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Am still amazed
by China Mieville's extraordinary Perdido Street Station (see review
by John Clute). Many good things. The city of New Crobuzon, half-masonry
half-pain, somewhere between the slums of Rio de Janeiro and Mayhew's London,
and teeming with grotesque fertility. A speculative thaumaturgics that
borrows from Marx's dialectics ("crisis energy"). Slake-moths, insectile
predators that invade the Umwelt of the city, inflicting the inhabitants
with unpleasant dreams so as to feed on their psychic effluvia. And real
characters.
Read M. John Harrison's "Signs of Life," which
I had somehow missed on its first publication. Some excellent set-pieces,
but not as compelling as either"The Course of the Heart" or "Climbers."
Although others disagree. His "Travel Arrangements" collection is more
representative of his strengths - especially "Anima" (cannibalized for
Signs of Life) and "The Iron Horse." Screwed up characters who mistake
the phatic for the vatic.
Elizabeth Hand, Winterlong (re-read). Not
as elegant or elegaic as The Glimmering but better for all of its
slight incoherence than any of the books in between or since; a gorgeous,
wicked feast of sexuality and violence - but with a strong underlying ethical
sensibility. A fierce and unsatisfied intelligence that is entirely lacking
from other writers doing superficially similar stuff (viz. Anne Rice).
The sequel, Aestival Tide is also worth reading, but inferior -
too many infodumps which distract from the baroque magnificence of the
setting. Apparently there is a third book in the series, Icarus Descending,
which is long out of print, and apparently not very good. She seems to
have been making up the story on the fly; my paperback edition of Winterlong
has
a postscript essay describing a very different Aestival Tide from
the version that was published, and Aestival Tide itself refers
to a sequel, The Eve of St. Nynex that may or may not be Icarus
Descending. |