Book Club 2025: King Rat by China Miéville

I’ve read most of Miéville’s books, and they’re a bit hit or miss. He’s a talented writer on a sentence by sentence basis, and that’s sometimes a problem: He gets so enthusiastic about how good he is that he has a tendency to go on and on, conjuring forth an exciting miasmatic milieu just by insisting on it. That worked really well in Perdito Street Station, where we were in a very alien city, but this one is in London.

And it’s a really exciting read! It’s propulsive and interesting and scary and fun. Lots of plot twists I didn’t see coming. Nine thumbs up.

But: Spoilers ahead! And you shouldn’t read the rest of this if you ever intend on reading the book, which you should if you like Miéville and haven’t yet.

But! It has also more than a whiff of just being ridiculous. We’re talking London, right, and not some imaginary fantastic city, so Miéville have to big up current cultural phenomena like drum and bass and raves into something magical and mysterious, and it’s like *lifts eyebrow*. Especially since this was published past the tail end of jungle as a cultural phenomenon… But it’s also things that make a nerd go “well, echshully”, like rats being so dirty, and there’s pages and pages and pages about how filthy rats are, and presumably everybody these days know that rats are pretty clean mammals, as mammals go — so the protagonist not cleaning himself for weeks because he’s now “a rat” is like… what. There’s also the inherent ridiculousness of the Big Villain — I was thinking “surely not, that would be too risible” and then it turned out that it was. And! The Big Final Showdown had exactly the same problem as the first season of Jessica Jones had — and the Supervillain’s power is basically identical: 1) Why not invest in ear plugs, and 2) why not get a gun. Or a knife. Or anything! Don’t just go in with nothing else than your naked hands to take him out!

What I’m saying is is that this book doesn’t just require you to suspend your disbelief a bit, but put it on hold for the entirety of the book. If you start to think about anything that’s happening, you can’t help yourself (and I’m speaking on behalf of everybody) starting smirking and chuckling, and that’s not the effect Miéville was after.

I think! I may be wrong!

But I thoroughly liked reading this book, and I’d put it above a bunch of other Miéville books.

King Rat (1998) by China Miéville (buy new, buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)

Tweaked version of the simple auto poster for Bluesky

There’s are many plugins for WordPress to auto-post to Bluesky. I use the nice and simple one called (simply) simple-auto-poster-for-bluesky. It’s simple!

But it has two problems: If you’re editing an older post that the plugin hasn’t seen before, it’ll post that to Bluesky, which is something you’d normally not want to happen. And the plugin includes the featured image in the Bluesky post, but Bluesky has image size limits, so this would often fail.

I’ve fixed both problems and put my fork on Microsoft Github. I haven’t submitted the patch upstream, because my WordPress skills suck, and the code probably shouldn’t be used in its current state. But I can’t be bothered to fix it up.

Oh, and it formats the posts differently than in the original version. The original version includes a “site preview”-ish card in the post, which I don’t think is all that attractive. My version just includes the featured image.

So there you go. Enjoy. Ou pas.

Book Club 2025: Daybreak Zero by John Barnes

Barnes wrote some moderately entertaining space opera books back in the day, but this is book two in a post-apocalyptic series. I bought the two first books in 2012, but I only read the first, and I wasn’t quite sure why.

But reading this now, it’s kinda coming back to me: The book is competently written, with dozens of characters we flit between, and it mostly keeps things moving along. Politically, it’s somewhat grating (Barnes apparently took a right wing turn at some point?), but it’s not too bad.

The main problem is that the characters have no character. Or rather, they’re the exact same character with dozens of names, so it’s a bit of a chore to remember who’s supposed to be who. And the longer “philosophical” discussions about what’s going on are tedious.

So I ditched it after 55 pages. I did slightly wonder where all this was going, and whether the solution to the mystery of what’s behind the apocalypse was the one that I thought was obvious from the start… and it turns out that it is, but is apparently only revealed during the last ten pages of the next (and final) book. And Barnes planned on doing many more books in the series, but his publisher, Ace, thought they sucked (I’m reading between the pixels), so there weren’t.

Oh, and Barnes hasn’t published anything after that book?

Daybreak Zero (2011) by John Barnes (buy used, 3.59 on Goodreads)

Comics Research Update

I’ve been updating kwakk.info, the search engine for magazines about comics a bit, because:

Anna’s Archive finally updated their libgen.li mirror. So now we can see vital things like

turn into

and thousands of people with OCD rejoiced.

Now, doing searches for Cartoonist PROfiles #35 on Anna’s is easy enough — you just search for it. (Oh, and also 035, because the search engine isn’t smart enough to understand that 035 and 35 are the same issue. And that’s even more fun with single digit issues, so you have to search for 3, 03, 003 and why not 0003, too.)

But what about Comic Shop News?

That’s a lot of stuff to search for, dude. So I refashioned my search tools a lot this weekend, and I’ve now got an Emacs mode for doing this stuff:

So I can just hit s to search for the title in question, and then after parsing the results, it filters and sorts the results so that I can easily download the missing issues:

It’s bare bones, but I’m the only one that’s going to use this, so that’s fine. With this setup, I think I can keep things up-to-date as people keep scanning old magazines and fanzines about comics and uploading them to libgen and other Anna sources — I think I can go through the list of magazines in less than an hour with this setup.

The horror!

So now you can read about Thomas’s new series debut!

In addition to these search updates, I’ve also been testing to see if LLMs (boo hiss) are able to cough up names of more obscure magazines and fanzines. This is the prompt I’ve been using:

List 30 magazines and fanzines focused on discussing comic books in any language, and also list approximately how many issues the magazine published. Order by number of issues, descending. Exclude magazines that are predominantly comics magazines — list only magazines that are about comics instead. Prioritize magazines with long runs. Exclude magazines from this list:

And then follows the list (now) 572 magazines and fanzines that I already know the names of.

I’ve tried various LLMs — most of them seem to understand the question and do indeed avoid listing comics magazines, but include magazines from the list of magazines to be excluded, and of course all the hallucinations.

The only one that seems even partially helpful is ChatGPT o1, which gave me about 60 magazine names I didn’t know before (and used over ten minutes to think! probably used more electricity than Sweden). Many of these are more recent magazines that are still commercially available, so I’m not including them in kwakk.info, but it also found some interesting magazines that I’ve now added.

After the third iteration, though, most of what it’s outputting is now hallucinations — or it’s just stuff that I’m unable to verify has ever existed. Like:

1. Crimestoppers Gazette

Approx. Number of Issues: ~200
Country/Language: USA (English)
Focus: Long‐running fanzine from a Dick Tracy fan club, offering deep dives into Chester Gould’s strips, detective‐comic history, fan letters, and collector resources.

Or:

4. The Avengers Files

Approx. Number of Issues: ~80
Country/Language: USA (English)
Focus: A long‐time fan/club newsletter (later compiled into a fanzine) on Marvel’s Avengers, including issue‐by‐issue retrospectives, continuity notes, and fan‐theory debates.

Or:

30. Hiperdraw

Approx. Number of Issues: ~6
Country/Language: (English)
Focus: A small hobbyist zine analyzing bold art styles in superhero comics; includes “how‐to” columns for aspiring artists, plus short reviews and fan letters.

You get the idea. But for all I know, I now have a list of all magazines and fanzines about comics that have ever existed, and I’m asking it for more, so I get what I get.

Anyway — new total:

Go forth and research.