*cough*

*cough*

*david mitchell*

*cough*

But yes. McDonald is a rare talent.

It’s hard to neatly cram Mitchell into the hardcore British SF box, but you could say the same of Jim Crace (another limey) or Margaret Atwood (a Canuck, so British by proxy, much like Cory). And I thought Mitchell was ripping from Italo Calvino, but most good writers steal from multiple sources. (taking notes on who to steal from in the future)

More than anything, Mitchell’s narratives borrow heavily from the ‘big sky’ tradition of magic realism, a certain unknown mysticism which in ways is anathema to hard science. Such conceit can be frightening to reading technicians who are engorged by diagrams of nuts and bolts, but Mitchell’s prose itself is brilliant and worth admiring as a work standing alone outside of genre descriptors.

At least we agree on McDonald as common ground.

I love Sci-Fi short stories, it takes me back to the time I read all of those Asimov and Philip Dick shorts, which I love profoundly.

http://www.martiniere.com/

The actual image is here:

http://www.martiniere.com/imagepages/cyberbad.htm

I admit I’m a sucker for great cover art, and recently caught up on the Sun of Suns trio of books primarily because of Martiniere’s cover art. I loved the books, too.

I also wish there was some kind of SF (or every genre) guide that would rate or categorize books by the type and amount of content. Some SF stories are political intrigue, some action thriller, some “big idea” hardcore SF, some existential pondering, etc. It would be nice to have a descriptive rating system to zero in on the ones I’d prefer, sort of like detailed musical descriptions/comparisons help me choose my music.

I am not a ‘hardcore’ sf devotee, and come on, neither McDonald not Ryman are hard sf – they both come out of the literary sf tradition if you have to put them anywhere in particular, and are both basically at base, concered with social and political possibilities rather than technologies themselves. I read anything and everything and in fact would regard the European experimental fiction of the mid-C20th, which links into but is not identical to Latin American magical realism, as my prefered area if I had to chose. Calvino is thus one of my absolute favourite authors of all time and I can see there are some threads linking Calvino and Mitchell – particularly in Cloud Atlas, but it’s not that strong and Calvino was a genius – Mitchell isn’t in that class (yet) IMHO.

I´m constantly surprised that western critics didn’t see the Murakami Haruki connections – they were probably covering up for the fact that they hadn’t really noticed Murakami up until that point – but Ghostwritten and No.9 Dream are total Murakami clones! Most at first didn’t even seem to appreciate that Mitchell lived in Japan for many years…

@3: Well, there’s always the #books category here!

I’m too lazy to type the extra characters and my bookmark file is already nearing critical mass.

Can’t wait to read the Bhagavad Gitmo. Off to the bookstore!

I don’t disagree that Mitchell is borrowing from many sources, with Murakami Haruki likely prominent among them. But that is what good writers do, though few will admit as much. I tend to view literature as an evolving and forking tree rather than random buckshot fired from the shotgun of history. Hell, every writer on the planet is still robbing Shakespeare blind, and his legend only deepens from the indebtedness.

When a writer produces a work inspired by another writer, it is not a disservice. Calvino wouldn’t have been Calvino had it not been for Borges. And Kafka. And others.

Number9Dream was my least favorite of Mitchell’s works to date (the goat story sucked balls) but the final chapter was a masterfully rendered experiment in literary white noise and would not have been possible without the prior, jumbled narrative.