Kraken: An Anatomy - Softcover

China Miéville

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330492322 ISBN 13: 9780330492324

Publisher: Pan Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

From 3 time Arthur Clarke Award Winner comes China Mieville's Kraken.

About this title

Review:

"The Soft Intelligence": 5 Underrated Literary Cephalopods by China Miéville

It was Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diolé who named cephalopods 'the soft intelligence', in the subtitle to their 1973 book Octopus and Squid. At first, the adjective seems vaguely simpering, as if these ambassadors of alterity are in fact safe, unthreatening, cuddly. But immediately comes a strangeness. If they are a, no, the soft intelligence, what are we? Hard intelligence? Soft unintelligence? Why are they soft intelligence singular? Is each but an iteration of some tentacular totality? What strange sentience. An opaque collective.

There are rules to this exercise. No invented species nor chimerical monsters--though this doesn't preclude gigantism nor a little taxonomic vagueness. Thus the 'huge, brown, glistening bulk' of William Hope Hodgson's 'mighty devil-fish' in The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' would be permissible: haploteuthis ferox, that hitherto unknown squid that assailed the English coast in H.G. Wells's The Sea Raiders is not: still less would be Cthulhu, despite his admirably tentacular visage. And as the effort here is to overturn a few rocks less jostled to see what coils beneath, much celebrated ceph-lit has been left alone. Captain Nemo's nemesis is not here. Benchley's Beast is absent, as is Lautréamont's octopus spirit from Maldoror. The astounding ruminations on the octopus-as-bad-ontology in Victor Hugo's otherwise 'prodigiously boring book' (Sebald) Toilers of the Sea, remain indispensable--but elsewhere.

See China Miéville's full list of underrated literary cephalopods at Omnivoracious, Amazon.com's books blog

From the Inside Flap:

In such novels as Perdido Street Station and the groundbreaking SF thriller The City & The City, China Mieville has astonished and delighted an ever-growing body of readers. In Kraken, he gives us his most absorbing creation to date, an eschatological epic that reaffirms his position as the foremost urban fantasist of the modern era.The story begins with the impossible disappearance of Architeuthis Dux— a gigantic squid – from London’s Natural History Museum. To some, that squid is simply a bizarre natural phenomenon. To others, it is an enigmatic divinity and a harbinger of the End of Days. The drama that arises from its disappearance illuminates the varied array of magical forces that live—have always lived—beneath the quotidian surface of London. The result is a visionary narrative of men and their gods, of magic, murder, and apocalypse. Densely imagined, enormously funny, and filled with unforgettable images, Kraken is a work of baroque grandeur and great originality that only China Mieville could have written.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0330492322
• ISBN 13: 9780330492324
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400