I enjoy his stuff. (With the exception of Kraken, anyway.)
This comic...if I didn't know anything about Mieville beforehand, I still wouldn't. The newspost isn't much better, but at least it says something besides "this is a person, he writes books, I want to punch him because."
On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea–even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it's a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—leads to considerably more than he'd bargained for. Soon he's hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.
I have to admit that I felt a bit punchy when I realized it had unsubtly redone bits of Moby Dick. The silly names don't help.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
I see where the anger comes from in the comic. Without any explanation to what you're reading, it looks like someone just made up a bunch of words and started churning them at you. I can see how violence would be the immediate response.
Not to say he might be a bad writer, just to say if you handed a Star Wars novel to someone who didn't know what the "force", a "Jedi", or a "Lightsaber" was, they would probably react with rage as well.
"Force" and "lightsaber" aren't so strange. The force is a force and the lightsaber is a laser sword. "Jedi" is weird, but it's only two syllables, and "space samurai" would be awful.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
^ This. Plus the list just goes on and on. We all got to see visual aspects of this, and have some frame of reference.
But if I just handed someone completely foreign to the ways of Star Wars a book from the New Jedi Order ark, I might as well be screaming "WELCOME TO STAR WARS, BITCH!" as they try to make sense of it all.
The other thing is, Mieville tends to use words like that without ever explicitly explaining what they mean. Which, personally, I love--it makes the elements of the setting feel more natural if you don't break for exposition, but let the audience learn them like any other new word--but it can certainly be disorienting.
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" has 4 letter "l"s in a row, but only if you treat it as written in the 26 letter Latin alphabet, rather than the Welsh one (in which "ll" is a digraph included in the alphabet and represents an entirely distinct sound).
The funny thing is, by most definitions of the word (Except for maybe, "Anything that is able to make a big change in a person or thing."), this is wrong
Well it's something that can be observed by a force its presence results in. You could just as well say that plants aren't green because they only reflect green light.
Not really, since "force" in physics context is a technical term with a specific meaning and certainly doesn't denote... whatever it is the Star Wars force is supposed to be. Just because something exerts a force doesn't make it a force.
This is silly though because "the Force" is basically like saying "the Power", it doesn't actually mean anything technical.
Well it's something that can be observed by a force its presence results in. You could just as well say that plants aren't green because they only reflect green light.
The difference is that plants are pigmented so that they reflect light in such a way so that us see them as green.
Not really, since "force" in physics context is a technical term with a specific meaning and certainly doesn't denote... whatever it is the Star Wars force is supposed to be. Just because something exerts a force doesn't make it a force.
This is silly though because "the Force" is basically like saying "the Power", it doesn't actually mean anything technical.
I suppoose, but you could easily argue for "Spiritual energy found in all living things that can be harnessed by living, sentient and sapient things in the form of telekinesis and other super powers"
Welsh is written in a Latin alphabet traditionally consisting of 28 letters, of which eight are digraphs treated as single letters for collation:
a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y
In contrast to English practice, "w" and "y" are considered vowel letters in Welsh along with "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u".
The letter "j" is used in many everyday words borrowed from English, like jam, jôc "joke" and garej "garage". The letters "k", "q", "v", "x", and "z" are used in some technical terms, like kilogram, volt and zero, but in all cases can be, and often are, replaced by Welsh letters: cilogram, foltand sero.[28] The letter "k" was in common use until the sixteenth century, but was dropped at the time of the publication of the New Testament in Welsh, as William Salesbury explained: "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth". This change was not popular at the time.[29]
The most common diacritic is the circumflex, which disambiguates long vowels, most often in the case of homographs, where the vowel is short in one word and long in the other: e.g. man "place" vs mân "fine", "small".
Well it's something that can be observed by a force its presence results in. You could just as well say that plants aren't green because they only reflect green light.
The difference is that plants are pigmented so that they reflect light in such a way so that us see them as green.
Not really, since "force" in physics context is a technical term with a specific meaning and certainly doesn't denote... whatever it is the Star Wars force is supposed to be. Just because something exerts a force doesn't make it a force.
This is silly though because "the Force" is basically like saying "the Power", it doesn't actually mean anything technical.
I suppoose, but you could easily argue for "Spiritual energy found in all living things that can be harnessed by living, sentient and sapient things in the form of telekinesis and other super powers"
or
"Thing that lets you become a wuxia character"
Well, it's certainly that. But I mean, "the Force" is just a name they chose to make it sound mystical and stuff. They could have called it anything, really. >In contrast to English practice, "w" and "y" are considered vowel letters in Welsh along with "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u".
Hence why a lot of people take a look at it and go "Lol, where's the vowels?" and I'm like "Dude, they're right there."
Comments
Seriously, what dude is named China
This comic...if I didn't know anything about Mieville beforehand, I still wouldn't. The newspost isn't much better, but at least it says something besides "this is a person, he writes books, I want to punch him because."
...that's how I feel about him, I guess.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Nice reconstruction of the classic 'Chosen One' story.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
is that
like
a real thing
And yes, they made the name that long on purpose. It was a publicity stunt by the railway station there.
This is silly though because "the Force" is basically like saying "the Power", it doesn't actually mean anything technical.
Yes, Welsh is a real thing.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
Orthography
Welsh is written in a Latin alphabet traditionally consisting of 28 letters, of which eight are digraphs treated as single letters for collation:
In contrast to English practice, "w" and "y" are considered vowel letters in Welsh along with "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u".
The letter "j" is used in many everyday words borrowed from English, like jam, jôc "joke" and garej "garage". The letters "k", "q", "v", "x", and "z" are used in some technical terms, like kilogram, volt and zero, but in all cases can be, and often are, replaced by Welsh letters: cilogram, foltand sero.[28] The letter "k" was in common use until the sixteenth century, but was dropped at the time of the publication of the New Testament in Welsh, as William Salesbury explained: "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth". This change was not popular at the time.[29]
The most common diacritic is the circumflex, which disambiguates long vowels, most often in the case of homographs, where the vowel is short in one word and long in the other: e.g. man "place" vs mân "fine", "small".
>In contrast to English practice, "w" and "y" are considered vowel letters in Welsh along with "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u".
Hence why a lot of people take a look at it and go "Lol, where's the vowels?" and I'm like "Dude, they're right there."