I read Perdido Street Station recently. When you say it borrows from Lovecraft (as it borrows from a lot -- the Dungeons and Dragons parody was pretty funny), are you refering to the sanity-destroying Slake-Moths?
That is definitely the best of the Bas-Lag books. Iron Council spent too much time hitting you over the head with Mieville's politics ("This book is about the Russian Revolution, get it?" THWACK!). Well he's a Trot, maybe he can't help it. ;)
--- wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> I also really like Lovecraft, but I am not sure
> how much his racism
> subsided so much shrank back from its pathological
> levels that
> occurred while living in the integrated slums of New
> York. The
> letters are particularly damning. There are a
> number of letters that
> express admiration for Hitler in the '30's. Also,
> his socialism
> tended to be a conservative paternalistic version of
> it. Joshi's
> biography is particularly good on this. Also, I
> would recommend
> Mieville's Perdido Street Station, which borrows
> from Lovecraft, but
> really flips it on its head for an anti-racist,
> post-colonial
> politic. (He also has a really nice analysis of
> Mountains of Madness
> in the Penguin edition.)
>
> Robert Wood
>
>
> > Chris Doss wrote:
> >> Man do I love Lovecraft.
> >>
> >> The racism really is jarring to the modern ear,
> >> however, perhaps even by the standards of the
> time.
> >>
> >
> > I like him, too (as you already know), loved him
> as a
> > teen, only sort of struck me how racist a lot of
> his
> > stuff could be (especially his personal
> > correspondence) when I got older and looked at it
> all
> > anew, through more politicized eyes. According to
> L.
> > Sprague de Camp's biography -- of which I have a
> > signed copy! -- Lovecraft went sort of the
> opposite
> > trajectory most folks go as they age.
> >
> > That is, instead of getting more racist and
> > conservative, he became less so as he grew older.
> > Folks often point out he married an openly,
> proudly
> > Jewish woman, despite personal anti-Semitic
> > correspondence earlier on. And though when younger
> he
> > had eccentric ideas that the US should have never
> > revolted against England, that there should be a
> > monarchy in power with aristocrats like himself in
> > attendance (as he lived in poverty on cans of
> beans
> > per day), etc., by the time of his death he was a
> > devout supporter of FDR's New Deal, the National
> > Recovery Act, the Works Project Administration,
> and,
> > de Camp predicts, was gravitating more & more
> towards
> > socialism.
> >
> > Although his fairly early-ish death (at the age of
> 44
> > or so, right?) cut it all off.
> >
> > About the fear of all of the stuff in his works
> (fish,
> > architecture, etc.) -- well, horror writers make
> the
> > ordinary into fearful, terrible things, right?
> It's
> > horror, after all.
> >
> > -B.
>
>
>
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