Author Topic: China Mieville - jerk or groundbreaking pioneer?  (Read 41312 times)

thedreameater

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Reply #50 on: April 02, 2008, 10:04:58 PM
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But does he deserve to be degraded and spat upon?  What makes a person viciously criticize another person?  Are the millions of people who buy Terry Goodkind books inferior because they gobble up high-fantasy-tolkein rip offs?  ...did they ask China to save them from their bungled and botched existences?

With due respect, you really need some perspective on this. Those comments of Mieville's are not degrading. They are not spitting. They're just criticism.

You're way overboard.

Word choice struck a chord with me I guess.

"moaned incessantly"
"profoundly backward-looking"
"Not that he would want to be one, of course - good lord, no. He has a PhD, don't you know."
"the wen on the arse of fantasy literature"

calling someone an ass tumor is not degrading?  Funny, sure, but come on...



thedreameater

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Reply #51 on: April 02, 2008, 10:59:35 PM
Rachel,

Do me a favor, delete this post.  No reason to have my negative ass commentary scuffing up your forums.

I'll play nice from now on.

Thanks.



hautdesert

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Reply #52 on: April 02, 2008, 11:36:58 PM


This analysis from the statement:

"Call out the king tho...cheap tactic to draw attention to the jerk on the soap box..."

Why did you choose to dissect the 'king' part and ignore the soap box?  Or 'call out'?  Focus this much on every phrase I 'throw down', man, I'm flattered.  Over analysis ftl.

Um, you've misunderstood my intention.  I was not interested in analyzing everything in that sentence.  I was pointing out that the cultural constructs in stories do affect the way that people think about the world.  For instance, you, presumably the citizen of a democracy or a republic, when giving someone the top slot, chose "king."  That says something about the images you've internalized about "how heirarchies work" and who is the ultimate authority.

By your measure, I under analyzed, not over, since I was only dealing with (and only meant to deal with) the curious phenomenon of a person who does not, in real life, live in a feudal state claiming that the best metaphor you could come up with for how people relate to one another is based on feudalism. 

If you want, I'll analyze soap box and call out as well--like "king" they're cliches you haven't fully thought through, and it says something about your ability with rhetoric, as well as underscoring my point--you are using the constructions you've read numerous times without so much as thinking about them.  You've never even considered the implications of those constructions, or how they might affect your assumptions.  How, for instance, assuming Tolkien is "king" might lead you to rather thoughtlessly assume that any criticism is degrading him or spitting on him, because the whole idea of royalty contains that implication.




wintermute

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Reply #53 on: April 03, 2008, 12:30:23 AM
This is kind of an old one.  Funny thing is, Mieville is my favorite example of this.  I won't say he's a prick.  I've never met the guy.  I DO think this politics are waaaaay off, but that doesn't really matter.  He's not a politician, and neither am I.  He's a writer.  You absolutley have to seperate a writer's opinions from his work, and I guess that's goes for other artists as well.  His writing is, for me at least, excellent.  So, I'll continue to support his socialist agenda by excercising my capitalist habit of giving writers money.  (haha)

Neal Asher.

I love his books, especially the Polity novels (Cowl not so good); but then, I was always a sucker for space opera. Then I discover the guy has a blog.

And I find out that he's a hardline Libertarian global-warming denier, with generally quite scary politics. For a Briton, he's quite an extreme rightwinger, making Maggie T look like Ghandi. So I stop reading his blog.

I still love his novels though.

Science means that not all dreams can come true


Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #54 on: April 03, 2008, 01:32:41 AM
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So I stop reading his blog.

I still love his novels though.

Oh, I feel that way about Orson Scott Card. Occasionally, some essay of his will circulate and I'll thunk my head against something and think, "Darn it, what an [epithet]. Wish he'd knock that off. I liked my illusions about him!"

But Ender's Game is still a good book, darn it. And I have an unreasonably large affection for his Oversoul series even though they espouse some philosophical beliefs I strongly dislike.

On the other hand, he does have a few books I can't bear. His biblical retellings fall flat for me, which I find disappointing, 'cuz the bible's a pretty cool set of stories, and the characters and events in them are inherently compelling. But his versions of them feel kind of twee. And I had to stop reading his Alvin Maker series because there was like a large billboard in the text with shiny lights around it reading, "EXOTICISM," and I'm fairly sensitive to that.

But I'd read the Oversoul series again sometime when I want the comfort of a known book and characters. Or Ender's Game.



Heradel

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Reply #55 on: April 04, 2008, 06:19:51 AM
Rachel,

Do me a favor, delete this post.  No reason to have my negative ass commentary scuffing up your forums.

I'll play nice from now on.

Thanks.

This is technically my neck of the forums to police, so let me answer you (Rachel's position is higher up the totem poll). There's a modify button on your posts, in the upper right hand corner. If you want to edit out anything you've written, please do and note that you edited it for content. As a rule we're pretty hands-off unless things start going critical. Yours is a bit stronger than normal for around here, but if you want it gone I'd rather you do it than me.

Thanks,
—Heradel

I Twitter. I also occasionally blog on the Escape Pod blog, which if you're here you shouldn't have much trouble finding.


Roney

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Reply #56 on: April 06, 2008, 10:16:24 PM
I'm going to try to keep my comments to the original question, not because I think it's particularly interesting but because I suspect that the main issues ("Is Tolkien's work any good? Is its continuing influence on Fantasy harmful to the genre?") are going to be discussed again in this forum.  Possibly more than once.

