Squidpawned
So I was just gearing up to write my next novel, which I was going to call King Squid, Esq., when I look up from all of my deadlines to notice that there’s this other novel out there called Kraken by this Mieville guy.
WTF? My novel was all about a squid cult hiding in a museum in a kind-of London setting and this guy named “Philly” Barrow, and all of the bizarre things that happen to him because of that situation. This Mieville joker’s novel seems, on the face of it, to be similar. Only difference being, I’ve actually swum with squid. Repeatedly. In an actual squid suit.
Now my agent says there’s no way to sell it–I’m going to have to change everything in it related to squid to fungi instead. Tentative new title will be Lord Mushroom, Inc. It’s going to take at least another year to sort this all out. And I’ve got to figure out how to make intelligent mushrooms swim.
June 8, 2010 at 2:25 pm
I think your next novel ought to be a travelogue starring Grod and Fred the Weed. But that’s just me.
June 8, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Careful Jeff, that handsome devil seems to have his own army of fangirls these days.
June 8, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I will be torn limb-from-limb by someone else’s fan army?!?
June 8, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Well, only if we don’t get to you first I suppose.
June 8, 2010 at 2:41 pm
This Mieville person is clearly riding on your coattails. The nerve.
June 8, 2010 at 2:54 pm
“Why I first wrote about squid back in 1932. How dare the man!”
Anyway, *I* thought it was funny.
June 8, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Somewhere in Texas, Mike is still wondering what it is with you people and squids.
Just remember Jeff, if you ever find the rather intimidating China Mieville heading in your direction, if you ask him when the next Bas-Lag novel is going to be out enough times, his head will implode.
June 8, 2010 at 3:01 pm
I suspect you are easily intimidated.
I suspect you are right about Mike. Although it was he brought that linkage to the foreground in his introduction. Thus the smear campaign began.
As a small footnote to all of this, China contributed an entry to the King Squid bibliography in City of Saints, under the title or author name “Nauty Lis” or something like that.
June 8, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Now my agent says there’s no way to sell it–I’m going to have to change everything in it related to squid to fungi instead. Tentative new title will be Lord Mushroom, Inc.
I regard this post in the nature of a contract.
June 8, 2010 at 3:18 pm
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh noes….I guess I’ll have to stop work on the loose sequel to “The Situation,” which involves a city-wide battle between two huge Godzilla-sized organisms and a very odd love story. And my story about how Komodo dragon poison glands are actually portals to other dimensions will have to wait, too.
I will get right on intelligent mushrooms as flotation devices. :)
June 8, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Actually, I’m quite taken with LORD MUSHROOM as a title for something. Sadly. Pathetically.
June 8, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Borne details, sustenance, NOM NOM NOM.
June 8, 2010 at 3:32 pm
LOL. If I ever finish it, it’s going to be the most devastating, crazy, emotional thing I’ve ever done. Hmmm. Sounds like a mess. Mebbee I’ll write about wyrd bunniEs instead.
June 8, 2010 at 3:34 pm
There will be no “instead”!
Bunnies vs mushrooms, perhaps.
June 8, 2010 at 3:36 pm
I’ve got my marching orders! See you on the other side, where the Mushbunnies live.
June 8, 2010 at 3:40 pm
And that will be the first line: “There will be no ‘instead’. This is in the nature of a contract. Which is how I met the bunniEs and inhaled the spores.”
June 8, 2010 at 3:46 pm
The world will thank me for this.
June 8, 2010 at 3:52 pm
In a footnote to Mecha-Clute’s 2050 Encyclopedia of Fantasy: “One could say the same of the moment in the querulous pseudo-career of Jeff VanderMeer when, for reasons unknown to us due to the great Internet Purge of 2025, he began to write about the ‘pseudo-bunnies of the Fifth Dimension and their sentient mushroom cohorts.’ However, if not for the religion based on the first book, he might still have survived this insolent decision.”
June 8, 2010 at 6:10 pm
At least *my* squid are gay. And giant. And mostly offstage.
June 8, 2010 at 10:27 pm
I believe CM’s next novel has been announced as ‘The Fungal Suzerain’. Something about proletarian revolution among the saprophyte inhabitants of a floating city made of whale barf.
June 8, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
June 10, 2010 at 5:26 am
instead of squid, howsabout giant sperm?
just a thought…..
June 10, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Yes, but how much of this Kracken novel is written in the narrative annotated bibliography form? ; )
June 14, 2010 at 1:51 am
But you’re an American, you have your own home-grown, far more powerful tentacled creature of evil to draw on: the Vampire Squid of Wall Street (aka Goldman Sachs). I didn’t make this up, this is not something born of a fevered antipodean brain reeling in Lovecraftian horror from the global depredations of the last surviving superpower, I got this from a bona fide take-overs lawyer in Melbourne – GS are well-known in the US with this name. And I think it even pre-exists the GFC.
You can put your vampire squid up against Mieville’s puny Kraken any day and you’ll win. GS did – all the way to bank. And the UK’s economy is still broken (Australia only survived because we hid under a rock the whole time).
I loved FInch, I loved that baroqueness. Now I want to see it taken to new depths with squid. Go for it!
June 14, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Hey–nice to hear from you! Glad you liked Finch!