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I suppose it is expected that everything be shadowy, darting, half-seen and multi-dimensional and unknowable whatnot. The grindylow are reasonably creepy, especially since you only get little vignettes between 100 pages of something else. But when you just read the grindylow stuff back-to-back, it gets a little bit squick-libs. The grindylow have inexplicable...limb farms...and bile factories...and skin libraries. If the book had gone one another 200 pages he would have mentioned three additional [inexplicable][yucky][infrastructure]. Tumor Arenas, and Eyeball Quick-E-Marts.
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Jan 20, 2010 06:47
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1294028 posted:If I'm a marxist yet dislike most fantasy/sci-fi books, is reading Mieville worth it? Depends. Did you want a Marxist Fantasy? or a weird setting that includes some laborers and rebels? Yes, there was union organizing, and the oligarchic leadership of the city was portrayed as baddies, but it isn't a marxist fantasy where the marxists actually win or anything.
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Nov 14, 2010 07:17
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Hedrigall posted:I'll put this in the post-below-the-OP as well. Check it out if you guys are interested! I don't read enough literary criticism/discussion to know how this stacks up against the average, but he missed the point by a mile about Yag at the end of PSS. Crying about how Yag choosing to be human is species-ist, and implies that humans are better than garuda, etc. No, the point is that Yag is a piss-poor Garuda, he is too too abstract, he doesn't have wings, in spite of his punishment and exile he persists in non-concrete behavior. However, he is as illustrated by the events in the book, a reasonably good human. By the standards of his culture/race, he is as bad as he can possibly be and continues to be so throughout the book. By the standards of (dissident) human culture, he is a big drat hero. So, rather than continue to be a bad Garuda, he becomes a good-ish human. It isn't better to be human, it is just as a non-flying, abstract, self-concerned, exile, he is proficiant at it. Yag is unacceptable in one community, and acceptable in another. If I had to assign 'goodness' related to species, we know a lot more about what a crapsack place human New Corbuzon is. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Sep 13, 2011 |
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Sep 13, 2011 15:41
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reflir posted:It's only noticeable because it's an uncommon word that he literally uses to mean 'magic' in the Scar, not because he unconsciously loves it too much. Though for the most part he is using it to describe biology. Think there was also a nictitating membrane or two in there. And nacreous. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Apr 25, 2012 |
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Apr 25, 2012 22:07
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FreudianSlippers posted:
There is a joke there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
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Aug 2, 2012 06:04
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Captain_Indigo posted:Mother. Fucker. I bet I missed all kinds of clever things throughout all his books. While it isn't quite on the same level, the Garwater flagship Grand Easterly. Well, that pretty much existed. The Great Eastern Largest ship ever built to that point. With sails, screws and paddle wheels. On the first Atlantic crossing it was so fuel inefficient that they were chopping up the furniture to throw into the boilers to get it to port. Would not be the least surprised if this exact image, with all the ships rafted together inspired Armada.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Eastern Was a major boondoggle at the time. Though in an interesting bit of redemption, it was also the only ship in the world large enough to haul the first successful transatlantic telegram cable across the ocean in a single piece. It had been attempted several times before by two ships each dragging half the cable and trying to link up in the middle without success. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Aug 2, 2012 |
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Aug 2, 2012 17:27
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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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BigSkillet posted:I don't think Bas-Lag was particularly humorless, it just wasn't of the direct bust-a-gut variety. It was quite playful with the tropes and expectations of the fantasy genre, like using an archetypical badass action hero as a secondary character instead of a protagonist in The Scar, or hiring the D&D adventuring party towards the end of Perdido. The strike scene toys with you because of course the political faction sharing the author's views would come out on top, it's fantasy right? And then their leader just gets offed. This, there is a ton of Clever Fun that makes me feel clever for getting it in Bas-Lag. I linked a bunch of stuff earlier in the thread. The Magus-Fin Macguffin, the Grand Easterly/Great Eastern and so on. Actually I could probably do with less, rather than more, isn't that clever I've been clever with my tropes stuff. I didn't care for Kraken, which tried to be more funner, though I'm nowhere near as in love with Magical London as the populace at large, I guess, which may not have helped.
