All 9 entries tagged China Mieville

China Miéville wins British Science Fiction Association's Award

Writing about web page http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/07/china-mieville-bsfa-award

Just heard on the wire (from Dan Barrow) that China's latest book, 'The City & The City' (or, 'The City & Teh City', as I like to call it) has won the best novel award from the BSFA. This, with Amazon rating it one of its best books of 2009, will hopefully put China in a good place to take even more risks with whatever he's working on at the moment.

(That said, his next book, 'The Kraken', is billed on Amazon as launching in May/June this year. Going to be colossal. Haha.)

Great also to see an endorsement of the book from the SF community, which shows an anti-purist line by supporting a novel that starts from a crime genre, but develops weird elements.

George Ttoouli : 07 Apr 2010 18:26 |  Tags: Award China Mieville SF Tentacles |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A prize for slipstream fiction

Writing about web page http://blog.saltpublishing.com/2010/02/10/two-salt-authors-nominated-as-shortlists-are-announced-for-the-2010-adelaide-festival-awards-for-literature/

Just saw over at the Salt blog [*] that two of their authors have been shortlisted for the 2010 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. When I read the details of the price, I became intrigued:

Innovation award ($10,000) – for a published book which departs from the conventional use of genre by borrowing elements from a number of genres such as fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, poetry or cultural criticism.

This almost seems like a new, or expanded definition of the slipstream genre; at least, it's one I'd buy into.

I first heard the term through Toby Litt, who, talking about China Miéville's work as well as his own, described it as literary fiction that borrowed aspects of genre, or mainstream fiction. There's something only a tiny bit niggling about that definition - there's an implication in the way I understood it that implies a dumbing down (which isn't really true at all - both those writers definitely have a genuine interest in seeing barriers between 'popular' and 'difficult' writing broken down).

And at the same time I had to acknowledge the subterfuge at play - trying to slip exciting cross-genre writing beneath the radars of taxonomising retailers, who put x books on x shelf, and y books on y shelf, and xy books on a shelf round the back with 'special interest' labels that no one ever sees, and ends up in the post back to the publisher, who gets blacklisted and their books never make it into the bookshop chain ever again. (Yeah OK, trying to turn my chip-on-shoulder-mode to OFF.)

It's great to see a prize that actually celebrates cross-genre work - even if the appear to have taken 'genre' to mean the medium of the written word, to the exclusion of marketing and critical genres. Worth noting that the Warwick Prize for Writing praised Naomi Klein's winning 'Shock Doctrine' for its ability to synthesise complex cross-discipline material into a readable format, which is what I think China and Toby do very well. So a kind of slipstream as well.

And with a grimace I recall walking into the Waterstones in Covent Garden and seeing a table labelled 'Slipstream', which somehow managed to put JG Ballard and Stephanie Meyer together. I restrained myself from sweeping the books to the floor and assaulting the staff for allowing whatever marketing pleb had dreamt that up to get their way.

[*] NB: Salt are running their Just One Book campaign again - Just One More Book. Still not in the clear a year on, it seems. Go on, lend them a hand.

George Ttoouli : 22 Feb 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Australia China Mieville Creative Writing Prize Salt Publishing Slipstream Toby Litt |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Getting Weird

Writing about web page http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1584

[This message brought to you by the CM Ministry of Disinformation.]

Those of you not following Questionable Content will be pleased to hear that Dora's cat is called Mieville. Judging by a strip this week in which Mieville interacts with Pintsize, the cat's clearly named after Mr Associate Professor China Mieville Sir.

First weird fiction lecture last Wednesday, what strikes me most is China's propensity for neologisms. My favourite has to be 'abcanny' = 'the never known'.

For anyone reading that doesn't know, China's latest book, The City & ytiC ehT, (I really want to call it 'The City & Teh City' whenever I read the title) was voted 8th Best Book of the Year 2009 by Amazon, and Best Book of the Month June 2009.

The hardback Amazon Sales Ranking is somewhere over 56,000 at the moment, but the paperback's at about 1700. I wonder if those figures actually mean more than fuck all to people who care about books.

