China Miéville Interviewed (Elsewhere)

While I know that I've already done an "Interviewed (Elsewhere)" for Miéville, I found the new interview too interesting to not bring up. Throughout it, we learn quite a bit about Kraken, and, while the whole thing is a must read if you enjoyed or are curious about that novel, the first question was probably the most interesting part for me:

The A.V. Club: The City & The City came across as a careful, tightly controlled book. Kraken, on the other hand, feels much more like an eruption.

China Miéville: [Laughs.] I was wondering how you might gloss that over. Kraken is a very undisciplined book. That’s a gamble. If it doesn’t come off, it’s disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can’t get the other way, and vice versa. You gain something and you lose something. My second book, Perdido Street Station, was the one that a lot of people really, really liked, and it was tremendously sort of rumbustious and ill-disciplined. I feel like I’ve been getting increasingly disciplined since then, and some readers seem to miss that kind of amiable chaos. What I wanted to do with Kraken is tap into what you’ve kindly called an eruption. I wanted to indulge that. It does have a very different feel than The City & The City. It obviously won’t work for everyone, but I always think about books like—and I don’t mean this hubristically—Gravity’s Rainbow. If Gravity’s Rainbow is anything, it’s kind of this dreamlike meander. The idea of saying to Pynchon, “You know, you need to tighten this up,” it would destroy it. Kraken was an effort to tap into that same kind of pleasurable ramble. In some ways, Kraken is more like Perdido, whereas The City & The City was a departure. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to do a lot more of. In some ways, this was getting back to what I was better known for.

That description vocalized a lot of what I feel about Kraken. Like with every novel the man's written, the book impressed me, in this case by not having a few interesting elements and building a story around them, but rather flooding the reader with a never-ending deluge of the weird and bizarre that threatened to drown (me, at the least) under its weight. I also found the comparison with Gravity's Rainbow very interesting, not just because I happen to be wrapping up that very text, but because both are novels of excess that are still, somehow, controlled, and both have to be viewed, at least to some degree, by scaling back the chaos in your mind and sorting out the elements one by one.

China Miéville Interviewed (Elsewhere)

Alright, alright, I'm aware that I'm not the only person to post this interview. In fact, I'll wager that I'm not in the first hundred. I do, however, want to draw attention to a slightly different part of it (though I won't deny that Miéville doing SF is a mouth watering proposition):

It seems sometimes that monsters are only considered valid if they are supported by some deeper meaning, but they can be enjoyed for what they are too,” he said. “When I was a kid I drew squids and robots because I loved them and I still feel that way now.

“Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

I think that dichotomy (between social commentary and holy fuck that moth just owned that guy) is precisely what makes Miéville books such excellent reads, and I think it's the skewing of that dichotomy that made The City and The City less gripping than its predecessors.

Guy Gavriel Kay Interviewed (Elsewhere)

Most of you have probably already read Pat's interview with Kay, but I figured I'd mention it, if only for the sheer excellence of the following quote:

What is your view as to fantasy's function?

I resist, inherently, grand unified field theories. I back away from the examples you’ve offered as much as I am uneasy with someone explaining the ‘function’ of music, art, or novels as a whole (psychological, evolutionary, whatever). For one thing, as you noted above, yourself, the fantasy field is increasingly fragmented and it is also increasingly blended into mainstream fiction. Does someone really want to try to be definitive about the shared ‘function’ of paranormal vampire detective-romance and Robert Jordan and Guy Kay and Le Guin’s Lavinia (compared to her Earthsea)? Good luck to them. Take it even further: might not the ‘function’ for you be very different regarding the same novel, from its function for me, or someone else? I’ll suggest chances are good they are different, in smaller or larger degrees. Art serves many and varied needs, and the very same work can serve quite different purposes for different people - and for the same person at different times in his or her life.

The rest of the interview is just as excellent, which goes to show that I really need to get around to ordering Under Heaven.

Alastair Reynolds Interviewed (Elsewhere)

I got home today having spent every waking moment anticipating diving into Alastair Reynolds’s newest. At times, it felt a bit like I was stuck in the Coming Attractions portion of the show, with standout scenes from his earlier novels replaying themselves in my head and a huge banner saying TERMINAL WORLD – COMING SOON popping up every few minutes. So, when I threw open the door to the mailbox, I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment when I was left bookless. Seeking to dull the edge of the craving, no matter how short lived the relief might be, I went onto the internet and found this interview.

First of all, Alec’s one lucky son of a bitch. On a more important note, Reynolds definitely has some interesting stuff to say. The misunderstandings about Terminal World are interesting, and they probably tie back to the Book of the New Sun inspiration. Something to keep in mind for my eventual review for sure. Of more interest still are the mentions of Reynolds new work. The trilogy looks to be both larger in scale than almost anything Reynolds has done (the mere thought of which boggles the mind) and also, at least at first, far closer to our present day.