Mieville is so frustrating to me. I wish his editor would strap him to a chair with every manuscript he turns in and make him cut it in half. The interesting ideas I want him to meander through and take his time are rushed and the boring bits are interminable. In kraken we get three pages of the cool underground freak show with the radio man and a hundred pages of lying low in safe houses and buses doing sweet fuck all. He'll regularly turn out absolute stunners of sentences in seas of drudgery. He'll skirt around his politics and leave his stories amounting to nothing substantial. He'll borrow entire motifs and plots to springboard his ideas off of and then just fail to do so. He understands that magic realism is the fantastical mixed with the mundane but makes his fantasy too fantastical and his mundane too dull. Very dangerous traits for a writer who isn't especially unique to have.

The opening line is one of those lines that's so great it makes me actually angry that I wasn't given the cosmic chance to maybe write it first myself.