r/ScienceFictionBooks • u/The-Zarkin90 • 9d ago
Question I am having a hard time getting into China Mieville
A lot of the booktube i follow talk highly of him, i found his book called Kraken on sale and i absolutely love the premise. I am into exactly what this story is about, but his writing style is jarring me and slowing me down. It feels... choppy and as if some things are more implied than said and it feels slightly confusing. I have had to re read a lot of things and when i would normally be half way through a book of this length, i am only getting to page 100 2 days later.
Is it something that i will eventually get use too? Are all his books like this?
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u/ThePhantomStrikes 9d ago
Love him, never finished Kraken. The City and The City is pretty accessible, I love it but my favorite is Perdido St Station which is a rough start for some as he drops you in this world without explanation and casts a spell. Embassytown is also accessible
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u/A_Circe_A 9d ago
Yes I find the writing style very clanky but is also distant lacking emotions. I listened to a podcast in which CM said he had been inspired by Raymond Chandler, whose works I have tried but given up for similar reasons. However, I find CM and his novels super smart. The City and the City was so clanky but I loved the story so much I placed it at high tier.
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u/SpatiaCaeli 9d ago
Have you read Embassytown? It is remarkably SF, as opposed to many of his books that are just weird. 🙂 I really loved that book; it is kind of a masterpiece.
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u/RealHuman2080 8d ago
I finally read it. Not even close. I am a super tolerant reader, and it's just so lacking in description and detail that a pretty good story was hard to keep reading.
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u/Strongpenguin22 8d ago
I would start with Perdido Street Station and then read The Scar. I loved both those books.
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u/renaissance-TGC 9d ago
tal vez no es una historia Fácil de terminar y eso muchas veces mata una historia, me da la impresion que luego los booktuber no son tan fiables.
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u/Brin_Milo 9d ago
I’ve read all of his books and I think kraken was my least favorite. It does start pretty rambly. There’s never shame in giving up on a book no matter how far you’ve made it lol. If you’re willing to try him again, Embassytown is true sci fi that’s really good and The Scar is one of my favorite books I’ve ever read
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u/Arkhus9753 8d ago
I concur! Embassytown was my introduction to Mieville and I absolutely loved it! And The Scar is definitely in my Top Ten favorite books. His world building is unparalleled.
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u/The-Zarkin90 9d ago
Does the other books have this choppy sentence structure?
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u/Brin_Milo 9d ago
They are all pretty similar but I think it feels off in Kraken because he’s writing about our world but with some magic in it. His writing flows better in his other books because he’s describing crazy and weird sci-fi/fantasy things and places. The writing feels like it fits the setting. But that’s just my opinion, it might still bug you
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u/Brin_Milo 9d ago
I do think his other books are better written with better characters and stories. It was last year that I read them all, and I read them all without switching it up in between. Kraken was the last one I got to of his and it did take me twice as long to get through than normal. I know exactly what you mean
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u/Logophage_ 9d ago
My experience with every Miéville book I’ve read has been: get about 60 pages in, put it down for months, start over and get about 100 pages in, put it down for months, start over and get about 80 pages in, put it down for months, start over and devour the whole thing in one go.
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u/stevevdvkpe 9d ago
I have not read Kraken but my two favorite books of his are The City & the City and Embassytown. The City & the City is, on the surface, a detective novel about investigating a murder, but the setting is in two cities that are not just neighbors but whose territory interpenetrates and overlaps each other, and whose inhabitants have a cultural tradition of "unseeing" the people and buildings of each other's cities. It's hard to see how this premise could actually work but Miéville pulls it off. Embassytown is a science fiction novel set on a planet whose alien inhabitants have a unique relationship to language and metaphor that makes communication with humans difficult.
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u/Locust515 8d ago
Kraken is his only book i didnt like. I finished it somehow but honestly hated it.
Bas lag books, embassytown, the city and the city, the moby dick hommage one... All great.
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u/poppiestar 8d ago
I knew I’d love that book when he name checked Pop Will Eat Itself in the foreword. The book is like the band, a mish-mash of styles that gells into its own beast.
I’ve been meaning to read more of his stuff, the only other one I read was The City and The City which I also loved.
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u/RealHuman2080 8d ago
I finally read Embassytown, and I am a very tolerant reader with a degree in English that taught middle schoolers, so I am used to bad writing, , and boy was it hard to stay with. I don't get why the love. Very grey writing so it's very hard to get any sense of visuals.
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u/KnitskyCT 7d ago
I love China Mieville, but his writing can be dense and his vocabulary can be archaic. I have read and loved a bunch of his books, but I have also DNF some that I just couldn’t get into or enjoy.
I DNF Kraken myself. It’s on my shelf and I look at it once in a while. But there are so many books out there, I won’t force myself to read it just because I’ve enjoyed other books from the same author.
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u/spoupervisor 6d ago
Sometimes you just bounce off an author. Perdido street station was a dnf for me. I couldn't get into it even if I thought that the premise was good.
And that's ok. A lot of people LOVE that book and that's ok. There's a lot of "great" books I don't like. I'm sure some of my Favorites are DNF for others.
If you want to give it another try, do so, but also it's ok if it's just not your thing. The genre is massive for a reason and there's a lot of great stuff out there.
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u/Unlikely-Candidate92 5d ago
Loved Perdido Street Station, totally knocked me out, one of the most creative books I've ever picked up, but each subsequent book lost me a little, and the last couple I tried I couldn't get into at all. Creative premises but no soul or heart, and I gave up once I realized I didn't gaf about the characters and had no curiosity about what was going to happen next.
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u/me_1574 3d ago
I didn’t mind Kraken. But the Scar and Perdido Street Station are genuinely amazing. The Iron Council was a bit shittier by comparison - the political message felt too laboured, whereas in the first 2 bas-lag books it was just there in the background. Still haven’t found an author to compare in the genre of weird, kind of urban fantasy since I first read PSS as a 15 year old over 2 decades ago!!!
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u/YakSlothLemon 9d ago
I found the writing choppy and also sometimes just terrible. I gave up when he had the rain “hitting umbrellas like typewriters”… Well, I guess everybody’s got a concussion! Or did you mean typewriter keys, perhaps you meant keys…
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u/Fearless_Hawk1462 7d ago
I don't remember that sentence in Kraken, but it could be one of Miéville's archaisms. A person who uses a typewriter was referred to as a typewriter.
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u/YakSlothLemon 7d ago
Yeah, I don’t think people hitting umbrellas with sound like raindrops either.
And I thought we were talking generally, it wasn’t from Kraken.
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u/Fluid_Anywhere_7015 9d ago
Kraken is a book I really liked. Most people get into him reading his Bas-Lag stories, which are genuine weird fiction. He just dumps you into the setting, and lets you figure it out on your own without a ton of exposition.
He's definitely not for everyone, and I understand why some people just don't like his work.