George Ttoouli : 22 Jan 2010 12:51 |  Tags: China Mieville Creative Writing Weird Fiction |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Writing about web page http://www.amazon.co.uk

I've just been google-stalking China Miéville to find out the title of his new book, 'The City and the City' due mid-May. I also heard that his new new book, due in 2010, is already listed on Amazon - and so it is, 'Kraken'.

Scrolling down, I noticed for the first time (yes, I'm a bit slow) that Amazon have added some functionality to their website: the 'What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?' bit. I have a few issues with this statement, as follows:

- The excessive capitalisation of the letters of each word. It smacks somewhat of 'Jesus Christ Will Save You And If He Doesn't Consumerism Will Because We Know Best'.

- The use of the word 'Ultimately' as if someone's last act in life has been to buy the book you're staring at and then expire before the book is delivered. As if the association of their death should be an inspiration to all of us buyers to buy with the same weakly-constituted passion. Truly, we all live to View Items and Buy Items and then Dispose of Items and Die Painfully without Making Use of Aforesaid Items.

- But the real gripe is that 28% (TWENTY EIGHT PER CENT!) of people who viewed the Amazon UK page for 'Kraken' Ultimately [sic] bought that book.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of loyal fan bases, but really? There's no description of what the book's about (it doesn't even say Bas Lag or New Crobuzon ANYWHERE on the page) and there's not even a cover image. China even says in an interviewfrom last summer:

"This is what happens in a world of rumor. I never talk about work in progress, and then the next thing you know some hint gets released, some misunderstanding generalizes, some whisper fractals, and then Amazon is trying to sell a non-existent book. My position is as follows: Kraken may or may not exist. If it does, it may or may not be called Kraken. Whether it exists and whatever it's called, it may or may not be out next year or the one after or another time. Sorry to be a pain!"

Personally, I'd be either a) scared of my readers if they're that keen, b) pity them for their lack of discernment, or c) fall into a bout of severe cynicism and start inventing titles for them to buy and then relocate to an undisclosed tax haven in the Caribbean.

George Ttoouli : 02 Apr 2009 13:20 |  Tags: Amazon China Mieville Interconnectedness |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

World–Building Wars Episode V – The Empire is Struck Back

Writing about The nerds regroupe (presumably at the Meeting Stone) – yet more World–Building from Gas-mask City

Taking Asimov as an example is interesting. It's been a while since I read the Foundation books (I recall seven books, rather than 3, but I take it you're a purist), but I've never forgotten one of the key issues: that the whole is overseen by Hari Seldon, who is dead by the Prelude.

Foundation's foundations could be argued to rest on the idea that world-building is unachieveable without a human story, without someone taking responsibility for that world - even if that creator is dead, in both the real sense of Hari Seldon in Foundation, or in the Barthesian sense.

Foundation sprawls through history, through time, through generations, but ultimately, it's the playing out of Seldon's vision that is important: does he have sufficiency of character to predict the scope of human evolution? Or maybe you'd rather call it a vision of society by a visionary, a supra-human personality, a kind of bodhisatva. An ontological character figure, non? And again, this isn't dependent on world-building as the narrative drive.

I could equally blast out ideas about his short stories, in which a variety of robot characters dominate - even ones that seem to be more machine than character. They are invested with personality, characterised. But I'm interested here in the idea of interpretation as well. It's the reader's prerogative to choose which aspect they gravitate towards as being most interesting. Hence the fans who start creating fiction about their favourite characters, or who pin blueprints of deathstars/cartography of Middle Earth to their bedroom walls. They're entitled to this, just as the writers are allowed to exercise their personal tastes in pursuing worlds over characters.

So really, Tim, what it comes down is that you're essentially right in saying, (to paraphrase) "character isn't the only point to story". There are various ways to drive a narrative and, I guess Miéville and Harrison are good examples of the world-building urge - I recently finished China's The Scar and the central quest is about characters trying to unlock a mystery to do with the structure of world they are in, rather than themselves, though this is of course thrown up along the way. It's not devoid of character, but they take second place to the environment, in terms of the book's concerns - or my reading of it.

