books
New Mieville Extract
One of my favourite ’speculative fiction’ authors from the last few years has to be China Mieville. Reading Perdido Street Station for the first time was a revelation. That’s still my favourite book of his and, to be honest, I haven’t enjoyd his last couple so much, but I still look forward to a new work with some anticipation. The combination of the grotesque, fantastical and political really appeals to me even when he’s not at his best.
Kraken is his upcoming book (out in the UK in May) and there’s an extract at the publisher’s website. It’s just a short one but it’s a great set up. It’s a return to the real real world – actual London (like in King Rat) rather than made up eastern Europe (like in The City & The City) so that will be interesting. Most people, including myself if I’m honest, would prefer a return to Bas-Lag, the world of Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council, but a man’s gotta write what he’s gotta write – the worst possible thing would be a new Bas-Lag novel just for the hope of selling more copies!
I waited to buy The City & The City until I saw it on sale and I suspect I’ll wait for this in paperback too, unless it gets really seriously good reviews. Luckily Mieville is one of those guys who everyone has an opinion on so at least there will eb lots of reviews.
It’s Thursday. Want some links?
- I personally don’t especially care about covers – I choose books based on reviews and previous work and I think most SFF covers are rubbish. But some people care a great deal. Here’s a post at A Dribble of Ink about the changes between editions of Mark Charan Newton’s Nights of Villjamur. The comments are pretty interesting if you like that sort of thing, with all sorts weighing in, including Newton’s editor.
- Filming of the Games of Thrones pilot has wrapped. Now we wait to see what the chances of a actual series are.
- Sex advice from D&D players. Actually serious advice, not a parody.
- The AV club’s best 15 video games of the noughties.
- Next time you’re at a loss for PC or NPC, try looking up this print of Characters for an Epic Tale. (via Boing Boing)
- The BBC discusses committing war crimes in video games. (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
- The Times covers ‘adult gamers’. Shock, horror!
- And, finally, Kotaku celebrates World of Warcraft’s 5th birthday by finding out from people why they’ve never played it. The intro where the writer discusses how it just doesn’t live up to tabletop gaming experiences is the most interesting one to me.
Introductory sci-fi fantasy books? Not the New Yorker’s list!
The New Yorker, one of my favourite magazines, has posted a little ‘intro to fantasy’ which is shockingly pedestrian in its recommendations. Well, that’s unfair. Tad Williams and Terry Goodkind are shockingly pedestrian. Terry Brooks is pretty pedestrian. Robin Hobb is actually pretty good and the sort of thing I’d suggest if making recommendations to someone who had just read Tolkien, as is Patrick Rothfuss. Guy Gavrial Kay is also great but Steven Erikson is just wacky. For new fantasy readers? Hell no.
What’s sort of interesting about this is that there’s no George R. R. Martin on the list. I thought it might be because it was an unfinished series, but so are the Erikson and Rothfuss series.
So what would be on my list? Well, I think I’d keep Robin Hobb, at least the Assassin trilogy, and Patrick Rothfuss. Then I’d add in George R.R. Martin and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books (yes, all of them). Then I’d toss in Scott Lynch’s wonderful Gentlemen Bastards stuff and probably, for a kicker, put in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. I’ve tried to keep this in the spirit of the original list – easy books that are within the mainstream of fantasy, but Miéville is there to show that it can be so much more as well…
Mark Charan Newton has already posted a list which does the opposite – it tried to completely counter the New Yorker list. I’m sure it will be the first of many.
How much would that dragonlance rip off in my bottom draw earn me?
Interested in SFF writing, but now sure how much you’ll get paid? Tobias Bucknell has done a survey of author advances and he answer is: not much. Median advance on a first novel is US$5,000 in both fantasy and sci-fi But still, 5 grand isn’t bad…
And fantasy at least, is surviving the recession nicely, with sales up about 10%.
Gaming & writing
I found this interesting wee article today in Clarksworld magazine. It’s all about the role that RPGs play for fantasy writing and writers, interviewing China Mieville amongst others. Mieville says
What we love about Cthulhu is that it is beyond our ken, as Lovecraft repeatedly points out. Then, in an act of Promethean heroic vulgarization, the Call of Cthulhu RPG neatly laid out Cthulhu’s ‘Stats’ – Str, 100, or whatever it is. This is not a dis of RPGs. My point is that that desire to systematize even the fantastic, the point of which is to evade systematization, is a kind of geek honor, a ludicrous and incredibly seductive and even creative project, an almost majestic point-missing, that in missing the point, does something new.
Which is an interesting point. I often read a genre novel and think ‘I’d love situations like that in my games’ and then realise that games just don’t work that way – scenes don’t get constructed perfectly. They’re messy and unpredictable. It’s also why I don’t like the ’shared story’ approach to RPGs – it tends to elevate predetermined plot over spontaneous reactions of characters. As author Tim Waggoner says:
So many writers plot out a story, march their characters through the plot, and then reach the outcome. They forget to leave room for the unpredictable, for the joy of surprise. Gaming taught me that what goes wrong for characters makes for the most interesting stories.
Some interesting stuff.
A small GRRM update
The Wertzone, a great fantasy book and other things blog, has a small update about A Dance of Dragons from George R. R. Martin’s recent FinnCon appearance. Martin is apparently saying he hopes to finish by the end of the year. He also says that he ‘envisages The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring taking three years apiece’.
We can only hope. At that rate, he might be finished in time for me to get the last book for my 40th birthday…
A whole mess of genre blook links
I’ve been collecting these, but it’s getting out of hand. So…
- John Scalzi, blogger extraordinaire and sci-fi author talks about how long it takes to get established in genre fiction. It’s an interesting read and remands me that if I haven’t started yet, I probably never will!
- There’s a new, George R. R. Martin edited, Jack Vance homage collection out entitles Songs of the Dying Earth and it’s prompted the New York Times of all places to print a lengthy homage of their own. I’ve never clicked with Vance, despite my love of the Vancian-style magic in D&D, and this article helped me realise why.
Intricate plotting is not Vance’s forte, but he artfully recombines recurring elements: the rhythms of travel; the pleasures of music, strong drink and vengeance; touchy encounters with pedants, mountebanks, violently opinionated aesthetes and zealots, louts, bigots of all stripes and boyishly slim young women with an enigmatic habit of looking back over their shoulders. His stories sustain an anecdotal forward drive that balances his digressive pleasure in imagining a world and the hypnotic effect of his distinctive tone, which has been variously described as barbed, velvety, arch and mandarin.
I’m afraid I’m all about the plots I’m afraid and writers for whom writing is primarily about the form of language have never appealed to me. The article’s a very good read though.
- Another thing I’ve never really got is steampunk, although I finished (and really enjoyed) Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel today and that has some steampunk elements. The Onion A.V. Club has a primer on steampunk which gives some pointers if you’re been interested but not known how to get into it.
- On the other hand I enjoyed the first two books of Scott Lynch’s as-yet-unfinished ‘Gentlemen Bastards’ trilogy as much as I’ve enjoyed any fantasy work in the last few years – they’re the sort of rollicking high adventure that makes me laugh and keep turning the pages. If you’re the sort of person who likes to wait till a trilogy is all finished before starting, you’ve got a bit more waiting to do. I’m hoping the wait is so the book is right not because Lynch has over extended…
- Finally the Guardian had some musing on fantasy fans recently as a result of the inaugural Gemmel Awards. To whit:
even SF fans have it easy compared to followers of fantasy. These are the people Red Dwarf fans sneer at for being nerdy. They are the zit-ridden little brothers of the SF geeks, whose even-less-healthy obsessions include trolls, giving Anglo-Saxon names to phallic weapons, and maidens with magical powers.
And to think this is an attempt to be complimentary. Sigh.
I will try to be better at getting these all up in a more timely fashion in the future. Promise.
Miéville on Tolkien – again
Amazon’s book blog Omnivoracious has got China Miéville as a guest blogger this week. He’s got two posts and a podcast up, but the best so far is this article on ‘Five reasons Tolkien rocks’.
It’s not a turn around, but Mieville is pretty famous for ripping into Tolkien, primarily in this 2002 article for the Socialist Review entitled ‘Tolkien – Middle Earth Meets Middle England’ where Mieville says
But if, as radical critics of both bourgeois respectability and Stalinist agitprop, we defend science fiction and fantasy, does that mean we should be rallying under the banner of ‘Socialists for Tolkien’? Hardly.
It’s not that I disagree as such, I just don’t take it so seriously. So it’s nice to see this new article focusing on things like
I mean, say what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster. Shelob, Smaug, the Balrog…in their astounding names, the fearful verve of their descriptions, their various undomesticated malevolence, these creatures are utterly embedded in our world-view. No one can write giant spiders except through Shelob: all dragons are sidekicks now. And so on.
I think he’s mellowing.
Edit: and just after I post this, I read a very interesting and cool Miéville interview done by Jeff VanderMeer. I liked this bit especially:
I’m very aware, by the way, that loads of readers of this may think I’m being a humourless or po-faced dick about it.
Quite possibly China!
Mieville talks about his new book – The City & The City
One of the few books I’m genuinely excitted about at the moment! Can’t wait to get a copy…
Holy crap – 16% of all book sales were for Stephanie Myer
Or that’s what it says here. Of course it’s worth noting that these are probably jsut US sales figures, but still…