Kraken marks a digression for Mieville from his familiar madcap style. Where before we had come to expect moody, slow-burn plots interrupted by sudden action, and just as suddenly back to introspection, we now get a story that is dramatic, unbroken, and streamlined in punchy chapters and theatrical quick-cuts.His vibrant, poetical asides into mad science and techno-thaumaturgy have been toned down: no longer a virulent undercurrent, twisting and shaping his world, they have become curiosities an...

Hey, come with me, do not ask and do not be surprised at anything. Even if something seems to you completely unbelievable - take it on the chin. Meet the city which you will not find in the coloured folders, places you will not find in any guidebook. Prepare yourself for delirious trip, apocalypse, armageddon or whatsoever. Just follow me. It is my first Miéville and I really didn't know what to expect. Story starts interestingly when we are about to visit Natural History Museum. It’s really fab...

In the city of _______, the end of the world is quickly approaching, instigated when a/an _______ gets stolen. Genero, the undistinguished protagonist, all of a sudden discovers a new world when he's ________ by a ________ and then rescued by a ________. It then turns out he is a hero sort, a necessary element of the battle between a ______ and a/an ___________.Jeff Vandermeer: Alright, Mieville, the name of a city. China Mieville: This will be a London sometin'. JV: Alright *writes it in* Now,

Four and a half squidshttps://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2015/...“Enter that room and you breached a Schwarzschild radius of something not canny, and that cephalopod corpse was the singularity.“I rather get why Miéville’s normally fantastic fanish fans don’t like Kraken much. I will note that I’ve had intermediate success with Miéville, finding a couple of his works quite memorable and some quite putdownable. Kraken is one I enjoyed muchly, primarily due to its absurdity, the absence of didacticism...

Kraken gave me a severe case of goodreaditus, an unpleasant condition whereby as you are reading a book you are constantly thinking not about the book itself but how you are going to review it. For example I thought maybe I could borrow the voice of Cher Horowitz from CluelessHere's the four-one-one on Billy Harrow. He's like a squid janitor, he's single, he's 24 or something, quite old, and he earns minor duckets for a thankless job. What that man needs is a good healthy boinkfest. Unfortunatel...

I had my ups and downs with this title, but in the end it's mostly all ups. The language was the biggest thorn, though in my other frames of mind, I also really enjoyed it at the same time.What this book is not, is a quick and light read meant to delight and float through your mind like a cloud of ink.It deserves to be savoured and gloated over, perhaps even stopping a bit to roll the cadences of copspeak off your tongue to feel its beat. I had to do it, too, before I realized that it sounded ju...

"Now look," said Billy, in an uncertain approximation of his reasonable voice. "What's all this about? Can't someone tell me?""Oh, for fuck's sake," replied Collingwood in disgust. "Someone's been trying to tell you for most of your sodding life. You just won't listen, will you? But if you want something more explicit, there's always Goodreads."She opened a grubby-looking Apple Powerbook with a Hello Kitty sticker on the lid and began typing."What's Goodreads got to do with it?" whispered Billy,...

The most fun you can have with a giant squid this side of Japanese octopus porn. I take that back. It’s the most fun no matter which side of octopus porn you’re on.This is the first China Miéville work I’ve read so I wasn’t tainted by any of his previous books. I went in with few expectations. And how did I feel coming out? The dude rocks.Here's the the milieu: Magic exists in modern day London, and, hidden behind mystical distractions, a secret society of competing religious cults, for-hire mag...

Oh hey. An lolcat.That's new. But wait, because even though they are 1,000,000 years old in internet time, lolcats are only kittens in "offline" time, by which I mean the time by which your parents live their lives (go on, check your email right now: your dad just forwarded you a bunch of them. Hahaha Invisible Bike. I forgot about that one). Moreover, judged by the molasses pace of the publishing industry, they're younger still. So I give props to China Miéville (you're only getting that acute

Oops...in my excitement, I seem to have Mievilled all over myself. Pardon my gush.So the ONLY reason this gatling blast of brainstorming outréness is not yet nesting on my all time favorite shelf along with  Perdido Street Station and The City & The City is that my feeble grey matter is still trying to process what…the…French I just read. I grasped the big picture, though my neurons were white-knuckled and straining, but there were so, so, SO many reference gems, idea snippets, bizarre sound byt...