I think I said in conversation that there are three ways to drive a narrative: plot, character and language. I left out ideas, which is where world-building comes in. Rather than rabbit on about this, I will instead list a few further texts that are driven by world-building and character, in equal or unequal balance:

Robert Lightman's Einstein's Dreams
Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
Clive Barker's Imagica
Stephen Donaldson's Covenant Series (I've not read the Gap into Power series, but might well do the same)

And I should also add that this isn't to say they're devoid of plot or language motors to carry them along, only that I'd consider these strands to be the dominant motivations.

Which, on a completely unrelated topic, reminds me of James Herbert's '48. He deliberately chose to write the book with an action packed plot that doesn't let the central character relax - and hence the reader neither. Aesthetically, it's about as intense a plot-driven book as I've ever read (48 could refer to the number of minutes it takes to get through it, given how it's impossible to stop reading). But at the same time, it's barely a glitch in terms of character, ideas and language - I have a vague memory of gardens and a mention of the Ritz in London, though when I try to remember the central character, all I can think of is Biggles.

George Ttoouli : 01 Mar 2008 09:00 |  Tags: China Mieville Creative Writing Foundation Isaac Asimov M J Harrison World Building |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

World–building revisited: a riposte to the nerds

Writing about World–builders – from the nerd end of the spectrum from Gas-mask City

Ignoring the philosophy of the question of world-building, I'm interested in the technical aspects. I'm arguing that the approach to world-building in fiction generally needs to avoid an abundance of detail, unless the characters demand it.

Think of sparse writing - the point of Carver, or Chekov, or Seiffert is to construct a net of environmental detail - a version of the real world - that holds together just sufficiently to carry the jelly of the story through to the end. If you stop to think about the actual technique of sentences, what concrete detail you're being given, there are numerous gaps, a flatness, a primitivism in the detail, which the reader does the job of filling. Some even have gaps in the syntax, that still works.

The main aim then is to construct the world the characters need in order to not fall through like bad clipping code in an early 3D FPS. In this way, gaping holes that need to be covered must be. But you don't really need a full blueprint of the Death Star in order to believe that the weak point is REALLY REALLY hard to get to.

"Why the desire for ratified, internally consistent universes?" Tim Franklin asks. I think that's a demand of the reader, one that's had their ego swept aside by the skill of the writer (to paraphrase TS Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', as I'm wont to).

The writer's ('story-teller's' would be more accurate) concern is to know their character first, and see how they are in the world. I'm saying this, while also totally aware that China's approach (and I guess MJHarrison's approach) is the opposite - to imagine the world and then locate the characters within it. But you're left with a lot of baggage - reams of description that clog up the story. Sure, it's probably a good enough read if the writer is competent, but it's also indulgent.

If the characters are 'there', the world follows to some extent, even with a minimalist approach. A recent comment a Birmingham film guru made to me was that tests have shown readers will stay glued to a video image no matter how bad the picture is, as long as the sound is top quality. Compare disaster footage on handhelds and mobile phone cameras, where you can clearly hear someone holding the camera expleting.

Similarly, the voice of the character, the narration (the subvocalised soundtrack to the story) is more important (these days? I think it loops back towards oral narrative) than the precision imagery of the world. If the voice is gripping, the hazy shapes of the world don't need to resolve, they just need to give the 'character of place', an atmosphere. I'm sure there are juicy quotes along those lines, but of the top of my head, refer to David Lynch's films, or the atmosphere of 'Dickensian London' as a concept; or as counterexamples, the banal detail and patronising tone of Dan Brown's and JK Rowling's books.

By illustration, Drizzt Do'Urden and Leopold Bloom. The first a fantasy environment totally constructed, that only becomes interesting by virtue of the heroes that inhabit it. The second a real place, Joyce's Dublin, turned unfamiliar, but a believable environment by virtue of the perspective watching it. Both are outsiders to the world's conventions (the point where Lupine and Kindred (or Lycans and Brethren, or whatever they're called in 'Underworld') can exist in the same party) and provide a more interesting view of the world as a result.

