Looking for the Fantastic

Was wending thru the blogs when I came across this rant via Kraken. (Though the actual link was taken from here. I swear I sometimes feel like I have to leave a trail of bread crumbs to figure out where I've been on the 'net.)

As a reader, I love reading about the fantastic. The weirder, the better is what I say. As a writer, I'm also constantly trying to push myself in coming up with ideas that haven't even been thought of before. So I was genuinely moved by someone's experience in reading New Weird writer China Mieville's short story collection, Looking for Jake:

Everybody gets the "crap I wish I'd thought of that!" thing if you're in a creative field, I imagine, it's one of those buttons wired into our brains, but Mieville's writing doesn't so much push that button for me as take a sledgehammer to it until the plastic shatters.... Be troubled! This is troubling shit. You're either seduced by the fabulous weirdness of it all, or you can get bent. It's fantasy that's actually fantastical--not in the sense that anything gets used as a deus ex machina, (terribly far from it!) but in the sense that the world is just full of weird stuff. It's Alice in Wonderland meets Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" meets hell. And it doesn't blink.

And now, to trot out a variant one of my favorite rants, god, I wish more people would do that. God, I wish *I* would do that. All the infinite possibilities of fantasy, and instead we get ten thousand rehashes of a quasi-Western European culture with elves, fairies and telepathic wolves, and magic systems so stratified and carefully explained, so that nobody ever gets the idea that the author is using magic as an excuse for stuff, that they have all the exuberant joy of a rectal exam.... Strange is like a lost art.

Damn right.

Oh and serendipitously, JP is currently reviewing Mieville's book here.