Kevin's Watch

King Rat?
Perdido Street Station?
Iron Council?
Un-Lundun?
(note that The Scar is not so curiously absent from this list)

While China doesn't have the knack for writing angst ala SRK, he does have an amazing ability to create a world. And typically, that world seems solidly real while simultaneously being Dalian bizzare. I'll put the seedier streets of New Crobuzon (Perdido Street Station) up against Billingate any day of the week. Billingate will seem tame(ish.)

Any other Mieville fans or do I really need to start selling this guy's works?

stutt

Hey, I thought The Scar was as good as Perdido and much better than Iron Council!

Yeah, I liked The Scar, even though I thought it fell apart in the end. Iron Council was interesting, but ultimately torturous and unsatisfying. And I just couldn't get into Perdido St.

Hmm, I'm nearing the end of PSS now, and I love this book. It sounds like The Scar is in my future, but I may have to punt on The Iron Council. "Torturous and unsatisfying" is not a ringing endorsement. Or maybe it is.

i LOVED iron council!

PSS was pretty damned good. I also read king rat, found it sort of meh, but I think even that showed "potential." I'll probably look for some of his other stuff pretty soon.

Small criticism, nothing too important. When china uses "big words" they often sound forced to me. He himself has said he thinks of mervyn peake as an inspiration; Peake also uses weird words, but they flow a little better. Gene Wolfe's another guy who uses big words well, and SRD usually does (though every so often they sound silly). I can't really think of any examples, it's just something I thought of.

Mieville got better with every book. PSS was good but man, what a brick that book is. Soo long. The Scar is even better and Iron Council was fantastic, I loved his sort of minimalist writing style.
I think his stuff is very original and I hope he'll publish a new book soon. It can also be pretty gruesome, though...think of the Remade. Really think about what they are and what's been done to them. Shudder.

Spiral Jacobs wrote:Mieville got better with every book. PSS was good but man, what a brick that book is. Soo long.

Huh? It was only 600 pages; that ain't that long. It was a pretty quick read, too. I do like his writing style; it's very clean, and the book wasn't over-complicated. Are the other books that much shorter, or are they just better, and therefore faster to read?

I wouldn't think of Mieville as minimalist by a long stretch. He tends towards the verbose, much of the plot is self-referential and intricate, and his writing is at least as thick as Donaldson's. The settings and characters may be stark and austere, but... Compare that to the sleek style of Palahniuk or the shotgun prose of Hemingway. About the only pure fantasy writer, at least among the ones who work with more dark themes, that employs a minimalist style would be Bakker, I think.

The thing about Mieville's prose is that even though he uses a large vocabulary, even though he can use a lot of intricate description, he is a good enough stylist that it reads as if it was clean, simple, stripped-down prose. He puts it together so well you hardly realise it.


And I would say that Bakker quite often has florid passages and overwrought metaphor that don't pass by so smoothly.

Murrin wrote:The thing about Mieville's prose is that even though he uses a large vocabulary, even though he can use a lot of intricate description, he is a good enough stylist that it reads as if it was clean, simple, stripped-down prose. He puts it together so well you hardly realise it.

Schmegxactly! I agree about Bakker, too. I had to do a lot of re-reading when I was reading the PoN earlier in the summer. I hardly ever had to re-read passages of PSS.

I couldn't disagree more. I wish I had some Mieville on the shelf to double check, but from what I remember, the only thing that kept me reading was the denseness of the text, and even that was too often marred by pretentious over-reaching. I'll admit that his craftsmanship is fine, but if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't make it through the three chapters needed to find a major plot point (and that's probably why I didn't make it past five chapters of PSS).

Now that's an argument you could make about Bakker as well, but the actual structure of his writing is what I was referring to. Obviously, Bakker has a penchant for the occasional dive into excrutiating detail, though by and large I'd say it's used to give an idea of the vastness of the scenes. And as Mieville is usually more concerned with weirdness than vastness, that's even more detail. But quite a lot of Bakker's writing, if not most, is dialog and two or three sentence paragraphs. I'd put up some quotes, but since this is a Mieville thread... Anyway, just saying Bakker's closer to minimalism. (And Palahniuk would be closest, but since he's considered mainstream...)

