China Miéville’s novel The City & The City just picked up the British Science Fiction Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and later this year it’s up for the Hugo and the Locus Awards, as well as securing a Nebula Award nomination in May. How’s he following up this smashing success, you ask?
ENTER THE KRAKEN!
China’s new book Kraken, which goes on sale June 29th, is a wild, unapologetic, no-holds-barred urban fantasy set in an underground London filled with wizards, magic, cults, and thieves. That’s a very different kind of book from the mystery-fantasy-thriller that was The City & The City (and word has it that China’s following up Kraken with a science fiction novel containing aliens and spaceships).
As China stretches his writing muscles with each new novel, seemingly covering the genre from A to Z, we began thinking that it might be interesting to get an A to Z from the author himself. (Kaitlin Heller, who knows a lot of things, informs us that it’s called an abecedary).
Keep reading to get an A-Z from China Miéville…
A is for Antlion — AKA Myrmeleontidae larvae. If you’re American, they’re ‘doodlebugs’, but that’s too whimsical a name for these terrifying predators. They hide buried at the bottom of conical sand traps they dig steep enough that insects within slide ineluctibly into the antlion’s awful jaws (as fictionalised, with gusto, in Lindsay Gutteridge’s great work of scale-shifting wonder Cold War in a Country Garden). (See E is for Eruchthonousness.)
B is for Brond — A 1987 Channel 4 drama, based on the book by Fredric Lindsey, unaccountably unreleased on DVD, despite starring Stratford Johns and a young John Hannah, and being, insofar as dreamlike bewildered reminiscences can be trusted, very weird and surprisingly good. Sort of surreal political thriller with an intensely shocking opening scene, and a killer theme tune: ‘Secret Ceremony’ by Bill Nelson. (After 1 minute 15 seconds, it starts to go all noodlynoodly jazz, but the first minute is wonderful).
C is for Crosshatching — This term has been adopted by the great John Clute to describe two or more overlaid realities. It’s an excellent metaphoric deployment, but the original usage is pretty uncanny too. In the field of pen-&-ink art, crosshatching is the representation of differing shadows by the overlaying of thin lines at various angles. It exists in artistic traditions around the world, throughout history. It’s an everyday miracle, the exploitation of imperfections in human visual perception to make depth out of two dimensions simply by drawing lines in different directions. (See R is for Reid.)
Click here to see the rest of China’s abecedary.
