Mieville's "Kraken" out in May 2010

[Arthmail]

Have you read City and the City? I thought it was a beautifully written story without any of the traits you describe here.

Unless the book was brought to my house, and lent to me, i will not be reading it. I will not purchase it, nor will i go the library to borrow it, if the library even has it.

I'm glad you liked it, but i have zero inclination to give this guy another chance.

[Guest Raidne]

Unless the book was brought to my house, and lent to me, i will not be reading it. I will not purchase it, nor will i go the library to borrow it, if the library even has it.

I'm glad you liked it, but i have zero inclination to give this guy another chance.

Okay, it's no skin off my back? It was just that I'd only read Perdido Street Station and Scar before City and the City and so it was not at all what I was expecting and showed a completely different side to him as an author. I would run to buy and read a book in the more realist noir style of City and the City, but I only read his other stuff when I run out of things to read by other authors I like better.

I don't know, I suppose there are aspects of Scar that I like. It's just that the bizarro-fantastical is not really my thing, and City and the City is not at like the rest of Mieville's work in that sense.

It's sort of like how words cannot describe my loathing of Paul Thomas Anderson films (except Boogie Nights, I guess), but I always watch them when they come out just to see if he did something that I liked this time. And there were things about There Will be Blood that I liked, unlike Magnolia, which is the worst piece of trash to grace cinema screens this side of the Bonfire of the Vanities.

ETA: Also, to be fair, I wanted to know in order to evaluate how fair your opinion was, so I'd know whether I should go away thinking "oh, Mievelle is one of those authors that people just don't like" or not.

[Arthmail]

Okay, it's no skin off my back? It was just that I'd only read Perdido Street Station and Scar before City and the City and so it was not at all what I was expecting and showed a completely different side to him as an author. I would run to buy and read a book in the more realist noir style of City and the City, but I only read his other stuff when I run out of things to read by other authors I like better.

I don't know, I suppose there are aspects of Scar that I like. It's just that the bizarro-fantastical is not really my thing, and City and the City is not at like the rest of Mieville's work in that sense.

It's sort of like how words cannot describe my loathing of Paul Thomas Anderson films (except Boogie Nights, I guess), but I always watch them when they come out just to see if he did something that I liked this time. And there were things about There Will be Blood that I liked, unlike Magnolia, which is the worst piece of trash to grace cinema screens this side of the Bonfire of the Vanities.

ETA: Also, to be fair, I wanted to know in order to evaluate how fair your opinion was, so I'd know whether I should go away thinking "oh, Mievelle is one of those authors that people just don't like" or not.

Based on your opinion, Raidne, i might pick up the City and the City. And perhaps it was the mood i was in last night while attempting for the third time to get into Kraken. But i was instantly bored with the character of Billy. One scene has him involved in talking with some police officers, though its so wall-bangingly obvious that they are not what you think they are, and each question he asks is basically ignored. And he doesn't think anything of it, he just keeps wandering around in his own befuddlement and i instantly came to hate him.

[Guest Raidne]

Billy sucks. It is known. I hope The Tattoo eats him.

Goss and Subby go a long way for me, though - they really are scary. I also like the stuff about the Paul, the host of The Tattoo. It's just...funny.

But like it said, it's crawling for me. I keep reading other books instead of finishing it. It just refuses to flow and let me get into that place where I get aborbed into the book. It's like it keeps repeatedly slapping me out of that state while I'm reading it. It is not comfortable.

Perhaps if I visited Great Britain, I would also feel this way. So familiar, and yet so totally alien...who knows.

[Calibandar]

I think one of the reasons it's crawling is because Mieville is not an easy read. By which I mean to say that he doesn't easily endear you to his characters, or at all, and that is something I find very important in my fiction. Coupled to that, he *is* overrated, and the books just aren't that great. I think he's an author who does something different to what you often see in genre, but I don't think he's an exciting writer whose work I love to read. It's intriguing in premise, hence my starting of this thread, but in execution it is often overlong and written in a style that doesn't greatly appeal.

[Arthmail]

I think one of the reasons it's crawling is because Mieville is not an easy read. By which I mean to say that he doesn't easily endear you to his characters, or at all, and that is something I find very important in my fiction. Coupled to that, he *is* overrated, and the books just aren't that great. I think he's an author who does something different to what you often see in genre, but I don't think he's an exciting writer whose work I love to read. It's intriguing in premise, hence my starting of this thread, but in execution it is often overlong and written in a style that doesn't greatly appeal.

