Kraken
an anatomy
by China Miéville · first published 2010
50% recommend50% neutral
Kraken is a fantasy novel by British author China Miéville. It is published in the UK by Macmillan, and in the US by Del Rey Books. The book bears the subtitle "An Anatomy" on the title page. It was the winner for the 2011 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Miéville has described the book as "a dark comedy about a squid-worshipping cult and the end of the world. It takes the idea of the squid cult very seriously. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd."
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Besides The City & The City I really enjoyed Kraken and Un Lun Dun by China Miéville. Kraken is the hunt for a giant squid after it vanished from a London museum. Un Lun Dun is a young adult story of two friends who end up in a whimsical version of London.
on “Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?” ↗If you enjoy encountering new words and phrases such as 'theurgic vermin' then you might like China Miéville’s Kraken. I had to read it with a copy of the OED and Wikipedia to get the most from it.
on “Panjandrum: The ‘giant firework’ built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall” ↗The last bullet point reminds me of the description from a game in China Miéville's Kraken. > The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was... It could move to any square…
on “Chess, but moves are simultaneous” ↗…the top or middle or left side of a page, or that I was sitting in a particular chair when I read it. This seems weird to me. Does your ebook reader not have a "page" concept? I read China Mieville's Kraken on a Rakuten Kobo about 6 months ago and I distinctly remember the layout of the page where the protagonist does something that shows the culmination of his personal growth throughout the novel, or the…
on “Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning” ↗(source: am a literature student - UK open university) I just asked get ChatGPT a question about use of language in a specific book (China Miéville's Kraken). It gave a plausible answer but used a common English word ('knackering') instead of the word 'knacking' that is actually used (the word 'knackering' isn't in the text). I then asked it to give me a…
on “AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder” ↗