China Miéville, Embassytown

Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel.  Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening.  A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself reached for that word, can be seen.  "If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said.  "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives.  It needs a mind behind it."

Hosts' minds were inextricable from their doubled tongue.  They couldn't learn other languages, couldn't conceive of their existence, or that the noises we made to each other were words at all.  A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words.  That was why those early ACL pioneers were confused.  When their machines spoke, the Hosts heard only empty barks. (p. 55)

Language is the cornerstone and stumbling block to all social structures.  Without it, whether it be in verbal or non-verbal form, all communication would collapse. Yet the structure of language is confusing and fraught with potential tripwires for the unwary wielders of it.  Meaning, which in Lacanian terms is the relationship between the signifier (the sound or image produced) and the signified (the concept), depends upon a complex relationship in which substitution (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy) in which the unconscious desires and the conscious thought ebb and flow.  Lacan formulated this as Signifier (Sr) over Signified (Sd), Sr/Sd.  The two are never melded into one in human thought.



In reading China Miéville's recently-released novel, Embassytown, I was struck by how he intended to make the Language of the Host Ariekei utterly alien by having their thoughts be indivisible between Signifier and Signified.  This, to my relatively meager knowledge of SF, had never been treated in quite the fashion that Miéville proposed to do.  I was curious to see how Miéville would approach creating such an alien mindset and how deep he would explore the possibilities inherent in having such a radically different approach toward language and its scions (communication, structure, power).  Unfortunately, what I read and considered in Embassytown was a frustrating, disappointing read.


Embassytown is the name of a colonial outpost created humans from the diaspora power of Bremen.  Intergalactic travel is possible through the transverse of a superstructure-like entity known as the immer, through which the spaces and gaps of the manchmal are reduced.  This utilization of the German words for "always" and "sometimes" is intriguing (although, like several ideas introduced in the novel, it is barely developed beyond occasional mentions), considering that there are hints that this is not a Star Wars-esque hyperspace, but rather an apparent other dimension in which are embedded alien realities that most humans find it difficult to fathom.  Yet some people are born with a talent to "immerse" themselves and their starships into this immer.  Avice Benner Cho is one of these adepts and after a long time away she is returning to her native Embassytown, bringing with her a linguist husband who is fascinated by the unique case of the Ariekei.


Avice also returns to a place where she herself has become part of the Language of the Ariekei; she is the simile "the girl who ate what was given her."  Surrounded by the Ariekei, the human port of Embassytown is under de facto control of the Ambassadors, vat-grown human pairs who are enhanced in order to provide the dual "cut and turn" phrasing of Ariekei Language that the Ariekei can understand.  It is, on the surface, an intriguing development of a functional oligarchy, yet the rationale behind this structure comes crashing down further into the novel.


Avice narrates the action which unfolds over several kilohours (roughly equivalent to several months, if not a year).  She witnesses the efforts of the Ambassador duos, including a surprising, foreign duo, EzRa, to communicate with the Ariekei.  Despite the relative lack of external action, the slow revelation of human/Ariekei past and present interactions proves to be fascinating.  Of particular interest is the Ariekei effort to speak lies, which in their Sr/Sd-unified Language, they prove to be incapable of doing without the most strenuous of efforts to divide their thoughts between their two mouths.  At first, this scene made some sense, until I began to consider further the rationale behind this; I found it to be half-formed.


If concepts and the sounds and images bound to them are indivisible, with a resultant language that is devoid of symbolic speech (thus the need to employ actual persons and things to represent ideas), then it makes little sense for there to be lies birthed out; such things literally should be inconceivable in minds organized in such a fashion.  Yet Miéville seeks to explore this despite failing to make a strong case for why this should be possible, much less desirable, in the first place.  This is later compounded by the acute "addiction" that the Ariekei experience when they hear the différance in an Ambassador duo's speech and they crave for that truth/untruth in sound/conceptual meaning that they experience as they hear that dual voice.


The part of the novel in which this occurs, roughly from the halfway point to around fifty pages to the end, I found to be ridiculous.  Not just for the ill-explained reasoning for this "addiction" (which, one might think, would result in disorientation rather than dependent desire for an experience recreation), but also for the outbreak of violence that shatters the power status quo.  From the deaths of an Arieka and an Ambassador duo (whose roles are replaced in a thematically and plot-wise weaker fashion by less interesting substitutes whose late entrances serve to dampen plot movement and development) to the de-centering of Avice's role from an active participant to the more passive communicator of more distant events, Embassytown became less coherent of a novel.  Its central theme, that of the changes in Ariekei society due to the radical shifts in their Language under the influence of the humans, devolves into a haphazard exploration of semantic issues that never really seemed to be cogently argued or developed beyond the immediate plot needs.

As a result, the action surrounding this core felt herky-jerky, as conflict after conflict dissolved into chaos without a clear purpose behind these events.  The characters felt less "real" and more akin to pawns who were moved willy-nilly into place without much depth to their thoughts or to their actions.  Each of these unravelings stems from the failure of the Language theme to make a convincing case for such changes to occur; everything felt providential and not falling into a discernible pattern.

This is not to say that Embassytown is a total failure.  It did engage my attention, even if it was to spark declamations against the unconvincing developments.  Certainly the notion of Language is an intriguing one and hopefully other writers will explore the possibilities that Miéville fails to do here.  Embassytown fails at its apparent goals, but in that failure, it manages to fail better than several "safe," successful novels. 

Interesting poll results, viewership patterns

The results of the China Miéville/PSS poll question asked both here and at wotmania were quite illuminating. First the results of the poll here, with 95 people voting over the past week:

What is your opinion of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station?

Loved it - seminal work of the New Weird	46 (48%)
Liked it - good book	16 (16%)
OK - decent, but could have been better	4 (4%)
Meh - not the worst, but far from great	10 (10%)
Blech - I'd rather read you-know-who	1 (1%)
Haven't read it yet, but might	12 (12%)
Absolutely refuse to read it	1 (1%)
Hadn't heard of it before now	5 (5%)

Of the people who had read it (83% of those responding), those who loved PSS were a distinct majority (46 out of 77), with few who haven't read it yet and (thankfully) very few who have been living under a rock the past 8 years. Now for the results from wotmania's poll asking the same question, with a sample size of 185 votes:

Loved it - seminal work of the New Weird (20.00%)
Liked it - good book (11.89%)
OK - decent, but could have been better (2.70%)
Meh - not the worst, but far from great (2.16%)
Blech - I'd rather read you-know-who (1.62%)
Haven't read it yet, but might (23.78%)
Absolutely refuse to read it (3.78%)
Hadn't heard of it before now (34.05%)

We see at this site created originally as a fansite for a bestselling epic fantasy author, Robert Jordan, that the readership is nowhere near as aware of Miéville's first Bas-Lag novel. While there is still a majority of those who've read the work who loved the book, the number of those who haven't even heard of the book before the poll question is disconcerting. But even more interesting was the realization (again, this is from another wotmania Quickpoll question for its Other Fantasy section) that even though I and Jake are the two main mods there and are the two main posters here at the OF Blog, the readership there overlaps very little with the readership here:

How often do you check the OF Blog (http://ofblog.blogspot.com)? (184 Votes)
Asked from 2/4/2008 to 2/16/2008

Almost daily (4.35%)
A couple of times a week (5.43%)
A few times a month (8.70%)
Maybe once in a blue moon (21.20%)
I just read it for the first time now (3.80%)
Never/haven't heard of it (29.35%)
You're such a shameless pimp (27.17%)

So it shall be quite interesting to see what differences, if any, shall arise from the question I'll now pose in the Blog Poll. Another mod (who incidentally has his own blog here) wrote this excellent question based on a discussion elsewhere and I'm curious to see what the answers will be:

What do you think of maps included in epic fantasy books?

I'll post the comparisons next week sometime.

China Miéville: A Few Thoughts for Those New to Him

This past weekend over at wotmania, I wrote an online poll about China Miéville (I copied that question and its choices and posted a poll here for you to take) and his most famous book, Perdido Street Station (2000 UK; 2001 US). The results were rather dismaying, with over a quarter at the time of this writing (if you click on the link and see a different Quickpoll, just follow the link at the bottom to the archives and search for one posted around Valentine's Day) voting "Hadn't heard of it before now." While much of that can be chalked up to wotmania's core demographic group (those under the age of 25 who mostly read epic/secondary-world fantasies if anything besides the Wheel of Time), the high number of those who hadn't ever heard of Miéville bothered me just enough that I decided to write a short little summation of his writing. While this will not go in-depth into the reasons why I myself like (and sometimes am frustrated by) Miéville's writing, hopefully the short little snippets I write will be of interest to others. With one exception, the cover art here is for the American editions.

Miéville's first published novel, King Rat (1998) is set in a dark, drum and bass-influenced London underworld. It is a twisted retelling of the story of the Pied Piper and of the influence that music can have on people. The main character, Saul, discovers that his father has been murdered and later that his departed mother was actually a rat (of a magical, shapeshifting form). It is in this exploration of the mysteries surrounding his father's death and his own origins, when set to evocative descriptive prose such as the following, that makes for a compelling read:

The trains that enter London arrive like ships sailing across the roofs. They pass between towers jutting into the sky like long-necked sea beasts and the great gas-cylinders wallowing in dirty scrub like whales. In the depths below are lines of small shops and obscure franchises, cafés with peeling paint and businesses tucked into the arches over which the trains pass. The colors and curves of graffiti mark every wall. Top-floor windows pass by so close that passengers can peer inside, into small bare offices and store cupboards. They can make out the contours of trade calendars and pin-ups on the walls.

The rhythms of London are played out here, in the sprawling flat zone between suburbs and center. (p. 15)

In this, his first novel, we begin to see what later became hallmarks of Miéville's writing: dirty, dank, perhaps occasionally disgusting visual images superimposed upon an urban setting that is run-down, decrepit, decaying, but yet with signs of life (albeit of the more "humble" classes) peeking through. While the ending of King Rat is weak, the novel on its own is a good, darker counterpart to other "underground city" novels.

While King Rat might have served as a testing ground, it is in the Bas-Lag fantasy universe (to date, consisting of three vaguely-connected books that have no protagonists in commons) where Miéville earned his reputation for writing striking prose that on occasion could frustrate the reader as well as enchant said reader. The first Bas-Lag novel, Perdido Street Station, is in my opinion a glorious mess. The story itself takes close to 100 pages to get going, because Miéville is so concerned with showing just how decrepit and oppressive the city of New Crobuzon is for its myriad races and social groups. But yet it is this focus on the shit-splattered streets and on the wretched Remade (men and women altered by magical means to have extraneous body parts or mechanical torsos or anything that suited the thaumaturge's fantasy, usually as punishment for some crime, often as petty as stealing to feed one's self) that makes this story so compelling. Instead of a tale of heroics and of rising from the "humble" to the privileged classes (as so many stereotypical heroic/epic fantasies go), Miéville removes the reader from that comfort zone and shows us a fantasy world whose equivalent can be found in E.P. Thompson's seminal 1962 work, The Making of the English Working Class. Instead of cheery rustics, we get the sordid side of New Crobuzon, as this passage shows in horrific detail:

He hated this floor. He hated the slightly blistering wallpaper, the peculiar smells that emanated from the rooms, the unsettling sounds that floated through the walls. Most of the doors on the corridor were open, by convention. Those that were closed were occupied by punters.

The door to room seventeen was kept shut, of course. It was an exception to the house rule.

David walked slowly along the foul carpet, approaching the first door. Mercifully, it was closed, but the wooden door could not contain the noises; peculiar, muffled, desultory cries; a creak of tightening leather; a hissing, hate-filled voice. David turned his head away and found himself gazing directly into the opposite room. He caught a glimpse of the nude figure on the bed. She stared up at him, a girl of no more than fifteen. She crouched on all fours...her arms and legs were hairy and pawed...dog's legs.

His eyes lingered on her in hypnotic, prurient horror as he walked past, and she leapt to the floor in clumsy canine motion, turned awkwardly, and unpracticed quadruped, looking over her shoulder at him hopefully as she pushed out her arse and pudenda.

David's mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were glazed.

This was where he shamed himself, in this brothel of Remade whores.

The city crawled with Remade prostitutes, of course. It was often the only strategy available to Remade women and men to keep themselves from starving. But here in the red-light district, peccadilloes were indulged in the most sophisticated manner.

Most Remade tarts had been punished for unrelated crimes: their Remaking was usually little more than a bizarre hindrance for their sex-work, pushing their prices way down. This district, on the other hand, was for the specialist, the discerning consumer. Here, the whores were Remade specifically for the profession. Here were expensive bodies Remade into shapes to indulge dedicated gourmets of perverted flesh. There were children sold by their parents and women and men forced by debt to sell themselves to the flesh-sculptors, the illicit Remakers. There were rumours that many had been sentenced to some other Remaking, only to find themselves Remade by the punishment factories according to strange carnal designs and sold to the pimps and madams. It was a profitable sideline run by the bio-thaumaturges of the state.

Time was stretched out and sickly in this endless corridor, like rancid treacle. At every door, every station along the way, David could not help but glance inside. He willed himself to look away but his eyes would not obey.

It was like a nightmare garden. Each room contained some unique flesh-flower, blossom of torture.

David paced past naked bodies covered in breasts like plump scales; monstrous crablike torsos with nubile girlish legs at both ends; a woman who gazed at him with intelligent eyes above a second vulva, her mouth a vertical slit with moist labia, a meat-echo of the other vagina between her splayed legs. Two little boys gazing bewildered at the massive phalluses they sprouted. A hermaphrodite with many hands.

There was a thump inside David's head. He felt groggy with exhausted horror.

Room seventeen was before him. David did not turn back. He imagined the eyes of the Remade behind him, on him, staring from their prisons of blood and bone and sex.

He knocked on the door. After a moment, he heard the chain being lifted from within and the door opened a little. David entered, his gorge rising, leaving that shameful corridor into his own private corruption. The door was closed. (pp. 341-343)

Although this scene is relatively minor for what follows after, I would argue that this and a couple of others serve as the soul of this novel (and series), imbuing it with a sense of moral outrage over the degradations that people force upon others (and themselves, on occasion) that rarely is touched upon in modern literature. It took an imagined city, full of its weird creatures and monsters, to allow people to see what most "polite" literature dares not show us these days.

While the ending of Perdido Street Station was a bit disjointed (although keeping in line with the notion that there can be no heroes in such a degraded society), Miéville's second novel, The Scar (2002) opens up the Bas-Lag universe and showcases the polity of a massive pirate fleet, Armada, which consists of thousands of lashed-together ships collected over the centuries. In this novel, Miéville has begun to distill his creative thoughts; his monsters (like the anophelii women) are more vicious and unsettling, with scenes of horror that can make some sick to read. But while I believe PSS couldn't decide if its main focus was to be that of the degradations of New Crobuzon or on the non-heroic qualities of its protagonists, here in The Scar Miéville has dispensed with most of the social history-disguised-as-fantasy-setting references. We do see glimpses of collectives and of the insidiousness of greed and how the "working (fReemade) man" struggles against that, but for me, the most powerful part was the Quixotic quest for The Scar itself and of what power potentially lay there. While the ending was rather predictable considering the thematic elements at play, I found this to be a very powerful novel.

The third Bas-Lag novel, Iron Council (2004) has divided many readers. I myself found the story and its structure to be very disappointing when I first read it in 2004, in large part due to the middle half of the novel. But yet in many ways (as a recent re-read and a discussion with a few others in the interim has revealed), Iron Council might be the best-written of Miéville's novels. Smaller (at 564 pages compared to PSS's 710 and The Scar's 638 pages) than the other two, the story contained within is much more personal. On my first read, I thought Judah Law's flashback story, which consumes over 100 pages in the middle of the novel, weakened the flow of the novel. However, on a re-read recently, I began to realize that his story, which showcased all of the changes that had transpired in the New Crobuzon-controlled territory since the events of PSS 20 years before, served to highlight quite a few of the themes of the two earlier novels as well as bringing the story forward into the "present." While I still believe that the ending is rather abrupt and could have been clarified a bit more, my recent re-read did open up some interpretative possibilities as to what that ending signified. So while I still believe The Scar was the best of the trio, Iron Council rates a strong second in my opinion for its structure and thematic elements.


Besides the Bas-Lag novels, Miéville has written a novella,The Tain (originally published in the UK by PS Publishing in 2003 as a signed, limited-edition work; later part of the anthology Cities (2004) and the collection I'm about to mention), Looking for Jake (2005), and the YA standalone novel, Un Lun Dun (2007).

The Tain can be read as a fable of sorts, a take on the hatreds engendered by the 19th and early 20th century Imperialist states. One day in London, the mirror people (Imagos), long forced to be mimicries of the people whom they hated for imprisoning them in such a stifling state (the story behind is this based on a Jorge Luis Borges writing that is excerpted at the end of the novella). So what happens when the repressed break forth and unleash all sorts of mayhem on the populace? It is that question which serves as the impetus for this tale.

Looking for Jake collects all sorts of shorter fiction that Miéville has written from the late 1990s to 2004. Most of them are set in a modern setting, but with elements of horror that leads to heart-racing, apprehensive reads on the part of readers who aren't for sure how (or rather, if) the characters will survive to another day.

Finally, Miéville's foray into Young Adult fiction, Un Lun Dun, is a rather uneven affair. Although the writing, while toned down a bit, is superb and the plot developments occur at a reasonably fast pace, there were times that I felt as though the writing, good as it would have been in most cases, failed to keep up with Miéville's imagination. The story of a prophesied savior who failed to save anything (leaving the heroism to the overlooked sidekick) was intriguing, but it just lacked the layers of depth that I have come to expect from Miéville. While as a YA novel it achieves most of its purposes, I cannot help but be reminded of the richness of Miéville's prose in other stories that has been stripped away here. However, it still is a worthwhile read, but I would recommend for adult readers to try Miéville's other works before reading this one.

Hopefully after reading this long bit, some of those quarter over at wotmania (and others here and there on the web) who haven't heard of Miéville will be willing to give one of these books a try in the very near future.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, The New Weird

weird (wîrd)

adj. weird·er, weird·est

1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of the preternatural or supernatural.

2. Of a strikingly odd or unusual character; strange.

3. Archaic Of or relating to fate or the Fates.

n.

1.

a. Fate; destiny.

b. One's assigned lot or fortune, especially when evil.

2. often Weird Greek & Roman Mythology One of the Fates.

tr. & intr.v. weird·ed, weird·ing, weirds

Slang To experience or cause to experience an odd, unusual, and sometimes uneasy sensation. Often used with out.

---

[Middle English werde, fate, having power to control fate, from Old English wyrd, fate; see wer-² in Indo-European roots.]

Despite the seemingly precise definition cited above, "weird" is something that resists pat explanations or cute labels; it is just there, lurking at the peripheries, making the observers of it quite uncomfortable. In fiction, there have been hints of "weirdness" in the writing, places where it feels almost like a transgression to cross, because of its often alien and grotesque nature. From the beloved ruins of the Romanticists to the dank, dark corridors of an Ann Radcliffe, full of mysterious, odd, and quite possibly malevolent creations, to the rather unsettled end to the rather frightful 20th century, many writers have come to explore those boundaries that contain elements that both fascinate and repel humans. When I heard about Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's latest anthology project, The New Weird, I was reminded of a comment by M. John Harrison in his introduction to the PS Publishing edition of China Miéville's The Tain, "China Miéville & the New Weird" written in October 2002:

Good fiction should make us question our experience of the world; not to say the means by which we scaffold that experience. But it should never do this obviously. The most painfully defamiliarising gesture is the most subtle. Good fiction has an uncanny quality: and that's enough to make it "fantasy" and "mainstream" at the same time. Let's go out there, we might say, meaning, into this mainstream arena, and make readers uncomfortable. Instead of splitting hairs let's do some acts of the countermundane.

In his introduction to The New Weird anthology, Jeff VanderMeer addresses not just the history of this "movement," stretching back to and referencing the near-iconic old pulp magazine Weird Tales, but also the problems inherent in such a purposely vague and yet fitting term. Back then, there were no rigidly-defined terms such as "epic fantasy," "urban fantasy," "horror," or "hard SF." Instead, in pulps such as Weird Tales, writers might mix elements of all of the above into an alchemical brew that would leave their readers feeling in turns fascinated and uncomfortable.
All well and good, one might argue. But what makes this "weird" the New Weird? VanderMeer continues, noting that the often-political, almost-always experimental approach of the New Wave writers of the 1960s and 1970s(M. John Harrison and Michael Moorcock being two prominent writers of this time period), with their appropriations of whatever "mainstream" tropes and concerns that they saw fit to use, made it okay again, after the rather rigid divisions between SF and Fantasy that occurred during the post-World War II Golden Age of SF era, to blend and blur the boundaries. In addition, during the 1980s, some horror writers (Clive Barker being cited as a major influence) began to take a more visceral, unsettling approach to Lovecraftian themes, daring to reveal much more of the hideousness of the imagined and "real" monsters than had been done before.

But experimenters rarely are accepted into the fold and by the 1990s, during a time in which the older political models seemed to be dissolving into a toxic mixture of ethnocentrism, religious fundamentalism, and rising xenophobism in the so-called "First World" nations, some writers influenced by the predecessors mentioned above began to write their own takes on the older fantasy, SF, horror, and "mainstream" tropes. This, VanderMeer postulates, is the beginning point for what later became known as the New Weird.

The term itself, he notes, is quite controversial, as even those associated with its coining, China Miéville, Steph Swainston, and M. John Harrison, later came to distance themselves from the term. Labels, after all, are tricky and confining entities that seek to bind and to standardize. But if "weirdness," this "uncanniness" that unsettles people, is such a slippery, vague word in the first place, how can labels apply? It is around this question that much of the VanderMeers' anthology revolves.

Many anthologies give little more than a brief introduction by the editor(s) of whatever theme(s) that the anthology seeks to explore. Here in The New Weird, the questions raised in the introduction are underscored by how the VanderMeers have divided their book. In the first section, "Stimuli," the reader is introduced to seminal stories such as M. John Harrison's "The Luck in the Head" (originally published in 1984 as part of Viriconium Nights), Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities" (published first in 1984 in the collection Books of Blood, Volume I), and Thomas Ligotti's "A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing" (1997 publication, In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land). In each of these stories (and others that I neglect to mention above), there are a few common elements. The settings are very vivid, sometimes set in another "world," sometimes in a very recognizable contemporary Earth. The language of the stories focuses heavily on how the narrator/characters interact with their environs, which often differ from the characters' "norms." It is a classic "Man versus the Environment" clash in part, but there is much more to it than just that. In these stories, the reader can expect to find all sorts of unsettling situations or implications based on plot events, all designed to heighten any unease that the reader might hold. As an introduction to the influences on the latter styles, these stories work very well together.

In the second part, "Evidence," there are reprinted stories by Miéville, Jay Lake, Jeffrey Thomas, Steph Swainston, and Jeffrey Ford, among others. In these tales, the earlier tales' atmospheric settings and unsettled narrative reactions is married to an even closer attention to language and "real-world" concerns. Miéville's "Jack," set in his New Crobuzon universe, explores the machinations of a totalitarian state and the usefulness for that regime of having mythical hero-opponents such as Jack Half-a-Prayer oppose it. Miéville's descriptions of the Remaking process, of how Jack is eventually caught, and what happens to his snitch all serve to focus our attention not just on the wonderfully described situation, but also on how our own political systems are fraught with corruption and how complacent many citizens can be in light of such potential governmental abuses. Although the other stories in this section are not quite overtly political (or Marxist) as is Miéville's, they too have their moments in which the "weirdness" presented often hits a bit too close to home for our comfort.

But as well-written and presented as these stories were, one of the key selling points for this anthology in my mind was the third section, "Symposium." Here the VanderMeers have reproduced the opening salvos of a landmark 2003 discussion that originally appeared on The Third Alternative forums (now archived here) as well as publishing reprinted and original essays on the New Weird theme by Michael Cisco, K.J. Bishop, and a series of non-English language editors from Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe on the impact that such a movement as the New Weird has had in their countries, both in the selling of translated fiction as well as on native writers. It is in this section that the questions presented in the introduction reemerge and take center stage. The reader witnesses the debates over the terminologies employed, the questions over the efficacies of even having such a label, and so forth. For me, it was this section that made this anthology much more than the sum of its parts.

In the final section, "Laboratory," there is a writing project in which authors not often associated with the original New Weird movement, are presented with a story beginning written by Paul Di Filippo and are asked to riff off of that intro, using their own understandings of what "New Weird" might mean. This collaborative exercise on the parts of Di Filippo, Cat Rambo, Sarah Monette, Daniel Abraham, Felix Gilman, Hal Duncan, and Conrad Williams is a very striking look at how the techniques employed by the New Weird writers have influenced those whose stories at first glance might not be associated with such a movement. It was an interesting way to end the anthology and one that will take me multiple reads before I will feel comfortable presenting a cogent discussion of its themes and elements.

Perhaps that was one of the points of that exercise - to shake readers such as myself from our comfort zones and make us contemplate things that are often baffling, sometimes repulsive, but almost always imaginative and vivid. In this, the final section fits in well with the previous three and hints at what may lay ahead in the field. Defined precisely or not, the New Weird certainly has had a major impact on writing both inside and outside the narrowly-defined genre limns. This eponymous anthology does an outstanding job in presenting the New Weird in all its unsettling, vague, weird glory. Highly Recommended.

Publication Date: February 1, 2008 (US), Tradeback.

Publisher: Tachyon Publications

Best of 2007: YA Titles

I managed to read a few more Young Adult titles this year than in years past, enough for me to have four decent selections out of the ones I've read to date (there are a few unread ones, unfortunately, that I hope to have read by the end of the first quarter of 2008). Here they are, listed below:

Rafael Ábalos, Grimpow: The Invisible Road

China Miéville, Un Lun Dun

Jeffrey Overstreet, Auralia's Colors

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows