monsters
Ever wonder what a fat Chinese Fire Elemental might look like?
Here’s a picture I took in downtown Singapore yesterday.
Fat Chinese Fire Elemental
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!
Race, genre fiction and roleplaying
Larry, at OF Blog of the Fallen, has written a really interesting post entitled ‘Whitewashing Diversity‘. It’s all about the lack of diversity in science fiction and fantasy writing and about the way that this is never interrogated, let alone noticed.
Too often in the SF that I have read (perhaps a couple hundred of books over the years, so it is very possible that I might not have read the right sorts of SF), way too often are the issues surrounding diversity/Otherness presented from the dominant culture’s point of view. While many SF authors over the years have taken great pains to avoid the “White Man’s Burden” point of view dominating their stories of First Contact, all too often the notion of “discovery” that creeps into these tales is that these Others (perhaps analogues for Africans, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, etc. in US society today?) is that these “discovered” peoples (aliens) are ciphers, are often dangerous or at least potentially threatening, and that too often there isn’t a concerted effort even to “understand” these alien groups.
Street Monsters!
While on the way to work a while ago I walked passed these very cool little pieces of street art. Unfortunately one of them has already been removed for being “graffiti” and some lame tags have taken it’s place. Thankfully due to the power of the interwebs they can live here for posterity.