One that makes the world a more interesting place for the fan to inhabit after the story ends? I.e. does the fans' desire to create the world in greater detail only come from having seen great stories unfold in those lands?

Backatcha, Tim.

George Ttoouli : 16 Feb 2008 14:34 |  Tags: China Mieville Creative Writing M J Harrison World Building |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Bypassing publishers

Writing about web page http://www.nin.com/

I stumbled over some interesting music industry happenings recently. I say stumbled: Saul Williams is coming to the UK in February, to do an event for the London Word Festival, run by Tom Chivers of penned in the margins, who I've worked with on podcasting; and I'm a MASSIVE Nine Inch Nails fan. I put two and two together (i.e. I read the websites) and this is the story: 

Saul Williams' latest album is produced by Trent Reznor, who decided, having had trouble releasing the album through a major label, to make the album downloadable for free online. The results: 

"As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

[...]

"If 33,897 people went out and bought Saul’s last record 3 years ago (when more people bought CDs) and over 150K - five times as many - sought out this new record, that’s great - right?"

[NB. These figures from this blogpost - go here for the full blog.]

The first 100k downloads were completely free, with an option to pay $5; since then the album's been available for $5. So a drop in about 5000 of actual sales, but a 500% audience boost, roughly.

What's really interesting is the cost of production and marketing. Trent's latest post points at an Observer article by Simon Napier Bell, on the topic of industry giants and how they screw the artists:

"Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company's discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time."

Most notable fact is the 10,000% mark up on raw product to retail price. That profit mostly goes on rent, employee's salaries and into the pocket of the label, not the artist. Remove that and the relatively insignificant cost of hard copy CDs, etc. and you're left with just the artist's time and the producer's time and then the relatively magical concept of the art's intrinsic value (i.e. how much did you enjoy it?).

Compare to Radiohead's latest, In Rainbows. Originally available free, with an honesty box, which reportedly saw devout fans throwing £70 or more into the band's pockets. Now only available from the band's official merchandise website, for £40. Ouch. Ditto Saul Williams' Niggy Tardust, which uses Paypal to process credit card payments. (Waste appears to have its own system, but I couldn't be bothered to register. Maybe when I feel rich enough to buy the album.)

I've had a couple of chats with China Miéville about a similar line being taken in book publishing. Cut out the conglomerate vampires because soon digital reading tech is going to be as good and widespread as ipods. So how to control it, if it takes off?

Readers are swamped with text these days, they're up to the eyeballs in reading material (of a different sort to literature though? I add ponderously) on screen, off the 'net. So there's no question about whether it's going to grow, as far as I'm concerned. I've a friend who came back from Japan recently with a (Chinese-) modded Nintendo DS that allowed him to download ebooks to it from the internet, load up any text, whatever he wanted - correction, whatever he can get hold of, which, increasingly, means everything.

The future is here already, according to China (M, not the country), we just don't have it shipping free with new home entertainment systems yet. According to some people this and digital print in general mean (these are paraphrases):

• The death of the book in the next five years (China)
• A shift towards localised networks, devolution of readerships (Rupert Loydell, Stride)
• An interesting fad, that marketing departments need to be aware of and part of (Stephen Page, CEO Faber & Faber)
• Something that will create a new playing field for the publishing industry (Alexandra Pringle, Bloomsbury Editor, I think said something like this at her recent Warwick visit, as did various other small press people I've chatted to)
• A way to screw artists of their royalties (this comes more from music and television giants, like David Geffen, who set up that anti-piracy squad several years ago targeting mp3 websites)
• A way to screw conglomerate publishers (Steven King & Trent Reznor, though I might be over-interpreting them both)

China suggested that writers will eventually find themselves working directly in partnership with freelance editors, and releasing their books online, possibly with the kind of honesty-box donations that you get on Trent's site.

