Provenance: I picked this up at the Page Turner in downtown Kent, when I was looking for a completely different book. And that's the nature of the Page Turner in that sort of thing happens quite often.
Review: OK, I'm a fan of China Miéville, but I haven't read everything that he's written. I started early with Perdido Street Station (published in 2000), and the two other books set in the same world, The Scar and The Iron Council. I enjoyed The City and City and Kraken (which I did not review - I don't review everything here), and really liked (and reviewed) October, a non-fiction book about the Russian Revolution. So I picked up this collection of his short fiction, adding it to the To Be Read pile, and finally getting into it in the past month or so.
And, to my lack of surprise, I enjoyed it tremendously. There are a LOT of stories here, ranging from widely-published works to stuff that was used as handouts at a exhibition in Liverpool. As a result, though you get a good feeling for how and what Miéville writes over a number of different stories.
When Miéville first showed up with Perdido Street Station, he quickly got folded into his own subgenre- the New Weird. This was over 25 years ago, so the patina of "new" may have gotten a bit threadbare since then, but there are not a lot of other books that fit neatly into that category. Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer gets mentioned a bunch as a sister volume, and I could put The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin in that general category. Piranesi could elbow its way in as well with a good argument or two.
But genre is a slippery marketing term - it effectively says: If you liked THAT, you'll like THIS. But it also sets up it own set of walls - This is NOT magical realism. This is NOT urban fantasy. This is not old school or cozy or like a lot of other things you've seen. It is akin to all of that, but it is a thing of its own right. The Old Weird belongs to Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft, and it has a good linkage with that as well, but this is a different animal.
So what is Miéville's encampment of the New Weird? Well, it has strange doings - icebergs calving above the skies of London, animated oil rigs. card decks with suits that only appear once in a lifetime, or etchings on bones newly-pulled from cadavers. It has body horror, in addictive parasites to people who put on dead animal heads or medical actors who suddenly present with symptoms for future diseases. Miévilles brand of the New Weird is very urban (usually) and Londonian (keep your wiki link open for when you hit something idiosyncratic).
Most of all (and I think this applies to the New Weird in general) - it is unexplained. No one steps forward in the story with a reason why animated oil rigs are blundering ashore like kaiju. Even those seeking the truth discover nothing but dead ends and unsure resolutions. Miéville in his short fiction keeps his focus tight on his protagonists (who are also usually his victims), and they are awash in this unsurity as well. This may be a hallmark of the NW, or at least Miévilles patch of earth within it.
It is interesting and puzzling and amazing and horrible and wonderful. It's worth hunting down and reading.
More later,
