The Mumpsimus

This is the fourth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here . 2009 began with an unremarkable post pointing to a couple of free items on the internets and ended with a post on introductory film textbooks  (December 2009 began the shift toward more frequent film posts that I discussed in the 2010 commemoration). Looking back on it, 2009 seems like a year with some good specific posts, but overall I don't think of it as a banner year for the blog in any way. I've been struggling with coming up with much to say about it, in fact, so instead of trying to tie everything together artificially, I'm just going to offer a few thoughts on some of my favorite posts from the year. First, not really a post here (though  I mentioned it ):  an interview with me that Charles Tan did in February 2009 . This gives a sense of...

From an interview with China Miéville in The Socialist Worker : To this day, I often hear people on the left talk about "utopian, hopeful, progressive science fiction"--as if these are the same terms. Sometimes, "hopeful" fiction can be among the most reactionary. Sometimes, the "grimmest" and most depressive fiction might be really, really radical--or it might not, but it might be fantastic fiction. Obviously, there's a question of taste. If you don't like "grim books," you probably won't like some of my books. That's fine--that's taste. And you might well construct a political critique where you say, "The bleakness of these books is reactionary for the following reasons." That's fine. That's an analysis, and I might argue back. But to simply put out there that the books are in some way either lacking and/or politically reprehensible because they're downbeat is crazy. My favorite example about th...

L. Lee Lowe just sent me a great link to a podcast interview with China Miéville for a new series called "The Books that Made Me".  Lee and I share an interest in the writings of Dambudzo Marechera , and I had known, but forgotten, that China also shares this interest.  One of the six books he lists as fundamentally formative in his life is Marechera's Mindblast .  Of Marechera's published work, Mindblast is the hardest to get a copy of, having been published only, to my knowledge, in Zimbabwe.  (I've managed over the years to at least find library copies of all of his other books, but not that one.) Miéville has talked about Marechera and Mindblast before , and in a fascinating 2003 interview with Joan Gordon he said I first read [Marechera] a decade ago, but came back to him recently and read all his published work. He’s quite astonishing. His influences are radically different from the folklorist tradition that one often associates with African liter...

Dear Nebula Voters, I know what your real purpose is with the nominees for this year's award.  Don't think you can hide your secret, conspiratorial goals from me!  I know what you really want to do is cause me immense angst by putting some of my favorite people up against each other in your various (nefarious!) categories.  You know when it comes to awards I root for the people I know and like before I even consider anything else, because of course the people I know and like are all the greatest writer in the world, but what am I supposed to do when you, for instance, put VanderMeer up against Barzak in the novel category?! I'm safe, at least, with the short story category.  Jim Kelly is the only writer I know well there, so obviously he should win.  Novelette is worse -- Paolo Bacigalupi is the one person whose short stories have caused me to write a long essay , and he's a really nice guy (well, as long as you don't burn lots of hydrocarbons in front...

If The City & The City is not my favorite China Miéville novel, that is only because I encountered Perdido Street Station at exactly the time I was ready for the riches it offered, and so the powerful, unforgettable experience of reading it will forever overshadow the experience of reading anything else Miéville writes. I think Iron Council possesses many virtues Perdido Street Station does not, but the latter is the novel that lives deep in my heart. It would simply be impossible for me to love a China Miéville novel more than Perdido Street unless I didn't think of it as a China Miéville novel. And it is almost possible to think of The City & The City as not a China Miéville novel. For one thing, there are no monsters -- at least not in the sense that we are used to monsters from his previous books. This is a great surprise -- what Miéville fan, after all, doesn't know that he loves creating monsters? For another thing, the writing is lean and straightfor...

