The Kiwifarms Unofficial Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club

In a tie, the books for May are Perdido Street Station and Children of Time.
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Choose whichever one strikes your fancy, and let’s find out if everything after the turn of the century is slop or not.
 
Greedy Fly said:
Storm Front
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I've actually never read any of the Dresden novels and almost embarrassed myself before looking up all the titles and instead just asking if there was anyone you forgot
VeteranOfTheRetardWars said:
In a tie, the books for May are Perdido Street Station and Children of Time.
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Choose whichever one strikes your fancy, and let’s find out if everything after the turn of the century is slop or not.
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I'll probably listen to both on audio book as I work(hopefully that's not haram). Of all the people listed, I've only read author I've read anything from is Max Brooks and Scalzi and it was long ago before I cured myself of Terminal Reddit.

I've long been a fan of Scott Sigler, but I could see him being under slop if he's even know by anyone here, for post 2000s authors.
 
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Well Intentioned said:
Surprised Mieville was even nominated. Can't imagine he's too popular with the average Farms user.
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There's a bit of morbid curiosity there. He's a big name in the new-weird genre (aka the current year take on early 20th century goodness) and in this spot where you both hear good things about his books but also that he's a massive faggot. I'm kinda glad he's one of the winners since it finally gives me an excuse to read his books and figure out what the hell his deal is, and worst come to pass there's an alternative which sounds way more appealing.
 
Well Intentioned said:
Surprised Mieville was even nominated. Can't imagine he's too popular with the average Farms user.
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Do you mean because of his politics? He definitely rubs me the wrong way but his writing isn't a bunch of shitty political screeds, and it's not like the Farms is comprised of only A&N spergs. Probably if we got down to it there would be something ~*~problematic~*~ and disagreeable about every author we've shortlisted here.
 
Didn't get a chance to reread Hyperion, but I remember it much better than I do Perdido Street Station. It is, after all, a superior book. But I still want to write about PSS because it's nostalgic for me: my dad got me into writing and this is one of his favorites. I started rereading it early, anticipating that it would win the poll. I was gonna read Blindsight next, but after getting through PSS I'm tapped out for now.


Perdido Street Station: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Posts

I always imagined New Crobuzon as being a sort of midnight blue, which is not how it's described. It's funny how reading a book very young and lacking thorough comprehension can make you imagine things the author simply did not intend.

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To begin, my thoughts on the author and his context. China Mieville is a privileged Marxist English teacher Londoner who never knew his dad. Raised by an intellectual single mother in a hyper-liberal center of an increasingly liberalized country sliding out of its last set of glory years, Meiville is as libshit as it gets. Only a city-slicking communist could come up with Iron Council (a book I hate irrationally,) but as of the time of this book that is not a sin he has committed yet. Mieville was buoyed by his era: in any other, I think Perdido Street Station would have been a scoffingly-smug "Haven't you read this masterpiece? Of course you haven't, you poor prole" conversation piece between British communards. As a child, it's easy to just see the fantasy for what it is. Now lacking innocence, everything I read feels riddled with stereotypes. But before we get into that...

Mieveille's Perdido Street Station came out during the Harry Potter Era. With the success of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, there began a renaissance of a certain kind of fantasy writing within the early 2000's. I think of things like the Dragonology, Wizardology and Egyptology books,The Spiderwick Chronicles, City of Ember, Children of The Lamp, The Bartimaeus Sequence, Artemis Fowl, I'm counting The Sandman because fuck you, and so on. Fantasy took on a more personal dimension, reinterpretive in aspect, casting old folktales and scenarios through modern perspectives. A good word for it is syncretic. Not always for the better, like The Sandman's universal nihilism hiding under the cloak of optimistic freedom. All of these books occupy the same temporal space within my head alongside Perdido Street Station. The key difference between them and PSS is that Mieville was ostensibly making a book for grown-ups and is resolute in trying to distinguish itself as true, dark, weird fantasy.

Being an American, and therefore inherently superior and more free than any other nationality, I will never fully understand the relationship between the Albionics and their government. What I do understand is the Marxist anti-authoritarian perspective. That, plus how much of a shithole London is, is the foundation of Meiville's conception of New Crobuzon. Made in the archetypal image of London as an ancient overgrown city of many strange layers, it's an Industrial Revolution era metropolis defined by the sudden advance of technology and the peculiar, petri-dish fecundity of centuries of street culture held in thrall to a distant and absolute authority. Races comingle freely where The Authority allows it. Everything is subject to The Authority. But on the street, no one thinks about that. Least of all our protagonist, Isaac.

Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a pervert. You learn this before anything else about him besides the fact that he's fat as hell, old and used to be a teacher. He fucks a human with a bug for a head, whose race typically reproduces with mindless male insects. This is what your friend Neverender calls a statement of breakage: it's Mieville's attempt to distinguish himself from previous works based on his experiences. It speaks to his values: freedom of love and lust (especially because Isaac is older than his paramour Lin,) freedom of the body through mutual nudity, and especially equality of the sexes in ecstatic debasement. He is a monster, she is a monster, and Mieville thinks it good, and it's Isaac's deficiency that he refuses to be out and out proud that he's fucking a nonhuman. This is a Marxist's view, without a doubt. The protagonist and his love interest are subject to the same tyrannical authority, and it is supposedly heroic to defy the Authority's conventions. Love who you will. Do what you will. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Even theft and back-alley moneymaking with dubious science is presented as both right and necessary for Isaac to keep himself and his dung beetle waifu out of arrears, and Lin considers it good that she has left her culture of hivelike interdependence. How ironic.

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Why, yes, I would say no to dating a Khepri. I simply am not attracted to BUGS. Somehow, this Khephriphobic statement secretly means I want to fuck Khepri.

Why am I talking about this? Because I don't like it. I think it's cringe.

"Neverender, you started this by saying you're nostalgic for it, you even mentioned a family member loves it. Why are you harping on the communism and having sex with xenos freaks?"

Because I can't ignore it now that I see it, and it just won't stop-- until it suddently does. Kinda. Mostly.

In Chapter 2, the book suddenly shows why it's special. Why it's actually remembered as a masterpiece. Even buried under the cloth of political sperging by the author, there is a city that lives and breathes in the prose. It is filthy, thrashing, alive with violence, joy, wonder, foreboding, all under the edifice of Perdido Street Station.

'Perdido' means lost in Spanish. It's a great name: a transportation hub in a dystopic city on The Street of The Lost. The image of the Station and the implicative names of the quarters, sections, districts and landmarks around it, give a picture of a living place. We all live in such places, but fantasy heightens what's real through our imaginations. The prototype of ancient reeking London, the schema that defined Mieville's life and has probably fascinated him in his thoughts and studies, is transformed into a place where your imagination can go beyond reality.

I think this is the book's true strength. Contrasted with the peculiarities and foibles of the author's perception of people and politics, his real love and his real imaginative spark lives in the city of New Crobuzon, its peoples, its environs, the complexity afforded by the web of life it forms. The necessities of drama pollute that web soot-black and streak it with blood, oil and filthy river water. I'd hazard a guess that descriptions of the city and its people take up a third of the word count. I can forgive socialist ideas and implicit politisperging for things like this.

Just don't make me read Iron Council ever again.

Only real 😤 Khepri🪲niggas live at Mog Hill :!:: don't come over 😳 if you ain't ready to BUG OUT!!!!!! 🪳🪳🪳🗣️
 
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Neverender said:
Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a pervert. You learn this before anything else about him besides the fact that he's fat as hell, old and used to be a teacher. He fucks a human with a bug for a head, whose race typically reproduces with mindless male insects.
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It's funny, maybe Mieville meant Isaac to be cool and relatable or something, I don't know, but I read him as you describe: fat ivory tower sadsack who likes to feel cool by "slumming it" with lower class revolutionaries while still being a well-behaved cog in the system which is just... quintessential college commie, isn't it? All-in-all he doesn't seem to be a bad person but it's funny to see the stereotype recreated in this fantastical setting.

Though I'm not very far in (about where the creepy caterpillar thing is pupating and become even more obviously dangerous), so my impression could be premature. But I'm not too worried if my interpretation of the character ends up diverging from what Mieville intended to write.

I hope he goes more into the extreme sexual dimorphism of the bugs and how that shapes their society. Tchaikovsky certainly does.
 
