Kraken by China Mieville (3.5 stars)

This is the least Mieville of all the Mieville's I've read, and that's a bad thing :( There's elements of the greatness from other novels, and an abundance of crazy ideas that make for points of interest, but I found it actually fairly tedious to read compared to how I have devoured his other books. The world building has nothing on the dark and dirty of New Cobuzon, the spectacularly alien Embassytown, or the mind fuckery of The City and The City. It's basically regular London with some weird knick knackery.

I come to Mieville with a thirst for weird, and don't get me wrong, there's plenty of very innovative weird. Goss and Subby are great, Tattoo is amazing, Wati and his original story are fantastic, squid bit zealots OMG, and the sea has an embassy! But it's not enough. These bright spots come and go from the story as interesting blips amongst a sea of less interesting characters. The world didn't feel immersive.

Occasionally it seems like a comedy (tiny little angel of memory made out of bottles?), but not really enough to actually be funny. And I think I was supposed to find Goss and Subby a lot more scary than I did, I thought the attempts to transfer a sense of horror for those immortal creative assassins fell a long way short. I was excited when they turned up (much less often than they should have), because I knew something interesting was going to happen.

An interesting read, but not in the same ballpark as his other novels.

Also, I barely needed the thesaurus! What's happening??? I only had to look up "autopoiesis".

Also, a ton of people on amazon think this is basically a worse version of Gaiman's Neverwhere. I should really go read that.

3.5 stars.