And if so, please elaborate to whatever extent you can without spoilers.
Yes.
Spoiler-free elaboration? Sorry, that is beyond my skills.
But I think you should start with “Perdido Street Station.” It is innovative and creative, and like many of my favourite works it is bigger than the story the book contains.
“Well, is he?” I repeated.
Roy didn’t answer for a long moment, staring out the grimy attic window across the grey London rooftops. The reflection of his face in the thick, filthy glass was smeared and distorted; his expression unreadable. Somewhere above us, pigeons thrustled and murmured. The air was heavy with the scent of their droppings.
At last he turned and shrugged; an uneasy, oddly delicate gesture.
“Why d’you want to know? Why not just read the books and…” He trailed off, waiting. A vague smile tugged at one corner of his mouth.
“I read that book you gave me; the short story collection. Looking For Jake? I want to know if it gets any better. I want to know if it’s worth wasting my time.”
He shrugged again; enigmatic, infuriating. “They’re… big stories, Terry. Bigger than you think. Mieville–”
"Mieville never finishes. His short stories-- they all read the fucking same. Some dull sod sees something queer, and doesn’t know what to make of it. In London. Then something else happens, and he realizes that something strange is afoot. The End.
“I see what he’s trying for, okay? Magic realism, dark wonder, a quick glimpse beyond the veil. I get it. But he never does anything with it. Nothing ever happens. There’s no big picture, no closure. He just leaves it hanging, and calls it good enough.”
“The novella–”
“Fine, I didn’t read the novella, all right? Why the hell should I? ‘Looking for Jake’-- no ending. ‘Familiar’-- no ending. ‘Different Skies’-- no fucking ending. So why should I slog through a whole damn novella-- why should I bother with his series of novels? Thirty pages is bad enough; but two, three hundred pages of warmed-over Brian Lumley, and then the story ends with the main characters standing around staring at each other? Fill in your own climax? Fuck him.”
In the sudden quiet, I realized that I’d been shouting. The hidden pigeons overhead had gone silent.
The room was strangely dark: how long had we been talking? Roy was a faceless silhouette by the window. When he spoke, his voice was oddly muted, almost embarrassed.
“Just lately there’s been talk…” he trailed off.
“Of what?”
“An ending. They say Mieville’s written…” Frowning, he trailed off again.
A week passed, grey and indifferent. I saw Roy a few times; at the library, at the Tube station. Each time, he eventually brought the conversation around to Mieville’s supposed ending.
“It’s near,” he repeated, flapping an arm limply in a vague world-encompassing gesture. He looked harried and unwell. Eventually I started crossing the street early to avoid him.
One afternoon the phone rang. It was Roy, sounding miserable and infuriated: why was I trying to shut him out? What had I done with the ending? Had I seen China yet? Why hadn’t I finished the fucking book? He screamed one last time, and slammed down the phone.
Looking For Jake was still sitting on the shelf where I’d abandoned it, shrouded by a thin dust of neglect. On a sudden impulse I picked it up and flipped to the novella at the back.
The last page had been neatly sliced out.
Harsh, metallic jangling sliced through a thick, sluggish tide of dreams. I flailed about in the darkness, nearly knocking the phone reciever to the floor. It was Roy, had to be. More of his gas about Mieville’s supposed ending, no doubt.
I pressed the phone to my ear: silence. Dead line.
Cursing, I reached to hang up, when the reciever burped out a single buzzing inhuman word:
“ENDING.”
Roy’s apartment door was hanging open. Stark yellow light outlined a figure crouching within: not Roy. Half-remembered dreams of clinging fog and impossible angles blurred into memories of an artist’s photo: Mieville.
He turned toward me, an unfathomable expression on his face. The unseen pigeons above us fluttered briefly, then fell silent.
We looked at each other for a long time.
I was disappointed by Un Lun Dun: I was expecting something far better, and instead I got a mildly entertaining children’s book with an unwelcome didactic message and a pretty cool subtle subversion of a fantasy cliche.
King Rat had some great passages, but the final speech in the book irritated me so much (including a pun so lame that this incorrigible punster has repressed its memory) that the book’s experience is tainted for me.
Other than those two books, I think Mieville is a fucking genius. I read a lot of fantasy, and Perdido Street Station is one of the best three fantasies I’ve read in the past decade (the other two being The Golden Compass and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell). The book is wildly inventive, hints at a much broader world, ties in politics in a fascinating manner, and has a truly disturbing antagonist, the kind of antagonist that Lovecraft wishes he coulda come up with. The Scar and The Iron Council are also both top-notch fantasy reads, as long as you’re willing to put up with some socialist politics about on par with Ursula Le Guin’s (I definitely am). Running across his short stories in anthologies is always a delight.
Edit: Terrifel, that’s hilarious.
Daniel
If you like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing you’ll like. I like him, but a lot of people don’t - you have to dig his New Weird style. (If you do like Perdido Street Station, try K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City, the first copy of which that Amazon sent me had the proceedings of Virginia Woolf conference replacing the first half in a bizarre printer’s error, and I knew it was going to be New Weird so I read the first several pages thinking it was probably just a gimmick.
I loved Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. They are set in the world of Bas-Lag, which is beautifully developed and rendered. Truly magnificent, moving, political, thoughtful… there aren’t enough words. There’s a short story in *Looking for Jake * that relates to the novels, so you’ll want to read it when you finish the first three. I think Mieville is a genius and, after George R. R. Martin (don’t get me started), he’s the author whose next novel I’m most looking forward to.
I’ve just read Perdido Street Station, and am now starting Iron Council.
Perdido is definitely one of the greatest fantasies I’ve ever read. He’s brilliant with plotting and prose, and his description of action and setting suspense is top notch.
My only knock against Perdido was his character development of the main and a couple of the secondary characters. The main was one that I had no empathy for and had trouble caring about, he was basically “Comic Book Guy” mixed with disgruntled entitled grad student. You could practically smell the cheeto-stained corduroy. He spent reams of pages developing side characters that didn’t stick around for more than a few pages, and didn’t adequately develop those that were at our side for the entire novel.
Keep in mind that this is a very minor nitpicking of the 0.1% of a 99.9% amazing read.
The protaganist of Iron Council seems more resonant with me though, and the book is great so far.
And hat’s off to Terrifel, that had me choking and crying with laughter 
I love Mieville more than any other living author besides maybe Pynchon. I’ll just give a big, fat “+1” to everything mentioned here. His world-building/cosmology creation is unrivaled by anyone else currently writing - I’d love to read entire books based on some of the mere anecdotes and sub-minor characters he uses (the ambassador of hell, the torque war and the colourbomb, the whole ghosthead thing, etc. etc.).
One thing that I think is extra-important, that people don’t mention enough is that while they’re not a “series” per se, you should really read the Bas Lag books in order - Perdido, then the Scar, then Iron Council. They’re not a series and only minorly reference each other, but the way that each book builds on the previous ones and on ideas introduced in those makes observing the order as important as a chronological series.
I believe they are chronological, though, right? The Scar takes place within months of the ending of PSS; the protagonist of The Scar is where she is because of the events in Perdido. The political unrest in Iron Council takes place after a war between New Crobuzon and a neighboring city-state, Tesh, which forms major plot in IC. The mayor in IC is a direct, hand-picked successor of the evil bastard who was mayor during PSS. The story “Jack” in Looking for Jake should probably be read after PSS.
I agree with TLDRIDKJKLOLFTW about there being a near-infinite number of setting described throughout the 3 novels that could easily form the basis of a whole series. The Witchocracy of Tesh (who is the Crying Prince? What is the Crawling Liquid?)… the Malarial Queendom… the undead aristorcracy of High Cromlech… the culture that created the Might Sword… Maru’ahm, land of the Casino Parliament, where laws are created via games of chance… I could go on. Mieville has a superlative gift for world building. I hope he never grows tired of Bas-Lag, because I doubt I’ll ever get tired of reading it.