So, is it reasonable for Miéville to write a robust but fairly superficial criticism of The Lord of the Rings?  Well, of course it is.  If he finds a work reactionary and objectionable, he's entitled to say so: not as a matter of political free speech, but because engaged criticism is a vital part of a mature, healthy genre.  That's so obvious that it's barely worth saying, but it is worth separating from the more contentious points, those that seem to have driven thedreameater to defend Tolkien from a perceived attack, which I'll come onto.

Miéville uses some provocative language, sweeping generalizations, caricature and unsubstantiated assertions in his piece for the Socialist Review.  Is it reasonable for him to indulge in this sort of lazy criticism in public?  I think Miéville knew exactly what he was doing, and I don't think it was lazy, for two reasons.  One is that there's plenty of scholarly criticism of Tolkien out there already, and rehashing it in detail would be neither original nor interesting.  For the purpose of Miéville's essay he merely needs to allude to its conclusions.  The other is that for all his negative comments about Tolkien, his aim in the piece for Socialist Review isn't to prove that The Lord of the Rings is bad.  Writing for a non-genre audience who are more than capable of spotting a feudal-patriarchal subtext for themselves, he actually seems to be mounting a roundabout defence of the books and the film of Fellowship, or at least those bits of them that he feels are still enjoyable.  By not pulling any punches with the socialist criticisms at the start he keeps the reader's attention for the paragraphs where he describes what he values in Tolkien and post-Tolkien Fantasy.

That's not to say that Miéville's a fan.  Which seems to be the third question wrapped into thedreameater's characterization of him as a "jerk": is it reasonable for the new guy on the scene to be so critical of the master who, intentionally or not, did so much to make the scene what it is today?  Or should he show more respect to the great author who can no longer defend himself?  Leaving aside the fact that it's traditional for the young turk to challenge the old orthodoxy (as Miéville says in the article, "Tolkien is the Big Oedipal Daddy"), it's important to remember that Miéville's comments don't come out of nowhere.  The context for them is that for most non-genre readers, many dabblers and even a number of people who would regard themselves as fans, Fantasy is the shelves full of two-inch-thick "volumes" of Tolkienesque high fantasy.  Miéville must constantly have to deal with people who assume that his writing is not just something that it's not, but something that he finds morally and politically offensive.  So he tries to distance himself from it, which seems fair to me.

This post has gone on too long already, so the three word summary is: not a jerk.



DKT

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Reply #57 on: June 16, 2009, 10:54:47 PM
I don't know if threadmeter visits the forum anymore, but I couldn't help thinking about this thread when I stumbled across China Mieville's There And Back Again: Five Reasons Why Tolkien Rocks on Omnivoracious.

Fun little piece.


Planish

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Reply #58 on: July 02, 2009, 06:25:46 AM
To answer the original question in the title - neither a complete jerk, because some of the criticisms are justified; nor a groundbreaking pioneer, because we've heard those criticisms before.
Meh.

All fiction is inherently political. In fact, all art is inherently political.
I prefer both Oscar Wilde's pronouncement in The Picture of Dorian Gray that "all Art is quite useless", and what Joseph Campbell and James Joyce say about it.

from page 246 of A Joseph Campbell Companion.
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I will give you what seems to me to be the most clear and certain exposition of basic esthetic theory I know, namely, that of James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Joyce makes the distinction between what he calls "proper art" and "improper art". By "proper art" he means that which really belongs to art. "Improper art," by contrast, is art that's in the service of something that is not art: for instance, art in the service of advertising. Further, referring to the attitude of the observer, Joyce says that proper art is static, and thereby induces esthetic arrest, whereas improper art is kinetic, filled with movement: meaning, it moves you to desire or to fear and loathing.

Art that excites desire for the object as a tangible object he calls pornographic. Art that excites loathing or fear for the object he terms didactic. All socialogical art is didactic. Most novels since Zola's time have been the work of didactic pornographers who are preaching a social doctrine of some kind and fancying it up with pornographic icing.
Say you are leafing through a magazine and see an advertisement for a beautiful refrigerator. There's a girl with lovely refrigerating teeth smiling beside it, and you say, "I'd love to have a refrigerator like that." That ad is pornography. By definition, all advertising art is pornographic art. Or suppose you see a photograph of a dear old lady, and you think, "I'd love to have tea with that dear old soul." That photograph is pornography. Or you go into a ski buff's house, where there's a painting of a mountain slope, and you think, "Oh, to go down that mountain slope..." That painting is pornography: your relationship to it is not purely esthetic: just perceiving the thing. Most of the art that one sees is either didactic or pornographic.
and on page 248:
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The mind [Joyce] writes, "is arrested and raised above desire and loathing" The original, biological function of the eye, to seek out and identify things to eat and to alert the mind to danger, is for a moment, or (in the case of a true artist) for a lifetime suspended, and the world (beheld without judgement of its relevance to the well-being of the observer) is recognized as a revelation sufficient in itself.

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ASparrow

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Reply #59 on: November 01, 2009, 12:22:53 AM
I like reading Mieville just because he does some really nice things with language that I admire, even if I don't like his stories. The worlds he conjures are pretty unique (sometimes disgustingly so!)