[Or the one that featured for a while on Stephen King's page, when he serialised The Plant online. The figures I saw published on King's website at the time showed him to have a net profit after the first one or two installments of about £75,000. The article linked above suggests total profits of nearly half a million dollars and that the project was abandoned supposedly because of a slump in people paying for the downloads. Nice work, if you can get it.]

But these processes are subject to one important point: artists with established fan bases can get away with it, but how do you draw new audiences on the net? What will new artists do when they only have a range to 100s or, if they're lucky, thousands of readers? OK, OK, Arctic Monkeys, I hear you say. (But don't say Lily Allen at me, she's connected.)

At the end of the day, being a good writer doesn't make you a good editor; being a good editor doesn't make you a good promoter; the business of publishing art is set up to work with skilled individuals and the idea that a writer is nothing without their readers is a strong one (but not one, in my book, that justifies pitiful royalties and contracts that hold artists over barrels marked 'profit'). At the end of the day, the book still needs to be written, then edited, then promoted. So writers who need editors who need marketers will find themselves working with an increasingly fragmented, independent array of individuals with various skills (accountants, PR people, editors, sub-editors, typesetters) so let's, for the sake of convenience, call this collective a publishing house.

And oh, right, we're back to square one, but with a chance to rewrite the history books. More tea, Comrade Lenin?

So, for me, there's some weight to Stephen Page's idea that the internet's effect on publishing is essentially a marketing problem, in need of marketing solutions. Publishers who don't keep up will look like dinosaurs, and lose face. Publishers who do keep up will be doing the same work as before (providing a collective, professional service) but in a new environment, alongside the existing one, until that, supposedly, dies out. If at all.

Piracy itself won't have that much of an impact on anything except the scale of operations - though the new model of publishing huge quantities of writers and texts that each sell in small quantities (cf. Salt, Shearsman, and, godhelpme, lulu) marks a change that will be much more noticeable at the lower end of the industry's turnover scale. The giants already have massive back catalogues, rights to recent classics and estates, that they won't have to worry too much. Their staff will though.

The main problem is that we're in a transition phase and, as usual, the industry is using it as an excuse to separate the wheat from the chaff in the usual fashion: through blinkered, unimaginative capitalism-tinted goggles. Similarly, you get the kind of shameless exploitation of artists that leads to protest (cf. Writers' Guild of America). Even the BBC is guilty of it, e.g. through early screenings of second episodes online and marketing sampler series to mobile phones. They've asked writers to 'go with it' for the sake of marketing experimentation, but bottom line here is that the broadcaster/publisher is getting coverage at no expense, from someone else's artistic product.

Sure, you could whine till the cows come home, only you can't afford any cows, or a field, because you've got no money. The obvious response is to go and do something it about it. Or go into banking.

George Ttoouli : 28 Jan 2008 09:00 |  Tags: China Mieville Digital Publishing Piracy Publishing Saul Williams Society Of Authors Trent Reznor Vampires |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Random Monster Encounter: China's workshop

[Draft produced from an Exquisite Corpse/monster exercise set during China Miéville's Weird Fiction series.]

*

I scanned the monitors for facility staff, anyone from the crew, rats, anything. Four screens on each level, four levels, buttons underneath each to control them. Jarry was supposed to be on the bottom floor, basement 3, searching the engineer barracks. The cameras swept left-right, right-left, grainy and monochrome. It was like watching a spliced up silent film with no cast. I pushed the security guard's body out of the chair and took his place.

There. Lowest level, second camera. Was that? No, Jarry was shorter. In a dark corner of what would have been a mess room - I checked the blueprints on my PDA to confirm - near the crew cabins. What was that? A woman? In a skirt? What was she doing? Hiding? I zoomed in. She was tall, hard to say how tall because of the angle, but well over six feet, I'd have guessed. In heels? The contrast was bad, I couldn't see her feet. She had a strange cone-shaped skirt that reached to the deck. At first I thought it was one of those Spanish gypsy dresses, but the shape was wrong, bulges rolled down the side like thick sauce on pudding; no, heavier, like rolls of fat.

