Miévillians discussion
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Perdido Street Station
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SECTION 6 : Chapters 15-17 (End of Part 2)
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DREAMSHIT! Isaac's little trip down the rabbit hole was both terrifying and miraculous at the same time. I've worked with many a scientist who has sampled the drug they are testing .. usually just resulting in some drowsiness or the opposite -- but man, how exciting!
Yes, i thought the particular essence of Isaac's trip was quite inventive of Mr Mieville, but then, China does seem to be like that. (Inventive ;))Nice to see you popping in, Jenn(iffer) !
Mosca wrote: "Traveller, I loved The Difference Engine!But I totally missed the allusion.
Fill me in?
Please?"
Sure, Mosca. :)
In my chapter fifteen (Close to the start of Ch 15), on my book's p 213, we have the following:
Eventually, Isaac closed the door. He returned to his ledge and watched lights slide along the Canker. He rested his head on his fists and listened to the tick of his clock. The feral sounds of New Crobuzon at night inveigled their way through his walls. He heard the melancholy lowing of machines and ships and factories.
In the room below him, David and Lublamai’s construct seemed to cluck gently in time to the clock.
Isaac collected his drawings from the walls. Some that he thought were good he stuffed into an obese portfolio. Many he squinted at critically and threw away. He got onto his big belly and rooted under the bed, bringing out a dusty abacus and a slide-rule.
What I need, he thought, is to get to the university and liberate one of their difference engines. It would not be easy. The security for such items was neurotic. Isaac realized suddenly that he would have the chance to scope out the guard systems for himself: he was going to the university the next day, to talk to his much-loathed employer, Vermishank.
In addition, Mieville's name for computers is "Analytical Engine" .We can discuss those in more detail later when they pop in the book. I think they're an enormously fun part of PSS.
Thank you, Traveler. Always more to be discovered.This whole wonderful pseudo science part of the book reminded me of the old 1930's movie serials with their bogus "science" fiction.
One of my favorite parts of the book.
Mieville's world is wonderfully allusive, as is that of Jeff Vandermeer's, whom i mentioned in another thread.I bet you could find at least one allusion on every page of Mieville. ..and yet he manages to make his own, separate world that is unlike anything he alludes to.
I liked how the dreamshit matched its name in side effects as well as form. Very refreshing from the floaty aloofness you usually get when books describe dream sequences, although it's only to be expected from Miéville, a master when it comes to psychedelic perversity.
Aubrey wrote: "master when it comes to psychedelic perversity."wonderfully said. Great description of the drug trip.
Reading about Isaac's experience with dreamshit (yes, lovely name!) reminded me of reading Huxley's The Doors of Perception quite a bit.
I've long been fascinated by Babbage's difference engine and analytical engine. It's amazing that a man could imagine a mechanical general-purpose computer, not altogether unlike the electronic ones we use today, nearly two centuries ago. Being typical of the Indutrial Age and perfect fodder for retrospective futurism, it's no surprise that Miéville makes reference to them, and they bring to mind great achievement in mechanical engineering and, for me, a healthy sense of effort being exerted.Our own computers are far more powerful than anything which would have been expected a generation age (Moore's law notwithstanding: even if you can conceive of logarithmic growth over the course of decades, coming to grips with it is something else), but they increasingly have passing outward appearances: they don't seem like they're doing anything most of the time, even though they are continuously computing something.
When you compare this to Bas-Lag's difference and analytical engines, with their steam-belching power plants, clicking and clanking gears and all that other paraphernalia, I find it almost comforting to see these machines work so hard to achieve what we would consider a trivial result. When I think back to earlier computers with crunchy hard disks, lengthy processing and I/O times, small memories (copying diskettes requiring more than one pass!) and blinkenlights, it seems as if the feedback we get is so artificial and inadequate now.
Who knew I'd get nostaligic for a crappy computer, eh?
J. wrote: "I've long been fascinated by Babbage's difference engine and analytical engine. It's amazing that a man could imagine a mechanical general-purpose computer, not altogether unlike the electronic on..."J, get outta here! You're just being a silly-billy now about wanting things to slow down and get more laborious again. ..but you have partly been granted your wish by MS with their wonderful gift of slow, laborious, obese 7.
Oh lordy, to think PC's used to be even slower and laborious (before XP) than this horrible 7 that we have to deal with these days..;)
Oh for the days of simple, streamlined XP, sigh.
Even the internet is faster now (in spite of 7 and it's hamstringing of modern browsers)-- I still have some cartoon jokes somewhere of people getting up to go and make a cup of tea and mow the lawn while a web page is refreshing... :D
But yeah, i know what you mean by the fun and romance of Steampunk. Everything seemed so adventurous in those days, and it is obvious that people like Verne believed anything would be possible.
Ah, for the days where everything was merrily steaming away, clattering and clunking with gears and wheels rolling and shifting--and nobody even knew about carbon prints and global warming and that the ozone layer could get holes in it.
No wonder that writers of the past generation or two have been writing so nostalgically for this period, just as people like Tolkien and Dunsany waxed nostalgic for the rural idyll a few generations before the advent of modern Steampunk.
@J: Listen, J, have you read The Difference Engine yet? I seem to remember you dislike Gibson, but, might you overcome your dislike, because i think he only co-authored that one. (With Bruce Stirling)
I completely abhor Gibson. Still, I suppose I can look into it...
I've never been on a drug trip (other than twice, prescribed, in hospital), but I love the name Dreamshit, and especially the way the empathetic synaesthetic experience is described. I'm now wondering (don't tell me) whether Isaac deliberately repeats the experience. I assume that at some stage he'll mention it to Lin, where she might relate it to Medley's advocation of using drugs to release creativity.Mieville's take on academia has aspects of the Cambridge colleges he knows (Traveller, comment 1), but also of the scholarly city of Sanctaphrax in Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's wonderful Edge Chronicles (for ~ ages 7-11), and indeed Gormenghast, though that is more obvious as Peake is one of only two authors named in the acknowledgements at the start.
One of Yag's first-person descriptive passages almost has Grimm fairy-tale elements: "I fought the barbarian prince who wanted to make a helmet out of my garuda skull and I won... Holding my intestines with one hand, I clawed his throat out with the other. I won his gold and his followers, whom I freed. I paid myself to health, bought passage on a merchant ship."
Miévillians
Books mentioned in this topic
The Difference Engine (other topics)The Doors of Perception (other topics)
The Difference Engine (other topics)
We also discover, erm... err.. dreamshit.
Trust China to think up a name like that. :P
Isaac has a very interesting drug experience. Any thoughts on this?
Isaac visits some of his old haunts, and we are introduced to Mieville's take on academia. I couldn't help wondering if in this instance, he was projecting some of his own experiences in the halls of learnedness onto Isaac.
I love the allusion to the Difference Engine, btw.
We make a more intimate acquaintance with Yagharek's past experiences.