#China Mieville

[frankensteinmutual]

Signalis (2022) [H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival] /Sagittarius A* / Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates / Outer Wilds (2020) / Is There a God-Shaped Hole at the Heart of Mathematics? / Drain for overflowing water at Sambuco Dam, Lavizzara Valley / ? / Thomasin Frances, Hole Theory (15/10/2022) / Bryan’s Ground, a public garden in Herefordshire on the Welsh border. / odd, weird, strange and unusual / Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves / Evil (2019-2014) / Judas H., Overflowing With Empty / Illustration of the Annular Eclipse of 1836 from “A fourteen weeks course in descriptive astronomy”, Joel Dorman Steele (1836-1886) / @imdad_barbhuyan on Instagram / The moon’s Copernicus crater. Through magic glasses. 1890. / Kaveh Akbar / Dune (2021) / x / Dmitry Kochanovich, Epiphany (Russian,b. 1972) / The Silt Verses, Chapter 41: But As My Last Breath Splits My Throat / Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, The Camp is a Bait for Time / Darina Muravjeva, Hole / Hilde Heynen in Heterotopia and the City / x / Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers / x /  Louise Glück, from Descending Figure / Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. / Caitlyn Siehl, What We Buried; from “A Letter To Love” / Lara de Moor, Orb (2014) / Sam Sax, Pig / The National - Wake Up Your Saints / Aleksander Rostov / Sanna Wani, from “Princess Mononoke (1997)”, My Grief, the Sun / Gregory Orr, [i want to go back] / Thomas Ott / ? / Judas H., Overflowing With Empty / James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room / Massive sinkhole swallows house in Florida / Edna St Vincent Millay, in Letters (1952) /Silent Hill 4 (2004) / @/vren-diagram / Anne Boyer, What Resembles the Grave But Isn’t / Law of Holes / Scarlet Hollow (2021) / China Miéville, from Railsea

(part one)

[figcatlists]

Contemporary weird fiction reading list

A chart of New Weird books and other bizarre, unsettling, and uncanny literature published in the last 30 years or so. This is a follow-up to my previous chart of classic weird fiction and another selection from my list of over 200 works of weird literature.

[stivkun]

Haven't finished Perdido Street Station yet, but wanted to sketch Lin anyway

[snowlithills]

Theses on Monsters, China Mieville

1.

The history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of monsters. Homo sapiens is a bringer-forth of monsters as reason’s dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories, games, and terrors.

2.

To insist that an element of the impossible and fantastic is a sine qua non of monstrousness is not mere nerd hankering (though it is that too). Monsters must be creature forms and corpuscles of the unknowable, the bad numinous. A monster is somaticized sublime, delegate from a baleful pleroma. The telos of monstrous quiddity is godhead.

3.

There is a countervailing tendency in the monstrous corpus. It is evident in Pokémon’s injunction to “catch ’em all,” in the Monster Manual’s exhaustive taxonomies, in Hollywood’s fetishized “Monster Shot.” A thing so evasive of categories provokes—and surrenders to—ravenous desire for specificity, for an itemization of its impossible body, for a genealogy, for an illustration. The telos of monstrous quiddity is specimen.

4.

Ghosts are not monsters.

5.

It is pointed out, regularly and endlessly, that the word “monster” shares roots with “monstrum,” “monstrare,” “monere“—”that which teaches,” “to show,” “to warn.” This is true but no longer of any help at all, if it ever was.

6.

Epochs throw up the monsters they need. History can be written of monsters, and in them. We experience the conjunctions of certain werewolves and crisis-gnawed feudalism, of Cthulhu and rupturing modernity, of Frankenstein’s and Moreau’s made things and a variably troubled Enlightenment, of vampires and tediously everything, of zombies and mummies and aliens and golems/robots/clockwork constructs and their own anxieties. We pass also through the endless shifts of such monstrous germs and antigens into new wounds. All our moments are monstrous moments.

7.

Monsters demand decoding, but to be worthy of their own monstrosity, they avoid final capitulation to that demand. Monsters mean something, and/but they mean everything, and/but they are themselves and irreducible. They are too concretely fanged, toothed, scaled, fire-breathing, on the one hand, and too doorlike, polysemic, fecund, rebuking of closure, on the other, merely to signify, let alone to signify one thing.

Any bugbear that can be completely parsed was never a monster, but some rubber-mask-wearing Scooby-Doo villain, a semiotic banality in fatuous disguise. It is a solution without a problem.

8.

Our sympathy for the monster is notorious. We weep for King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, no matter what they’ve done. We root for Lucifer and ache for Grendel.