Morridowfag said:
There's a bit of morbid curiosity there. He's a big name in the new-weird genre (aka the current year take on early 20th century goodness) and in this spot where you both hear good things about his books but also that he's a massive faggot. I'm kinda glad he's one of the winners since it finally gives me an excuse to read his books and figure out what the hell his deal is, and worst come to pass there's an alternative which sounds way more appealing.
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I quite enjoy his writing, although there's some of his works that are kind of ehh. The Bas-Lag books (Scar, Perdido Street Station and Iron Council) are quite good, but I can see Farmers not enjoying them.
Greedy Fly said:
Do you mean because of his politics? He definitely rubs me the wrong way but his writing isn't a bunch of shitty political screeds, and it's not like the Farms is comprised of only A&N spergs. Probably if we got down to it there would be something ~*~problematic~*~ and disagreeable about every author we've shortlisted here.
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There is definitely an aspect of that. Notably, The revolutionary stuff and his politics being pretty obvious. But there's also a few scenes revolving around what I would consider to be transgender writing. I might be mixing it up with the Scar, but I'm pretty sure there's a scene that takes place at a Remade brothel (? I think, it's been a while and I loaned my copy out to a friend) that really explores into the psyche of that.

As I said above, I quite like his work so I take it as being pleasantly surprised.

Neverender said:
Mieveille's Perdido Street Station came out during the Harry Potter Era. With the success of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, there began a renaissance of a certain kind of fantasy writing within the early 2000's.
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Greedy Fly said:
It's funny, maybe Mieville meant Isaac to be cool and relatable or something, I don't know, but I read him as you describe: fat ivory tower sadsack who likes to feel cool by "slumming it"
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I wouldn't really lump Mieville's Bas Lag books into the Harry Potter/Percy Jackson/etc pile. I get you mention he's writing for adults, but I think that the two camps are taking fantasy in very different directions.

Potter and its clones are basically embracing fantasy elements and tropes, while Mieville's stuff is very much a deconstruction of a lot of speculative fiction tropes and ideas and is more rooted in 'weird' fiction, as you noted, as well as more pulpy stuff. Things like Lovecraft or Moorcock. Hell, there's a scene later on, and LATE BOOK PLOT POINT SPOILERS where Mieville shits on the typical D&D Murder Hobo party when they hire some mercs to try and handle the slake moths.

I think that the visceral approach he takes to things, like Isaac's relationship with the khepri, is meant to be smashing fantasy concepts (ie, the beautiful elf falling in love with a human) and making it a place where you viscerally react to everything in a negative way. Mieville has commented on playing D&D and wanting to do that with these books, although I don't know how far he was intending it to go.

Everything pretty much in the book is gross and unappealing, from Motley's appearance, to Isaac being an old, fat, dumpy guy, the Weaver being an utterly bizarre and alien entity, how the Remade are depicted, the city itself being a not-nice place to live in, etc. But like you said, the craftsmanship and detail that goes into the world he builds is incredibly well done and you can't look away.
 
Morridowfag said:
There's a bit of morbid curiosity there. He's a big name in the new-weird genre (aka the current year take on early 20th century goodness) and in this spot where you both hear good things about his books but also that he's a massive faggot. I'm kinda glad he's one of the winners since it finally gives me an excuse to read his books and figure out what the hell his deal is, and worst come to pass there's an alternative which sounds way more appealing.
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Yeah his name keeps popping up in my recommendations but I've never actually read anything by Asia Herman so I figured I'd give it a shot. Book descriptions sound bizarre enough so let's see what the execution is like.
 
Well Intentioned said:
I wouldn't really lump Mieville's Bas Lag books into the Harry Potter/Percy Jackson/etc pile. I get you mention he's writing for adults, but I think that the two camps are taking fantasy in very different directions.
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That was my general purpose for mentioning that category of fantasy, in that Mieville's writing is in direct contrast to it but still adopts the syncretism of fusing real life with the fantastic. They're doing the same things, I think, just on opposite spectrums of thought and to accomplish mirrored purposes. Young adult fiction at the time brought the fantastic into reality to make you feel like there was magic everywhere. Mieville's writing brought the fantastic into reality because he thinks a fantasy world should be just as grimy and awful as real life, but in a different way.
 
Rent Tin said:
I'm not sure I'll have time to read both, not sure which one to pick.
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What are you in the mood for?
Perdido: Fantasy, gritty and very atmospheric, plot follows a set of characters living in a city
Children: Scifi, alien worldbuilding 'tism, plot spans generations of planetside development/colony ships

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I started on Children first, I'm going in almost completely blind(the freaky bug people meme is the most info I have) but Children has space on the cover, and I tend to prefer Scifi in space than sitting around on Earth.

That and the audiobook is 16 hours long versus Perdido's 24. I'm decide after Children if I want to keep being experimental.
 
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