What does Veeky Forums think of China Mieville?

What does Veeky Forums think of China Mieville?

Good prose
Good ideas, particularly the more recent books
Cannot write plot, particularly endings

Embassytown went from a very well written exploration of linguistics and consciousness into a tedious pointless war and siege narrative because he had no idea where to take the concept. Railsea was ruined in the last 5 pages by turning a cool premise into an unfunny Douglas Adams-style joke.

Perdido is the novel equivalent of a kid's drawing of a pirate island. It has all the things in their own little districts. Here's the cove, here's the forest, here's the sea monster, here's the X for treasure. Here's the bug people town, here's the frog people town, here's the politicians consorting with a hell dimension because ham-fisted political messaging. Here are the hypnotic moths and the spiders that literally built reality, and somehow they are evenly matched in a fight. Jesus, DotA has more coherent world building than that book.

dude, just enjoy the book, lmao

Doesn't have the talent too be as ideologically driven as he is.

Sez who? A talentless inbred cunt?

Couldn’t make it past the halfway point.

Overhyped.

>Sez who
Mieville's own reader base, he has released several duds in a row, he's approaching bargain bin status with his brand new books releasing at 8-10 dollars.

That's possibly because his usual readerbase is hoping for more normal urban fantasy whereas his last book, The Last Days of New Paris is actually pretty smart.

...

He wins points with me since he doesn't have to rely on Tolkien inspired shit for his works. I really like his backdrops. Also the humanoid insect fucking.

Absolutely this, not really into fantasy a lot but he has a lot of cool ideas, it kinda reminds me of jrpgs that i played some years ago. Also have to agree with , the plot is all over the place, can't speak for all of his works, just Perdido.

But DotA has lore from Perdido Street Station

I really didn't care much for the plot of Perdido much but I really loved the world building. Just Isaac doing random things while exploring more of the culture would've been great instead of the detective stuff.

offbrand chinese melville

Based on Perdido Street Station alone, garbage.

I really don't understand what people find impressive about his worldbuilding. Like, there's these fly people, they're like people but with fly heads, they can also give blowjobs. There's these locust people, they live in swarms, they're like communist and stuff because that shit actually works unlike capitali$m. The cities are rundown and shit, there's like pollution, light pollution too, only the street lamps are purple instead of yellow because it's on the opposite side of the color wheel. One of the most blatant cases of forced subversion.

But if your standard for cool ideas is "more interesting than a hundred Tolkein-clone RPGs" then yeah it has cool ideas.

Perdido Street Station was good. I usually don't like fantasy but the way he presents the city as being basically an organism (the city as reflection of its inhabitants and vice versa) was spectacular. The plot was basically the good old "kill the monster" and it was the weaker part.
Embassytown was meh. A lot of good ideas that were not properly explored. Cool stuff about childhood and memory. Plot was bad.
I agree with the other anons that plot seems to be his Achilles heel. Dunno why, but he clearly wants to stay in the realms of genrefic instead of transcending it.

You're one of those /sffg/ people who jack off to Lawrence Miles and Gene Wolfe, aren't you

I want him to treat me roughly.

>people who jack off to Lawrence Miles
Do these people really exist?

I tried to read Embassytown but it was boring and I didn't care about the characters, the world, or how they interacted with each other.

I get the impression that there are 2 kinds of people who pay attention to SF these days: tryhard poseurs who think that shit like Ancillary Justice and Mieville are cutting-edge, and people who actually like to read science fiction.

People who like pushing the boundaries and people who like jerking off to sexy aliens. Got it.

Yes because nobody in SF pushes boundaries other than the authors of Perdido Street Station and Ancillary Justice

Perdido isn't even SF, it's some mix of fantasy and cosmic horror. Who do you think is better?

Nope, I don't even read much sci-fi. A lot of people praised Mieville as one of the good ones, and I was still disappointed.

>Jesus, DotA has more coherent world building than that book

DotA?

I agree that world building is probably his strongest forte. But reading through Perdido it seems that there are a lot of things he left out, like the "world" he described extensively didn't really seem to matter in the grand scheme of things. The plot sort of fizzled out near the end.

PDS was just one big contradiction, for me.
How a book with such imaginative worldbuilding can have such an utterly dull plot still boggles my mind to this day.

>copy some characters from Final Fantasy 7
>call it a day
a lot of "cool ideas"

He has the right idea, his execution is flawed though and being politically loaded doesn't help.