Mieville sighting in the New York Times

Rousing itself from centuries of torpor, the New York Times discovers the 'new weird' and China Mieville. Not surprisingly, the writer of the piece is Sarah Lyall, who is not one of their book people, but the woman who covers the British culture beat.

I just finished "Kraken" myself, and it's marvelous, if a bit clunky in its exposition... Jaw-dropping sense of wonder on every page -- and I'm all about sense of wonder. Turns out that Mieville is too:

..what attracts him to the genre, as a reader and a writer, is the importance of the imagination — “that sense of the world blown apart, that sense of a crack in reality, that visionary sense, that ecstatic sense,” as he described it.

There's an amusing reflection on Star Trek as well -- turned into a small horror as a significant plot point in Kraken:

...... teleportation, or travel by “beaming up,”... has long irritated Mr. Miéville because, in his view, it entails ripping people apart and then piecing them, inadequately, back together.

“I spent much of my youth soul-suckingly horrified by Star Trek and not understanding why no one else could understand that it was a charnel ship manned by ghosts, because you die every time you teleport!” Mr. Miéville said. “It freaked me out.”