It is a trace of skepticism that the given order is a desideratum that lies behind our tears for its antagonists, our troubled empathy with the invader of Hrothgar’s hall.

9.

Such sympathy for the monster is a known factor, a small problem, a minor complication for those who, in drab reaction, deploy an accusation of monstrousness against designated social enemies.

10.

When those same powers who enmonster their scapegoats reach a tipping point, a critical mass, of political ire, they abruptly and with bullying swagger enmonster themselves. The shock troops of reaction embrace their own supposed monstrousness. (From this investment emerged, for example, the Nazi Werwolf program.) Such are by far more dreadful than any monster because, their own aggrandizements notwithstanding, they are not monsters. They are more banal and more evil.

11.

The saw that We Have Seen the Real Monsters and They Are Us is neither revelation, nor clever, nor interesting, nor true. It is a betrayal of the monstrous, and of humanity.

[audley-and-cherry]

Okay, I know I haven't said much (anything?) on Gaiman/Mieville/Munro, but here's my take as a bookseller who has been a bookseller for goddamned too many years:

For the question of "what do I do when I find out that a work that was transformative to me was written by an abuser?" you have to realize that having loved their work is not a reflection on you– abusers can and very often do make art that speaks to us. They are also exceptionally good at having a charming public face, knowing the right words to say, and knowing how to present themselves to endear themselves to a specific audience. Parasocial relationship or not (and I think there's something interesting to be noted that Gaiman was extremely online and Mieville (afaik) had no social media presence), it's not the fault of the fan that they didn't know that their favorite is an abuser.

That said, if you continue to support their work knowing what we know now, I'm giving you a hard fucking side eye.

Here's the depressing part: you can't know if an author is an abuser based on their works or their public persona. My advice to you as someone with goddamned too many years in books?

Read midlist authors. Stop reading bestselling authors and authors who are the darling of their particular genre. Read authors who likely will not sell their work for adaptations or have celebrity coauthors or are invited to teach a semester of literature at [expensive private college full of kids from Long Island].

Read widely, even within your preferred genre. Not only will you expose yourself to so much brilliance, but if a fav is outed as a gross abuser, it's far less difficult to move on.

As a subset of 2: Try try try to develop more than one favorite. Find authors whose works you will read sight-unseen (as I'm sure many of you did with Gaiman), but have a stable of them. (I, for instance, have five authors I will pick up whatever they write, no questions asked.)

Stop relying on cis/het white authors. Read queer authors. Read books by people of color. Fall in love with those books!

This is, of course, not a surefire way to avoid supporting abusers– there is no way to do that. But expanding your reading will have nothing but positives for you and positives for the authors that you read.

[rubedeckillerofficial]

Keanu Reeves teamed up with China Mieville, one of the greatest living authors of the New Weird movement, to write a novel about his edgy self-insert OC who’s an 80,000 year old immortal warrior who was born because his mom fucked lightning. Cringe culture is dead and John Wick himself killed it. Write your goddamn stories and don’t let anyone tell you they’re cringe.

[ijustkindalikebooks]

“Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.” ― China Miéville.

[leona-florianova]

Jack Half-a-Prayer

[petricalore]

[keanuquotes]

Reeves tends not to get involved in politics. When I ask how he’s feeling about the US election, he responds, “God bless democracy” – to which Miéville says, “I can’t wait to see the beginning of democracy in America”.

“I think it’s fantastic,” Reeves continues. “And I think it’s really great – illusion or not – that people can cast a ballot… I’m just glad there’s an election and people get to make some kind of choice.”

[scalefeathers]

“Spanish Dancer” from China Mieville’s Embassytown

Not to overstate things but I would die for them

[johnwickb1tsch]

neone reading the book of elsewhere?

keanu narrates at least the first chapter, its pretty dope...

[figcatlists]

“Literary” speculative fiction reading list

A list of recommended sci-fi and fantasy books with high-quality prose and serious or complex themes, including works by Le Guin, Wolfe, Delany, Miéville, and Banks. This selection is drawn from a much longer list of well-written and ambitious SF that I published on my website.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[worm-dark]

Reading “Perdido Street Station” rn and the world building is fantastic.

[zimtlove]

I'm so sorry, I'm too much of a bookworm not to discuss this here.

So I saw the news that on 10/22/24 Keanu Reeves and China Mieville presented a joint novel at the London Book Festival. It's called "The book of elsewhere" and it's set in the world of BRZRKR.

I just want to know if any of you guys are going to read it? I'm dying to read it, but I'm not sure I'll be able to buy it in my country