I have finally made my way through the 3,000 emails that had accumulated in the mumpsimus at gmail account during my absence from checking it. Thank you to everyone for bearing with me on that. If you need a response of some sort to something, and I haven't yet replied, please send me another note, because I think I have responded to everything that seemed to need a response. There are some sites and items I discovered from the mail, including: The First Book , a site created by Scott William Carter to provide interviews with and information about authors of first novels. Scott was my roommate at the very first science fiction convention I went to, and he's not only a tremendous nice guy, but has developed a great career with lots of short stories published in a wide variety of markets and now a novel that is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2010. Noticing my comments on Cormac McCarthy's The Road , Henry Farrell let me know about a conversation with China Mié...

There are so many unquestioned assumptions and shallow statements in a new article at Strange Horizons, "The Reader and the Map" , that it would be exhausting to detail them all, and they're suffiently obvious that I doubt I really need to. Nonetheless, the topic of maps in books is an interesting one in some ways, and my frustration with the essay mostly stems from wishing the material had been treated with more depth and insight. The first book review I ever published was in the fanzine Niekas when I was in my mid-teens, a review of L.E. Modesitt's The Magic of Recluce , a glowing review that, if I remember correctly, made only one criticism: that the book didn't have a map. I was not a regular reader of fantasy novels at the time (I was a science fiction snob; I read Recluce because I knew the writer and he'd assured me it was a rational, scientific fantasy novel, a fantasy novel written by a science fiction writer), but I was a regular player of role-p...

Unlike last year, I didn't take any notes during Readercon this year, so I don't have much to report, and I'm wary of mentioning too many specific people, because I know I'll forget a few important ones and end up feeling guilty, which I'm already feeling for not being able to write a more interesting post about Readercon, and much as I like it, I really don't need more guilt. It was a pleasure to meet people I'd not had the chance to meet before and to catch up with friends I hadn't seen in a while. I'd tell you about some of the treasures I got in the dealer's room, but then I'd feel guilty for causing jealousy and being generally boastful. I'd tell you that one of the highlights of the con for me was learning to play Mafia (Michael Cisco will never trust me for the rest of my life; Laird Barron is a brilliant Mafia player), but that might make it sound like I didn't appreciate the various panels and readings I went to, or the g...

Via the new and final third installment of an interview with China Mieville at Long Sunday, we learn that China is doing some political blogging (mostly about the hurricane) over at Lenin's Tomb . Here's a link to what is, as I write, the most recent post. The third part of the interview at Long Sunday is worth attention, too. (Links to Part 1 and Part 2 .) I've just begun reading China's new story collection, Looking for Jake , and reading the first few stories, which I hadn't encountered before, I began to think that what he uses the short story form for is the exploration of how mood and metaphor can work together, and that a basic plot is there only as a way to keep the reader reading when not more interested by other things. Thus, I was heartened to see him confirm this idea in the interview (because I'm generally paranoid that I'm reading things entirely wrong, and therefore Missing the Point ... which would be a good alternative title for this ...

Various stuffs out there: *The new issue of Strange Horizons has been posted, with a column I wrote about the impulse to collect things. *It struck me recently that a lot of the small-press 'zines have plenty of fiction by women in them, but most of the major magazines don't. F&SF , for instance, has published three issues this year where all of the fiction is by men. In search of other people's opinions on this subject, I came across Sue Linville's SF & Fantasy in the New Millennium: Women Publishing Short Fiction , an article with data from the late '90s and early '00s. (For what it's worth, I don't think this is a case of simple prejudice; there are too many other factors involved. The unfortunate effect of the male dominance, regardless of whatever various reasons lie behind it, is that it makes the magazines appear to be men's clubs.) [Update 7/5/05: Please read the discussion in the comments section.] *My sensitivity to the above ...

I've decided that the tone at this weblog is too serious and stuffy, thus making it unlikely to communicate with an audience that matters. Dan Green recently told me in an email that he's hoping to change the tone of his site, keeping his posts no longer than 100 words and using no words with more than 4.5 characters and no compound sentences, because he hopes to start a campaign against elitism and for chick lit. This caused me to re-evaluate my own purposes and goals, and so here follows the first of my new entries.... w00t w00t!!!!! hey everybuddy i got a email from a REAL LIVE WRITER TODAY and i just totally was like I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!! and i wish i could tell u who it wuz but it's totally TOP SECRET!!!!!!!!!!!! lou anders has a INTERVIEW WITH CHINA MIEVILLE and china looks in the illo like vin diesel **sigh!!!** (i got the link from lou anders blog which is new n is just da bomb. so have you seen all the new info at locus about chucky stross and flamewars and ...

Before I argue with some of the ideas in Norman Spinrad's latest "On Books" column for Asimov's , I need to dispense with some particularities: First, I have been reading Spinrad's columns since the late eighties, and whenever they appear in Asimov's , I read them before reading anything else. He shaped much of my perception of what science fiction and fantasy are and are capable of being. I disagree with just about every third sentence he writes, but that's half the fun of reading him -- he does what any good critic should, and provides lots of fodder for argument. Personality and passion explode from his words, making him one of the few truly essential SF book reviewers. Second: The book Spinrad spends the most time on in this column is Iron Council by China Mieville, a book I've written quite a bit about, both here and at the Crooked Timber seminar on the book , so I won't say too much more about it right now, as there are other ideas I w...

Some of the members of the group blog Crooked Timber have put together a "mini-seminar" about China Mieville's recent novel Iron Council , with short essays by various people and a comprehensive response from China. I got to participate, but rather than link directly to my essay, I'll link to the introduction (which has links to each post) because that's by far the best place to start. There's also a PDF of the entire discussion.

Colleen Lindsay left a fascinating comment on my Considering Mieville post, but since the discussion there had died down and her comment was number 23, I asked her if I could post it on the main page, since many people who might be interested in what she has to say might not have seen it. If you want the full context, you'll need to go back to the comments section of that post (quite an interesting discussion, actually). Hi all -- I'm Colleen Lindsay and I am Del Rey's publicity director. I am also China's personal PR machine. The fact that so many of you are grumbling about his celebrity means that I have done my job right -- thank you! :-) First some thoughts on editing. I am not an editor, but I do know something about the editorial process at Del Rey especially where China's editor, a very gifted fellow named Chris Schluep is concerned. When Del Rey bought PERDIDO STREET STATION, it was, essentially, a finished book. We were simply publishing the repr...

(Note: If you haven't read Iron Council , intend to, and don't like to know plot elements and details before you read, you should not stray much beyond the first two paragraphs in this post.) I began to read Iron Council with a mix of emotions and biases: I had enjoyed China Mieville's earlier novel Perdido Street Station and found some of its imagery breathtaking; I had liked parts of his next novel, The Scar , very much, but overall found the book tedious; I was tired of the cult-like hero-worshipping displayed by some of Mieville's fans; I looked forward to seeing how Mieville's imagined world of Bas-Lag would be developed; and I hoped very much that the book would demonstrate a maturation of Mieville's craft and not a settling in to his fame and guaranteed readership. Iron Council is, indeed, a maturation, a book of depth and richness, particularly when viewed as the third part of a trilogy. (Actually, as Mieville has said , the order the books a...

Adam Lipkin's review of China Mieville's new novel, Iron Council , despite some over-the-top pronouncements ("Mieville is just an abhorrently boring and pretentious novelist") offers a concise window into the strengths and weaknesses of one of the most popular, talented, and frustrating fantasy writers to come along in decades. (Jeff VanderMeer's Washington Post review of Mieville's previous novel, The Scar , raises similar questions about Mieville's strengths and weaknesses, though VanderMeer's tone is more balanced than Lipkin's.) After reading the review of Iron Council , I read some of Lipkin's other reviews , paying particular attention to what he had to say about works I was familiar with. He's well read and thoughtful, a sensitive reader, and some of the more hyperbolic and general statements in his review could be ascribed to a few causes, not the least of which being Mieville's popularity. This is a writer who doesn...