#China Mieville

[figcatlists]

Contemporary weird fiction reading list

A chart of New Weird books and other bizarre, unsettling, and uncanny literature published in the last 30 years or so. This is a follow-up to my previous chart of classic weird fiction and another selection from my list of over 200 works of weird literature.

[snowlithills]

Theses on Monsters, China Mieville

1.

The history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of monsters. Homo sapiens is a bringer-forth of monsters as reason’s dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories, games, and terrors.

2.

To insist that an element of the impossible and fantastic is a sine qua non of monstrousness is not mere nerd hankering (though it is that too). Monsters must be creature forms and corpuscles of the unknowable, the bad numinous. A monster is somaticized sublime, delegate from a baleful pleroma. The telos of monstrous quiddity is godhead.

3.

There is a countervailing tendency in the monstrous corpus. It is evident in Pokémon’s injunction to “catch ’em all,” in the Monster Manual’s exhaustive taxonomies, in Hollywood’s fetishized “Monster Shot.” A thing so evasive of categories provokes—and surrenders to—ravenous desire for specificity, for an itemization of its impossible body, for a genealogy, for an illustration. The telos of monstrous quiddity is specimen.

4.

Ghosts are not monsters.

5.

It is pointed out, regularly and endlessly, that the word “monster” shares roots with “monstrum,” “monstrare,” “monere“—”that which teaches,” “to show,” “to warn.” This is true but no longer of any help at all, if it ever was.

6.

Epochs throw up the monsters they need. History can be written of monsters, and in them. We experience the conjunctions of certain werewolves and crisis-gnawed feudalism, of Cthulhu and rupturing modernity, of Frankenstein’s and Moreau’s made things and a variably troubled Enlightenment, of vampires and tediously everything, of zombies and mummies and aliens and golems/robots/clockwork constructs and their own anxieties. We pass also through the endless shifts of such monstrous germs and antigens into new wounds. All our moments are monstrous moments.

7.

Monsters demand decoding, but to be worthy of their own monstrosity, they avoid final capitulation to that demand. Monsters mean something, and/but they mean everything, and/but they are themselves and irreducible. They are too concretely fanged, toothed, scaled, fire-breathing, on the one hand, and too doorlike, polysemic, fecund, rebuking of closure, on the other, merely to signify, let alone to signify one thing.

Any bugbear that can be completely parsed was never a monster, but some rubber-mask-wearing Scooby-Doo villain, a semiotic banality in fatuous disguise. It is a solution without a problem.

8.

Our sympathy for the monster is notorious. We weep for King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, no matter what they’ve done. We root for Lucifer and ache for Grendel.

It is a trace of skepticism that the given order is a desideratum that lies behind our tears for its antagonists, our troubled empathy with the invader of Hrothgar’s hall.

9.

Such sympathy for the monster is a known factor, a small problem, a minor complication for those who, in drab reaction, deploy an accusation of monstrousness against designated social enemies.

10.

When those same powers who enmonster their scapegoats reach a tipping point, a critical mass, of political ire, they abruptly and with bullying swagger enmonster themselves. The shock troops of reaction embrace their own supposed monstrousness. (From this investment emerged, for example, the Nazi Werwolf program.) Such are by far more dreadful than any monster because, their own aggrandizements notwithstanding, they are not monsters. They are more banal and more evil.

11.

The saw that We Have Seen the Real Monsters and They Are Us is neither revelation, nor clever, nor interesting, nor true. It is a betrayal of the monstrous, and of humanity.

[leona-florianova]

Jack Half-a-Prayer

[corgiteatime]

I read "Embassytown"  and "The City & The City" back to back and then decided to look up the author and I too was completely surprised he looks like someone who could beat the ever living shit out of me in an alley behind a club.

(Source on Bluesky)

[adulthoodisokay]

what, and i cannot stress this enough, the fuck

i need this immediately

[worm-dark]

Reading “Perdido Street Station” rn and the world building is fantastic.

[motsimages]

The way I'm watching Candela Obscura really feels like reading a China Mieville book. I have begun with the Needle and the Thread, without the making characters or anything so I am basically figuring things out through context with no background. Who are these people? I'll figure it out. What is this Oldfaire thing? We'll see. And the bleed? Something to avoid. Same ambiance as half the books of Mieville I've read and same exercise of figuring it out. Loving it here.

I also watch like bits of 20 minutes or so so literally like reading on the lunch break.

[dazebell]

tim talking about train focus in china mieville books

[silverbooklamp]

Coming, July 2024, The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville.

[mrkapao]

“I share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.”

- China Miéville ‘Perdido Street Station’

[theoutcastrogue]

Illustration by Edward Miller (aka Les Edwards) for the short story "Jack", included in the Subterranean Press edition of Iron Council by China Miéville.

tinyurl.com/yww6tfp3

[figcatlists]

“Literary” speculative fiction reading list

A list of recommended sci-fi and fantasy books with high-quality prose and serious or complex themes, including works by Le Guin, Wolfe, Delany, Miéville, and Banks. This selection is drawn from a much longer list of well-written and ambitious SF that I published on my website.

[hobohobgoblim]

do you want a China Mielville story? 'cause this is how you get a China Mielville story.

In Chicago, there is a hole in the asphalt after a crushed rat, and for the past few days the city residents have been making sacrifices in it.

Source: https://twitter.com/CantEverDie/status/1746321098910683331/photo/1

[leona-florianova]

I need China Miéville to write more Hellblazer stories, because that short one in the christmas special of original Vertigo run (250) wasnt enough .. like..Miéville had John figured out and his way of writing urban fantasy would work perfectly.

Perfect.

(*tho it would be so much better if it wasnt colored by Jamie Grant n Stefano Landini.. why would you do this to lineart like this...its so painful to look at..)

[emillysstudio]

China Mieville Bas-Lag trilogy custome made leather dust covers presented in a velvet lined chest.

[keanuquotes]