me to take him seriously as someone who cares about politics, intelligent and qualified as he may be. He strikes me as the kind of person who's chosen a side because it's fun and interesting to debate on an abstract level rather than out of real conviction.  That's the one thing that I would never assume about him. Is there something obviously... capricious about him that I'm missing? From what I've seen and read he's politically quite active, not someone who just talks about these things. It's such an odd perspective that I feel I must be misunderstanding what you mean. Ceramic Shot posted:edit: I think it also explains why I really liked The Traitor Baru Cormorant more than some Mieville works even though the former could easily be labeled as a low-fantasy queer theory economic thriller: it was character-driven and explored an interesting, conflicted, striving character with specific, understandable goals. While we've got a lull in Mieville news, is there anything out there that might, in some capacity, scratch the same itch? In my case I like fantastic settings that illustrate socially conscious ideas. I've been quite fruitfully working through China Mieville's own recommendations here for the past few years, but I'm wondering if there might be anything else new and interesting along those lines, and I figure fans of Mieville are the people to ask.
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Jan 24, 2017 06:37
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I can recommend Shaun Tan. Mostly he illustrates kids' books, but reading them recently I was struck by how "Mieville" they felt-- every single page in The Arrival, for instance, feels like an illustration from the mythical next Bas Lag book. Seriously, google Shaun Tan.
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Jan 24, 2017 07:35
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I would name Felix Gilman, specifically The Half Made World, the semi-sequel The Rise of Ransom City. They're "weird westerns", like semi-mythical retellings of American history. Extremely good poo poo.
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Jan 24, 2017 08:47
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Eiba posted:
I could be totally wrong on that front, it even might just be basic jealousy on my part. Some of his positions just seem so much like a caricature of Marxism that it sort of sets the spider sense a' tingling in terms of what's motivating it. Sorry if this was a stupid derail! I really like what he's said about writers not seeing themselves as saviors or as some sort of elite group whose voices are more important than working people, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTb_CCukdnU). <-- Really long video where he argues that from time to time. In it he also argues (somewhat facetiously I think (I hope?)) for a basic wage guaranteed for (some) writers. Take from that what you will. One quote I really liked from that talk that's also in the comments section: "What if most fiction is, at best, moderately important? What if it is so vague and culturally drivel-some, and so mediated by everything else once the culture industry extrudes it through a writer-shaped nozzle, that our stern declarations about subversive literature are, mostly, kind of adorable?" A very fun and I think true Mieville-esque quote.
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Jan 24, 2017 09:38
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"If more people just understood Kafka's work, they wouldn't bandy his name around so much." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEiOY4y15KI&t=18s
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Jan 24, 2017 16:53
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Ceramic Shot posted:I could be totally wrong on that front, it even might just be basic jealousy on my part. Some of his positions just seem so much like a caricature of Marxism that it sort of sets the spider sense a' tingling in terms of what's motivating it. Sorry if this was a stupid derail! He has an actual PhD in Economics from LSE with a focus on Marxist theory. He's trained as a purestrain Marxist, and the line between academic Marxism and caricature is sometimes a little blurry. He is pretty heavily involved in more prosaic shoe-leather activism around political issues, though.
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Jan 24, 2017 21:01
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SaviourX posted:"If more people just understood Kafka's work, they wouldn't bandy his name around so much." Hey man, I've actually ghoulishly pored over the man's diaries and read what I think are all of his published short works. Just asking if there was a connection to one particular pair of works! And speaking of, I wonder if Mieville will ever publish another short works anthology. He seems to have settled into Weird/Historical Fiction novels in large part.
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Jan 25, 2017 04:05
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