| Re: Looking for Jake (with spoliers)
Read a few moe last night:
Different Skies
Mieville channels Lovecraft and meditates on old age as well. The ending seemed a little forced - I wasn't at all certain that the alternative courses of action the protagonist dismissed were so untenable - but I think that confronting those eerie kids had become an obsessive need by that point. Great character study.
An end to hunger
A very political piece, possibly spurred by Lefty (he prefers the term Marxist) Mieville's distrust of corporate-sponsored charities. It falls into the trap that the essential point is debatable (even if you agree with the writer's position, which in this case I largely do), which makes immersion into the story a little hard. The ending is vague, but I thought that was part of the overall pattern here of leaving the really scary stuff up to our imagination. Still, the topicality made the story feel relatively minor.
Tis the season
I read this when it was published in the Socialist Review, and it was a fun satire on the commercialisation of Christmas. Another one that's very transparently politicised, but with a willingness to keep tonge firmly planted in cheek. Mieville does have a decent hand at comedy. |