Kraken by China Mieville is about as predictable and formulaic as a book about a squid sect amidst a London underground teaming with competing cults and all under the shadow of the end of the world can be. Weird, weird book. But then, Mieville is supposed to be among the vanguard of the weird fiction group. I liked this, though it at times devolved into a clumsy absurdism; but to its credit, it never got down to ridiculous Kafkaesque or Beckettesque absurdity, but more of the Monty Python variet...

There's something agonisingly frustrating about throwing a China Miéville novel across the room.The problem, I think, is in convincing myself that it actually deserves to be thrown. Because a Miéville novel should be brilliant. Both Kraken and the other Miéville I've read, The City & The City, are built on fascinating conceits. Like City's politically schizoid metropolis, the hidden London into which a museum curator is drawn after theft of a giant squid promises a wild, intelligently drawn and

Unpredictable, funny, and chock-full of weird with a side of SQUIDDITY apocalypse - and yet (oh blasphemy!) Kraken is my first 3-starred Miéville. This hurts my fangirl soul.But here's the thing - even the weakest book by His Chinaness is still better that the strongest offerings of most other writers. Therefore me giving it 3 stars in NO WAY puts it in the same category that some of the drecks that I've read. I liked this one. It's just that it in NO WAY measures up to the usual amazing and bra...

Let’s make one thing clear: China Miéville is way too ripped for his chosen profession. Being the new demigod of speculative/weird English fiction, he should by rights be some kind of hunch-backed, bespectacled, bowl-haircut paradigm of nerd. Instead he’s an Adonis, a Hercules, a shaven-headed Atlas – standing out among his many accolades is the coveted “best guns in literature” award; a title he seems unlikely to yield anytime soon. Tomcat, Could They Beat-Up China Miéville? BlogWell, that i

DNF at 25 %I started with high expectations and I really wanted to like this book.The story sounded really good: A giant squid, a museum’s curator protagonist, London, magic, all kinds of cults, theft and murder, the end of the world and lots of weirdness.Unfortunately the execution just did not speak to me.I don’t think it’s a bad book, but it is definitely not my taste.

Chapter 1: Wow, this is kind of cool. Everybody says China Miéville is the shit. He owns the GR comment boards. He can kick ass in any genre, or no genre, or bend genres to fit his will. Not to mention his good looks, right? I mean, the dude is hawt with a capital H. Hubba-Fuckin-Hubba. At least, that's what I've been told; personally I think he looks like a rude, low-class French waiter who hasn't bathed and has been relegated to peeling potatoes in the back alley where he can't scare off the c...

A preserved giant squid is stolen from London's Natural History museum and curator Billy Harrow is at the top of everyone's list for answers. But who stole the Kraken and why? Was it the Londonmancers? Or minions of the Tattoo? Or the Church of the God Kraken? Or someone else all together? That's what Billy Harrow and Dane Parnell, a renegade from the Church, aim to find out. But can they recover the Kraken before it's used to trigger Armageddon?China Mieville appears to have the Midas touch at

Kraken is a complex urban fantasy about a missing squid, an astonishing large cast of characters and the end of the world - in no particular order.China Miéville is an incredibly imaginative author. In this story, he has created a half dozen separate religions with their own gods and customs. (Hundreds more are hinted at.) Not content with that, he also created magic of all kinds, a strike by familiars, protective London-based angels and a supernatural police force.And that's just the tip of the...

First off, a book with the title Kraken is required to have a sinking ship attacked by a Kraken or at least have the line "release the Kraken" make sense. Sorry, it's in the rules...This did not have any.If that's what you're looking for, look elsewhere, although if you know anything about Mieville (I'm told), you should know that you never really get what you expect from his novels.Kraken was my first crack (or should I say krak) at China Mieville outside of the 100 or so pages I read of Perdid...

I never thought I’d give a China Mieville book two stars. There’s just so much that I love about his writing and world-building. Although he does tend to move through genres with a shocking (shocking!!) lack of respect for genre boundaries, I never thought there’d come a day when he wrote a story that wasn’t really my thing. In fact, I believe I’ve said almost these exact words a few times: “His world-building is so inventive and amazing and his prose is so beautiful – I think I could read his w...