*shrug*

Farm Ur-Ted wrote:

Spiral Jacobs wrote:Mieville got better with every book. PSS was good but man, what a brick that book is. Soo long.

Huh? It was only 600 pages; that ain't that long. It was a pretty quick read, too. I do like his writing style; it's very clean, and the book wasn't over-complicated. Are the other books that much shorter, or are they just better, and therefore faster to read?

Errr, my Pan edition paperback of PSS is 867 pages. But then The Scar is also 795 and Iron Council 614. Getting more minimalist by the book

I liked Scar, or rather I liked the concepts and images it drew from my brain. I often find Mieville unneccisarily gruesome and gory. I tend to like his ideas more than his execution of them

I tried the PSS book from the talk around here and at first it was a tad difficult to get accustomed to. Now that I am a little over half through it I look forward to reading every time I sit on the exercise bike. Completely bizarre stuff goes on in this book that I just haven't read elsewhere. His style is different, but different is good. I'm picturing that PSS could be into a movie.

What a wonderful idea! PSS would make a brilliant film. Think 'Children of Men' taken to an extreme...

I've found with all his books that they take a while to settle into, the Iron Council most so.
What PSS did best imo was meld genres together so very well, not sure i've ever read such a horrific fantasy. Unless you start talking Clive Barker perhaps who has walked that line a few times.
Not read UnLunDun yet, will be intersting to see how he calms his prose down for a yonger crowd.

I read PSS, IC, and The Scar pretty much together and wouldn't shrink from regarding them as a trilogy.
Or even as just one joyously, deliriously long novel!

I bitched about last year's local literature festival in the Iain Banks thread, but this year looks good! They've got China Mieville as one of the 'guest directors' and though I'm only only halfway through brochure, there have been a few moments already!

Described by Borges as a 'treasure-house of memory', internationally-acclaimed Argentian writer Alberto Manguel's Black Water anthology of fantastical fiction is a classic of its kind, ranging from HG Wells and Kafka to Cocteau and Calvino. He is joined by China Mieville, author of The City & The City, and Maggie Gee, acclaimed author of The Ice People, to choose and discuss their favourite tales of the fantastic.

Why is there never any science fiction on the Booker short-list? Yet why have so many 'literary' novelists, from Atwood to Ishiguro, borrowed their stories from science fiction? Where does sci-fi lie on the literary landscape? What are the issues of perception surrounding this genre and its cunterpart 'literary fiction', and how porous are the borders between them? Join critic and former Booker judge John Mullan and guest director China Mieville , Arthur C Clarke award-winning author of The City & The City, for a fascinating debate

From HG Wells to John Wyndham, Britain has been home to some of the most ground-breaking and successful science fiction writers. Explore past classics and the best of the current crop as authors Iain M Banks, Gwyneth Jones, Michael Moorcock, and China Mieville discuss this very British tradition

There's also individual talks by Banks (again), Philip Pullman, Stephen Hawking, Michael Moorcock (on Doctor Who), discussion on Utopias, a history of magic, various vampire and ghost literature discussions, various dream discussions, a few ancient Egyptian god things, Roddy Doyle is back , there's a Doctor Who table quiz....

Fantastic!

Stonemaybe wrote:

I bitched about last year's local literature festival in the Iain Banks thread, but this year looks good! They've got China Mieville as one of the 'guest directors' and though I'm only only halfway through brochure, there have been a few moments already!

Why is there never any science fiction on the Booker short-list? Yet why have so many 'literary' novelists, from Atwood to Ishiguro, borrowed their stories from science fiction? Where does sci-fi lie on the literary landscape? What are the issues of perception surrounding this genre and its cunterpart 'literary fiction', and how porous are the borders between them? Join critic and former Booker judge John Mullan and guest director China Mieville , Arthur C Clarke award-winning author of The City & The City, for a fascinating debate

Fantastic!

I know it's childish and I do apologise but that's a fantastic typo