He’s good, but bear in mind that he’s a bit… political. And by “a bit” I mean “completely bonkers”. If our **Der Trihs *** were a highly talented fantasy writer, he’d be China Mievelle.
- No offense?
Just bought Perdido Street Station. Thanks for the input.
He’s openly a socialist. But he’s far from bonkers. I think he does a good job of showing why capitalism is screwed in his novels, but you can enjoy the work without being a socialist. He has a BA from Cambridge in social anthropology, Masters and a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and had a fellowship at Harvard. He isn’t pulling this stuff out of thin air.
He also has a tendency to launch into florid rants on the evils of capitalism, to constantly stack the deck against any characters in positions of authority, and to admit the possibility of only one legitimate view of any issue. Not unfamiliar behaviour, even with intellectuals - although I’d expect an intellectual to exhibit a bit more subtlety.
But yes, I do enjoy his work, and I’m not a socialist. He writes powerful prose, and his world-building is amazing - he has one of the most original minds the genre has seen in decades. It’s just that I have to filter (or laugh away) some of his subtext.
(The almost throw-away image of punk cacti gangs still makes me smile and shudder.)
Hell, the socialist subtext is one of the (many, many) reasons I enjoy Mieville so much. We need more fantasists who don’t all buy into the “Divine Right of Kings” crap. Miéville and Pratchett have that in common - no respect for that “chosen one” cliche.
And really, people, is Alt+0233 really that much work to key in?
Well, yeah. Most fantasists set their stories in medieval-like societies, with pseudo-medieval politics; Mievelle sets his stories in an Industrial-Revolution like setting, so he can get away with 19th-century politics. Still doesn’t make it any less tiresome.
The comparison between him and Pratchett is apt, though: his books are a lot like the Discworld novels, only without the humor or moral nuance. Remember pre-zombie Reg Shoe from Night Watch? There’s a Mievelle protagonist right there.
I don’t see that. I see the authorities almost always maintaining their power positions, even when they are hell-bent on taking the whole operation over the edge. Very rarely, one of the little people will strike out against them and hit something, but the overall structure of society is very resistant to change. The deck is stacked against regular folks, if anything. Everyone, it seems, is a pawn in larger games.
Lack of subtlety writing from a socialist angle =/= complete bonkers
Also, I do think his message is subtle. It’s nice to see meaningful class struggle in fantasy, rather than feudalism, which is pretty much de rigeur and rarely brings anything fresh and new to the table.
Apparently, at least 50% of the time, it is.
Which brings up another troubling point about Mieville-- his stupid name. I had no idea that “China Mieville” was supposed to be male until I read one of his books’ cover copy. No wonder the poor bastard’s a terminal socialist, as he was obviously raised by hippies.
“Ohh, sweet China, did the other boys beat you up again? Hush now, China; let your androgynous tears flow. They only vent their bourgeois patriarchal rage on you because they secretly envy your groovy Chairman Mao t-shirt, little sprout.”
Or is his name pronounced some other way? “Mieville” is French, I suppose; so should “China” also have a Gallic accent? “Shee-na M’yay-vee?”
That actually works pretty well. Try it with while impersonating Maurice Chevalier!
" 'Allo, ma cherie… My name is Sheena M’yayvee. I am, 'ow you say… a writair of fantastique fiction. Perhaps I could persuade you to join me in an… intimate literary critique? Ohn-hohn-hohn!"
I’m actually surprised to read the idea that his novels are devoid of moral nuance. Without going into spoiler territory, I think the story of the birdman from the first book shows a lot of moral nuance, as do the conflicts between the fleet leaders in The Scar. The final act of The Iron Council depicts a decision that may be heroic or may be monstrous, and Mieville deliberately doesn’t decide that issue.
True, authority figures tend to be assholes in his books, but despite that, there’s a great deal of moral ambiguity and nuance.
Daniel
I don’t like him. I read Perdido Street Station and King Rat, and found them both too…disturbing?
Having said that - I recognize that he is a very good writer - just not for me.