And then I noticed she was bald - big ears, no hair - or maybe some tufts behind her ears, that stretched more like a kind of webbing. She - he, it - had no shirt on its pale, reedy, triangular frame. A man? Jarry must have seen it, he should have squawked it. A seven foot man in a skirt didn't just stand in the corner of a room unnoticed. I zoomed in as far as the image would go, so he filled the screen from top to deck and I blinked to try and resolve the pixels into something that made sense, but my eyes couldn't match up what I was looking at with any mental registers.

I looked away at the other screens - where was Jarry? I looked back at the man. Large round ears, though they seemed oddly shaped, more like fins, and that definitely looked like webbing, not hair. Its arms were flimsy matchsticks and... Fuck, what were they? It had no hands and the arms seemed to taper away to points. I couldn't make out any joints at the wrist or elbows, just these strange pale lengths hanging from its shoulders, the same pasty colour of its head and torso.

And then, for no reason I could tell the dark, lumpy skirt bulged out, billowed like it had caught an updraft and then the thing's arms started to saturate and pulse, extending up and outwards, ugly, erectile. And Christ! They were tentacles, plain fucking tentacles. At the same time I noticed it had three of them distributed asymmetrically, two on one side, one on the other. Was this some kind of freak of nature, an abominable human deformed from birth? Or had it lost one somehow?

This thing started to ripple and I swear I'd never seen anything this crazy before, these ripples that ran up its body, from the hem of its weird skirt all the way up to its neck. How can I explain it? It reminded me of a Russian contortionist I'd seen in a travelling circus, years ago, who had made his body creep along the floor like a worm, rippling like that. Three, four ripples, tightening, flexing. The thing's tentacles pulsed and grew until they were fully extended and the ripples ran up its body, contracting rings of muscle, like it was going through a form of peristalsis. But how did the movement pass from the skirt to the body like that? I couldn't see where the skirt ended and the flesh began, the image was too poor.

Its mouth widened into an o, grew to an O, and the contractions pulsed right up to its lips, which widened more than any human could have managed, revealing a circular set of fangs, long sharp teeth that ringed the inside of its mouth - it was sickening. Its lips slid back like a sheath until its whole jaw bared itself, a bony sphincter, curved talon-teeth whitish on the CCTV. The terror that took me then - I couldn't look away, but my breath came quieter and quicker. It was so alien, so horrific and all the worse as I realised how unlike a human - how wrong I'd been at first.

A violent contraction took a hold of it and I swear to you now I could see a - a lump run up through its skirt and into its stomach, something so big that it literally forced its body apart as it swelled to accommodate whatever was inside it, pushing its bones out, stretching its skin. Even under the shock of what was happening, I made out its skeletal frame pushing against the skin, a ribcage of sorts, but more like that of a fish, or snake, than a human. Its tentacles, damn! They thrubbed and fattened and its whole torso seemed to grow.

The contraction dwindled and then another took up, forcing the now smaller bulge in its torso up to its scrawny neck and its mouth widened even further and then the thing bent forward at the waist and began to vomit. A disgusting, dark mass of wet, mushy excrement oozed out of its mouth. God knows what it was - a soft, faecal matter steeped in liquid, with small, paler pieces clearly visible in it. The vomit caught in its teeth, slid down its chin and dropped in chunks and slurs onto its skirts in a way that made me think they were not made of cloth, but of some harder, rubbery material. I thanked every power I knew that I wasn't there to hear it or smell the stink of it. The animalistic lack of self-awareness was terrifying; the filth it was sliming itself with was utterly horrible, like a sick dog fouled in its own shit that starts to wash itself with its own tongue. But this beast's eyes seemed to glare at the room like a drunkard's, the grey panache of intelligence just visible behind a sheen of delirium.

The beast stood upright again and drew another great bellows of air, squinting its little eyes and then it exhausted a great burst to clear out its insides, so all the traces of vomit, the lumps in its teeth, sprayed out across the room, spattered the metal tables and chairs. Finally, then, the creature slackened and its hideous, sphinctral jaw retracted into the sheath of its lips, which narrowed to a dark aperture, not quite closed.

