China Miéville

>>9447231
>Suggestions

Ask your friend.

>opinions please

Read your friend's suggestions and come back for ours later.

>>9447231

He is a professor and I am afraid my interest in his favorite author will make it seem like I am trying to suck up and impress.

>>9447287
So he's not really your friend then.

>>9447287

meant for >>9447257

>>9447231
I tried reading something of his. Kraken, I think it was, or something to that effect. Tolerable writing, but then, about seven pages in, he actually fucking described someone as a 'Leo DiCaprico' look-alike. I dropped the book like it was hot.

To this day it remains under my bed.

>>9447231
I read The City and the City because someone here said he's like Pynchon-lite. I was so excited, but it was utter trash. Predictable plots, YA-tier prose, shallow themes, and try-hard philosophy shoehorned in so redditors can feel deep . Might as well read The Hunger Games.

He's a brain let with delusions of grandeur, his work is just slightly more considered than YA. Theres a reason he's loved by loud mouth millenials, he mirrors their need for simple answers

>>9447318
I also tried to read this one and wasn't impressed, seems pretty pleb tier to me

>>9447313
You shouldn't put monsters under your bed.

>>9447318
There are lots of good critiques of Nationalism, that book is not one of them

Most of his work is lacking in something. The Last Days of New Paris is brilliant however.

>>9447318
>Ah, there he is.
>That motherfucker.
>What a tool.

>>9447346
I'm a tool because I didn't like a book?

Fair enough.

>>9447231
I cant take that name seriously. Even if it is a nom de plume couldn't possibly be more off putting. I tried for the last several minutes to think of a pseudonym more irritatingly ridiculous. Brazil Dickens? Israel Chaucer? Columbia Marquez? Kazakhstan Milton? Indonesia Dostoyevsky? I don't known the story of that name but of its a given Christian name he should kill himself.

>>9447364
>I'm a tool because I didn't like a book?
No, it's because every one of your points was wrong.

>>9447383
Nice argument

>>9447231
I like him quite a bit, albeit more as a short story writer than anything. Railsea's alright for what it is, Kraken I thought was his attempt to be "mass market" when he'd rather be doing something else, This Census-Taker was dead brilliant but everyone hates it because they wanted another Bas-Lag.

>>9447377
It's actually his birth name

>>9447377
He's the ultimate product of the london bourgeois that thinks themselves the inheritors of Fabian Socialism, it's entirely predictable

>>9447391
That was a statement, not an argument.

>>9447318
>YA-like prose
>Mieville
Apply the /lit is always contrarian rule and decide for yourself.

>>9447460
This desu. I can't imagine a typical YA reader wading through all his uses of "oneiric", "shadchan", "benthos", etc. Plus when he makes up words like "mutarch", or idiosyncratically decides to start sentences with ampersands.

>>9447460
>Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

I would bet my life this dullardry is tattooed on some idiots arm

>>9447460
I wonder if you realize how stupid you are.

>>9447471
Even Vox Day respects him as a writer, despite the anarchist/socialist bent.
I just enjoyed the weird vibe of Bas Lag.

>>9447499
"I know one thing; that I know nothing" - Socrates

>>9447507
Vox Day is a moron, why would his opinion matter

>>9447517
Same reason you assume your opinion matters.
Shitposting is easy, proper criticism is difficult.

>>9447377
>Miéville
>Melville
>reading comprehension

>>9447460
Not even memeing friend, it was the worst book I read last year. I wanted to like it, I really did.

>>9447533
I don't like Orson Scott Card's books (muuh space jesus), but I can accept he writes good.

>>9447539

>writes good

ya dun goofed

>>9447544
dubs
I'm no writeperson.

>>9447412
He's a lot further to the left than the Fabians, he's a Marxist, ex-SWP currently with the group around the journal Salvage, for which he's a regular contributor. I've seen him lecture on the subject of international law, which he has a PHD in, and it was excellent, one of the best public lectures I've ever attended.

