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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

werewolftrial asked:

Given that you just reblogged a quote from him, do you have any recommendations for someone who hasn't read any Miéville before? His work has always intrigued me from a distance but I don't know where to start.

Kraken or Perdido Street Station. Read the cover blurbs and pick whichever one appeals to you more. PSS is maybe my favorite book, at least in the sense that it’s my go-to answer for when people want to know what your favorite book is, which is not actually a good question but it’s easier to answer than stage a protest. But both are great big chunks of worldbuilding fabulousness (esp PSS) and and unashamed intellectual and linguistic acrobatics and various other Sorts Of Things I Like.

I understand his recent books have been on the shorter side and in theory those might be good tasters given that they’re shorter, but I haven’t read them yet myself. There’s a whole stack of him still in my to-read list, all mentally festooned with blinking bold red priority asterisks, and inroads are unfortunately not being made in said list because I don’t reach the necessary mental escape velocity to tackle good fiction often. FML.

china miéville
we-are-rogue
we-are-rogue: “Each museum of London constituted out of its material its own angel, a numen of its recall, mnemophylax. They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. In a...
we-are-rogue

Each museum of London constituted out of its material its own angel, a numen of its recall, mnemophylax. They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. In a city where the power of any item derived from its metaphoric potency, all the attention poured into their contents made museums rich pickings for knacking thieves. But the processes that gave them that potential also threw up sentinels. With each attempted robbery came the rumours of what had thwarted it. Battered, surviving invaders told stories.

In the Museum of Childhood were three toys that came remorselessly for intruders—a hoop, a top, a broken video-game console—with stuttering creeping as if in stop-motion. With the wingbeat noise of cloth, the Victoria and Albert was patrolled by something like a chic predatory face of crumpled linen. In Tooting Bec, the London Sewing Machine Museum was kept safe by a dreadful angel made of tangles and bobbins and jouncing needles. And in the Natural History Museum, the stored-up pickled lineage of the evolved was watched by something described as of, but not reducible to, glass and liquid.

But the squid had been taken, the angel defeated. No one knew the meaning of or penalty for that.

~ China Miéville, Kraken

edderkopper
edderkopper

“The eternal moment, the moment of transition, the trickster moment: Why is this important? Because during that moment, we are out of ourselves. We are broken into parts: we are man and woman, god and human, hero and villain; all of the possibilities of life are there, and we select them and participate in our own re-creation. We are taken apart and rebuilt. It is for that reason that the moment revitalizes us, freshens us. That is a major reason for our love of storytelling: we allow it to dissect us and to remodel us. The trickster is the alpha and the omega of the movement, at once the force of the movement and its end. In the trickster is the hero, like a magnificent butterfly struggling to free itself of the cocoon. We are present at our dismemberment and our rebirth.”

—

Harold Scheub, Trickster and Hero: Two Characters in the Oral and Written Traditions of the World (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) @we-are-trickster

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