China Miéville, blogger

China Miéville was blogging last week over at Omnivoracious, and it’s been a lot of fun to read. Jeff Vandermeer has a wrap post, with links to all the good stuff.

My favorite was this post listing “a few modest proposals for literary/artistic movements to fulfil the moment’s cultural needs”, including Salvagepunk:

As Steampunk wheezes and clanks exhausted into the buffers, dragging an increasingly huge load of books behind it, the hunt for the next great somethingpunk is over. The orgy of para-Victoriana has been impressively tenacious, but it has its limits, and rather than yet another reclamation of an earlier mode of production–steam, dust, stone, diesel–the punk aesthetic of DIY, cobbling-together, contrariness, discordance and disrespect for the past will go meta. It will investigate not imaginary branchline points in a timeline (an understandable if rather plaintive discomfort with the idea that such a line was actually teleological, and ended with this bloody mess) but history itself as always-already a bricolage, and what we do about that. Though this might look like apocalypse fiction, it will in fact be not about any implied catastrophe, but about scobbing together of culture from the refuse (and implying that all culture is and always has been so scobbed). An art of making-do, tool-use and ingenuity. A fiction infused with a militant amnesiac uninterest about cultural memes’ origins and ‘pure’ ‘original’ ‘purposes’ – which chimeras its adherents will derisively and polysemically render ‘pUr(e)poses’ – this will be literature that celebrates reclamation, and/but forgets that prefix ‘re-’: so, clamation fiction, ignoring the fact that ruins are ruined, were ever anything else.

And Noird:

Pronounced Nward: Weird Noir. Candidates for membership are already appearing. Crime novels, particularly of a hard-boiled variety, infused with and riffing off the strange. Detective fiction with a deeply sceptical relationship to the supposedly everyday, whether it eschews morality or not.