As for his work, I prefer his non fiction, he's a better writer / theorist about genre fiction than he is a writer of fiction, and I prefer his short stories to the long form stuff. Not to say that he's bad or anything more like good, occasionally great, rather than god-tier. Great if you're into that sort of thing.

One thing I'll say about A City and a City, having lived in Belfast and Derry during the troubles, it captures something and speaks to the experience of living in a divided city in a way I've never seen done in fiction before.

China Melville has huge arms.

>>9447547
Have you read London's Overthrow? I thought it had some god tier aesthetics, but couldn't quite get a feel for what his point was

If you like Clive Barker's more fantastical stuff, have a go at Mieville; Kraken and Perdido St staion are ones I'd recommend. Kraken is like a literate Dr Who; a fastastical fantasy world and supernatural cast lives amidst modern day london; Perdido is a huge world/city building adventure story. I've read a couple of others that I didnt like as much. Don't even ask /Lit/, we're all teenage racists and hate everything.

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>>9447553
Yes he does :3

>>9447533

sup holden

>>9447553
/thread

>>9447556
No I haven't read that one.

>>9447553
>>9447562
Yeah, he is extremely physically attractive. #nohomo

>>9447562
wow cutie, im a fan

>>9447576
shaved head white guy who lifts (and isn't a meathead)...where are they all :o

>>9447575
It's a weird little 50-page photo essay about poor neighbourhoods in London, contrasted with the pomp and ceremony around the Olympics, and implies some sort of apocalyptic message. Apparently he took the photos himself, just wandering around slums for a few weeks

>There’s been a revolution in remembrance. Digital photography’s democratised the night-shoot. One touch at the end of a sleepy phone call on your way home, you can freeze the halo from streetlamps, the occluded moon, night buses, cocoons shaking through brick cuts, past all-night shops. Right there in your pocket, a lit-up memory of now.

>>9447547
I'm also a northerner and spent a lot of my time looking at Belfast and other divided cities (Urbanism studies) and found TCaTC to be typical shallow outsider preaching of the "futility of nationalist conflict" without actually engaging seriously its complexity. You can get a better impression of Belfast from fucking Cal

>>9447539
>Orson Scott Card
>writes good

No, he doesn't. Don't believe everything reddit tells you.

>>9447606
I got his books through a book club catalog. No decent library or bookstore with scifi/fantasy growing up.
t. oldfag

>>9447606
Hes not fucking Tolstoy, hes good for a sci fi writer, just stfu and and go read the Odyssey in greek, genius

>>9447632
This is epitome of "nerd culture", the elevation of mediocrity

>>9447643
Alice Munro, please go.
Not enough happiness here.

>>9447654
Do you buy capeshit too?

>>9447661
>spouts memes
>ends up sounding like a feminist teacher
The New Yorker's been writing much better putdowns than you for years now.
If you got suggestions for weird genre that are better than Mieville, I'm all ears, there's some good books that put up here now and then. You'll get better traction than random buzzwords criticisms.

>>9447684
Weird genre IS a meme, it's as dead and irrelevant as Vaporware. Only millenials with the tendency to say "YAS" think otherwise

>>9447696
Not even one book huh? QQ

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>>9447701
Now go away, /lit/ it is a Christian board

>>9447707
And that's how you know China Mieville is worth reading.
QED

>>9447625
He's among the best of the YA sci-fi writers, I'll give him that.

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>>9447231
> extremely smart
> reading genre garbage
lol.

>>9447231
I read Perdido Street Station last summer. It had a very slow start, but then captivated me until the climax. The book just kind of ends and tries really hard to tie up loose ends before it does. As much as I liked a lot of things throughout the story, the ending ruined it for me and I would not recommend it.

I haven't read any of his other works

>>9447231
I loved The City and The City, but didn't like Perdido Street Station except for the last paragraph.

Haven't read any others.

>>9447825
>Ah, there he is.
>That motherfucker.
>What a tool.

>>9447313
Kraken is his worst

>>9447231
leftist faggot cunt, he is.
with a thesaurus open, he writes.

>>9447313
kraken is easily the worst of his books i've read