I agree on all points here. His books are not that great, nor ground breaking. I wish to god i knew why people seemed to have such a hard on for him.

[Jussi]

Embassytown plot synopsis:

Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe.

Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie.

Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes.

Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts.

And that is impossible.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Embassytown-China-Mieville/dp/0230750761/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289474690&sr=1-2

[Durckad]

I have to agree that Kraken was a disappointing read. Here, more than in any of his other books, Mieville uses his writing to actively obfuscate the reader's comprehension of what the fuck is going on. Those first few chapters were so terrible that I honestly thought that someone else was writing. Actually, for the entire first half, things are written in such a confusing mess of verbosity (yes, we all know how many gigantic words you know how to use, Mr. Mieville), non-descriptions, and just weird shit that I almost quit once or twice, but, goddamnit, I paid for this book - in hardcover - and I wasn't going to give up so easily. So I soldiered on, ever so slowly. So very slowly.

I do think his writing clears up somewhere near the middle but I don't blame anyone for quitting before that. By the end of the book, I kept wondering if there was anyone that was an actual normal person living in London anymore. There seem to be at the very least 18 billion separate cults, groups, and religions all scattered about the city, each one worshiping something even stranger than the one before. "Oh us? We worship Keith Richards' toenails, but only on Tuesdays, for that is when they are waxing and at their greatest length. Soon his clippings shall cover the world and we shall rule all from our thrones of keratin!" I get what he was trying to do, but after a while, it just started to seem a bit ridiculous, as if he were making things weird just to be weird (a problem with his Bas-Lag books as well). Also, the whole 'striking familiars' plot felt completely superfluous.

Personally, I thought that the characters were actually fairly well done. Goss and Subby do evoke a feeling of certain dread with their mysterious and implacable natures, even if they do come across like semi-copies of Gaiman's Croupe and Vandemar (two great villains, btw). I also liked how Billy changes throughout the book, even if he spends most of it asking questions that don't get any real answers and just going with the flow. The brief interludes with Collinswood and her associates were usually a lot of fun.

So yeah, not a bad book, but I was pretty disappointed, but that may be the result of my internal hype engine working on overdrive. It's easily the weakest Mieville I've read, somewhere just below King Rat.

[jbpark]

I couldn't finish Kraken. Didn't get past the first third of the book. I've yet to read City & The City but I did love The Scar and Perdido--I just couldn't stand this one.

[Multaniette]

just finished kraken in essentially two sittings that had me hanging around in a railway station simply because the story was too gripping to bother navigating my way out through the thronging masses

it's definitely his whackiest story yet and is not nearly as punchy as something like iron council or the city and the city. it's like mieville decided he wasn't going to let conventions restrain him from unfurling his fairly disturbing imagination and just went to town on the idea of a madcap alternate london. a wee bit of suspension of disbelief, and it works.

probably 8/10 on this one. so better than, well, un lun dun, on par with king rat, lying in the shadow of perdido street station and dwarfed by iron council and the city and the city (relatively speaking)

cant wait for embassytown.

[needle]

I'm two thirds of the way through this right now, and it's dragging.

On the one hand, I really like the story, and the concepts, and Mieville's intellectual wankery doesn't actually bother me. On the other, the characters are terrible, the dialogue is terrible, Goss and Subby being mentioned in voices of fear every two seconds is boring the shit out of me, and it's the first book in years I think I need a bookmark for. (To be fair that's not neeccessarily a reflection on Meiville, that might just be the state of my head right now, but it is really really unusual for me not to pick up a book and know instantly where I am. Instead, I'm reading, and I'm a page and a half in, and I realsise I already read all this. to skip forward, to later find out I missed half a page. After this keeps repeatedly happening, I'm inclined to give Mieville some of the blame for being really repetitive in an obscure fashion).

Meiville's major strength is in world building. I found the City and the City a really uncomfortable book to read, and I thought the story was pants, but the concept of these knitted cities has definitely retained a really strong presence in my head - the same could be said for The Scar and Baslag. But with this, the world is already there, so we're relying on his plot, characterisation and dialogue, all of which are weak.

I'll stick with it, because there is a lot I do like (I'm a sucker for mythology) but I'm kind of dying to get in to Wise Man's Fear where I know the writing will just sweep me along.

EtA :

I found Harkaway's Gone Away World to be more difficult on the intellectual heavy-lifting front, actually - I believe he is a little inspired by David Foster Wallace - this is more like how it's slow going reading Neal Stephenson's Barqoue Cycle sometimes, so I can only conclude that I have a difficult time with British dialogue.

Harkaway is British, no?