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Feb 20, 2013 22:14
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Isn't New Crobuzon basically a magical London, though? I think New Corbuzon is more a magical Pittsburgh. More industrial, more provincial, more on the downward slope of a curve than a Magical London ever is. There is old money, there is regional influence, there is a university, but it isn't the center of a major empire, it isn't an eternal city. I think being run by and for the exclusive benefit of political machines, gangsters and oligarchs is also not very London-y. Further, I don't think China _likes_ NC, he does like London. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Feb 21, 2013 |
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Feb 21, 2013 10:06
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There is probably some sort of high literary cleverness in having a translator, who professionally has no agency, and neither hears nor sees, but just transmits as a protagonist. I actually quite liked the external POV from a relatively unimportant characters. Nonheroes watching what would generally be protagonists in another story act is an interesting way to play it, and fits with the rest of his style, where things that would normally get a whole set-piece of action based on their compelling cleverness are just glimpsed from a distance and get a line of description before they are gone. I liked the external-only view of Doul. Heroes doing heroic protagonist things would be poorly understood dicks from an external view.
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May 18, 2013 01:12
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General Battuta posted:I genuinely hope we never get to see any of the mysterious off-stage Bas-Lag stuff like the Torque. Best left imagined, I think, though if anyone could pull it off it'd be Mieville. Agreedo, I like that he generates new unknowable horrors for every book, without ever explaining any of them. Torque, unknowable horror poo poo. The Weaver, unknowable horror poo poo. The Demons, unknowable horror poo poo. The Scar, unknowable horror poo poo. Whatever the grindylow were up to, unknowable horror poo poo. Whatever the Teshi were up to, Unknowable horror poo poo. I also like the implication that it is actually knowable, to somebody, just not to our protagonists or to the reader, who are entirely out of their loving depth with unimaginable powers grinding them up with no more attention than a nacreous puissant constantly folding fractal tesserae mill stone gives a to an individual kernel of adjective adjective barley.
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Sep 11, 2013 06:22
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Occurs to me that the Anopheli are striking because they are so contrastingly understandable. They are just Hungry.
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Sep 11, 2013 09:00
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The thing I liked about Yag's whole arc is that he was, and remains a very bad garuda. However, he is a pretty good dissident human. Being too abstract, and choice thieving fits in just fine in NC.
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Aug 18, 2014 12:47
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regularizer posted:Unspoiled because it's not really a spoiler but I really like these passing descriptions of different things that aren't really central to the plot in a lot of Mieville's books, it makes it feel like there's a whole world out there and we're really only looking at a small part of it. Absolutely. The two that stick in my mind, for some reason are the Whim Trawlers from Scar...clearly some sort of boat, but that is all, name-dropped in a whole list of aquatic craft some slightly described, but all clearly familiar/not-worth-getting-into for the protagonist, and also the Blitzenbaums in Iron Council. Trees of frozen lightning, with a punnish name, but all it got was a sentence in the course of a description of a much larger scene, whereas somebody who had fewer ideas would feel like that was so clever and interesting that it needed a paragraph of adjectives.
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Sep 13, 2014 21:03
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paint dry posted:Just finished The Scar. Some thoughts: Weird, I really liked Isaac, pretty good reluctant hero with interesting limitations, who didn't really grow or change in the course of the narrative. Though I agree that Bellis was an unpleasant character, I thought it was a fun, if somewhat repeated theme, that from an external view, the heroes of other stories are assholes and weirdies. Lemuel Pidgen, or Uther Doul, or The Lover, or any number of other characters would be much more traditional picks for a POV hero. So picking a far less dynamic, kinda whiny, and nowhere near as smart as they think POV character, watching what certainly would appear to be heroics from a POV perspective, and seeing them come off as lovely, was fun.
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Jan 7, 2015 01:17
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Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:Something about PSS that still kinda bugs me (ending spoilers): Jack Half-a-Prayer seems to come out of nowhere to save the day and feels very deus-ex machina-y. The very first time I read it, my brain was going, "Wait, who? Who is this guy?" I saw on a second read that he's mentioned once or twice elsewhere, but even then his appearance seems super convenient and cheap to me. Maybe I missed some intricate detail that better explains that? If I remember, plot-wise, there isn't anything that Jack needs to deus-ex-machine, he delays/distracts the bully-boys for a few minutes. Far less "god gets me out of this corner I have written myself into" than any of the times The Weaver shows up, and replaceable by slightly slower bully-boys, or a bit of derring-do by any of the other named characters. I expect that China was pleased with his punny freedom fighter, and wanted to put him in the mix for a bit, show that while the moths were a big drat deal to Isaac and to the Powers that Be, there was a whole lot else going on in the big complex world, and other agendas in play, and so on.
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May 29, 2015 22:51
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