This, I thought, would be the godforsaken end it, but I was so fucking wrong you wouldn't believe. The next moment, it caught another billow of air and swelled up, so the whole creature actually rose up off the floor. It began to move, taking up momementum, the edge of its skirt rippling like the fins of a flatfish, propelling it forwards, hovering, levitating, I couldn't tell what, but the moment it started to move, to come towards the camera, I felt so terrified I sobbed. I looked and looked for signs of its feet, but the angle was wrong and everything else my eyes were showing me said that this thing was hovering.

Left behind on the deck, as it moved out of the dark corner of the room, was a whitish-grey pile, from which a mucous-like saliva trailed after the monstrous thing, stringing across the floor. And this, this I couldn't believe, I couldn't parse. I moved the camera down and spotted, in the pile, the unmistakeable flesh-stripped and hollow sockets of a human skull. The pile was a human skeleton. I retched over the desk, I had to look away, but my eyes fell on the dead guard, so I had to look up, stare at the lights until they hurt my eyes, chanting one of the training mantras to focus myself.

I zoomed out to view the room. Now that I'd found Jarry - what was left of him - I had to take care of myself, get myself out of the facility. The creature was already off the monitor. Then it appeared again slithering and gliding into view on the next screen, using its tentacles to drag itself along the walls, moving fast, through the view, then on into the next screen, the atrium at the bottom of the stairwell. It was trying to come up.

At the foot of the stairs, it stopped. Its skirts billowed and heaved, and it stretched its tentacles out to an unnatural length, extending them across the full three metre width of the well, its body seeming to narrow as it did so. It gripped the walls with the flat ends of its appendages, suckering and pulling itself up a few steps. It paused then billowed up again, a few more steps. I felt, then, unequivocally, though it might just have been the sheer, bloodless fear in me, that it knew where I was and was coming for me straight up the stairs, two flights and if I didn't leave immediately it would cut off my route to the ground floor, and the exit.

George Ttoouli : 26 Jan 2008 17:28 |  Tags: China Mieville Creative Writing Monster |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

M John Harrinson

I'm always banging on about the fact that in any kind of writing, you have to do the work of constructing the world you want to portray to your reader. This could be a completely imagined fantasy, or a version of a known part of the world. You still need to bring it to life for the reader in some ways.

After China Miéville's workshop last night, we had a little chat and he recommended M John Harrison to me. And, along those lines, I found these posts on MJH's blogs (to be read in this order):

http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viriconium/1/
http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/18/licensed-settings/
http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/very-afraid/
http://uzwi.wordpress.com/worldbuilding-further-notes/

From the get go he's saying some fantastic things here - I'm particularly fond of the idea that JRR Tolkien's world relies on a degree of poetry in the style and language to create the correct atmosphere for the reader to 'buy in to' the world of Middle Earth.

This reminds me of a workshop I trialled over summer using the herbalism and chanting, as practised by komboyannites (or 'Vikos Doctors') in Greece, over the centuries. The combination of blessings, preparations, meditation and chanting during the application of herbal medicine helped to create the correct mental state in which healing could take place.

Similarly, Jim Crace's work - Continent, Quarantine - relies on a degree of immersion in the rich language, the atmospherics, to deliver the world environment. As MJH continues, this clarifies in his argument:

"Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism... & in other worldbuilding news: Bush adminstration announces War on Climate Change– “We’ll fight with smoke & mirrors.”"

Perhaps it's more the broad brushstrokes that locate and contextualise the story, its characters. The smell of the landscape, the environmental pressures. Just creating the world isn't enough. This is there in HP Lovecraft's work, in his purple prose: the world is a verbose, graphic, flowery and frightening one, the syntax odd and historical. That's as much a description of the worlds in his stories as the technical specifications, but it's the poetry of his world, not the detail.

George Ttoouli : 17 Jan 2008 16:17 |  Tags: China Mieville Constructing Worlds Creative Writing Fantasy Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem