/lit/ - Literature

>>4785650
Windup Girl
House of the Scorpion
Night Circus
everything by Terry Pratchett

>>4785659
House of the Scorpion. Favorite childhood book.

Dune (the first three)
Book of the New Sun
A Deepness in the Sky

>>4785659
Windup Girl felt pretty pulpy to me, though I suppose that doesn't mean it can't have literary worth.

I'm really starting to dislike the terms "genre fiction" or "scifi/fantasy" or whatever. The Iliad, Hamlet, Macbeth, the Bible, all of our mythologies and traditions are "genre fiction.

Someone already did bring up one of his books, but I'll bring him up just to quote. Gene motherfucking Wolfe said: "All novels are fantasies." Ok, some novels are written so long, meaningless and detailed space battles might be written for profit. But this doesn't mean that any novel including ghosts, space ships, time travel, is automatically "genre fiction" and should be disregarded.

>>4785650
Honestly, I felt The Scar was pretty weak.

Not bad.. just painfully ok. I guess I expected more after reading Perdido Street Station.

Then again just adding characters to have someone to kill of wasn't very impressive either.

Really I think he might make the same mistake as I do when trying to write fantasy or sci-fi: One becomes so exited to present all the wonders of one's world that it takes over the story itself.

>>4786283
The story doesn't really matter and the one of the worst aspects genre fiction audience is thinking it does. The writing is what matters.

>>4785650
A Coffin For Dimitrios functions as a handbook of espionage, a meditation on the nature of mystery, and a exegesis of finding one's identity as a writer. Among the lost titles of the 20 C, which /lit/ is too tweaked out over Pynchon to ever have noticed.

>>4785743
Fuck off autist

"genre" is a fallacious distinction that only serves to boost the egos of those who dearly need it

>>4787751
Back when there were music stores, you could browse from amongst the clearly labeled categories: Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country & Western, Classical. Of course, partisans might cast a stink eye from one aisle to another, yet the categorizations themselves were regarded as conveniences for customer location of product.

"We're a power guitar trio."

"I write Regency Romance."

Interesting distinction, there, based entirely on notions of elitism, endemic to academy thinking. The typical race for tenure, from grad. ass. to adjunct, to associate, to full, to tenure, is like that cartoon of the progressively smaller monkeys, the biggest one getting hit by a falling mango, then taking his ignorant frustration out by itting the next smaller monkey on the head, then each hitting the next smaller one on the head until the smallest one punches the mango tree, having no other alternative. Causing a mango to fall......

I was delightfully surprised when I read Miéville.

I've read some of the trash everyone in this thread is mentioning, and I'm laughing pretty hard. "Windup Girl"? Terry Pratchett? Lord alive.

Still, Miéville is very talented and head and shoulders above his genre-writing peers.

>>4787838
>Miéville
>talented

>>4787957
>opinions

>>4788010
>muh opinion

>>4787957
You save and post Dilbert comics. Your opinion is completely and totally invalidated.

I like Mieville. He is a polarizing author here on /lit/, a lot of people love him, a lot hate him.

I'd say Mervyn Peake and Gene Wolfe are two of the best when it comes to speculative fiction. Gormenghast and Book of the New Sun are two series you should definitely check out if you haven't already OP.

>reading genre fiction
>reading fiction of any sort

>>4788043
>posting manga reaction images

>>4786283
I actually like the Scar: I thought the floating city was awesome.
My very, very high hopes for Iron Council were slowly and mercilessly bashed to bits with boredom and TOO MANY FUCKING CLIMAXES at the end.
I didn't even finish it yet... one day. I'm literally about 50 pages from the end...

>>4788037
>Book of the New Sun
so fucking good

>>4785650
I've yet to see anything to suggest that Mieville isn't just writing the same tired genre stories that have been told countless times before--except with flintlock pistols and 'thaumaturgy' instead of swords and sorcery.

He's definitely a talented writer, but ultimately he's writing commercial fiction. I think that speaks to the state of the industry more than it says anything about his personal ambitions. If Mievile actually wrote what he wanted to write, no one would buy it.

>>4788552
Lost my copy of shadow awhile ago. Just got a copy for a buck. Open to random page. Blow away that another human being can write like that!