COVER STORY

Kraken by China Miéville

For When: You've got ocean madness

by Mark Cofta

Published: Jun 16, 2010


(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Trust China Miéville, three-time Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner and self-described "weird fiction" author, to top his 2009 hit science fiction mystery The City & the City. In Kraken, the titular giant calamari — pickled and displayed in London's Natural History Museum by Billy Harrow — suddenly and impossibly vanishes. The ensuing adventure explores a magical London underworld of competing apocalyptic cults and the police tracking them, unionized animal "familiars" and their disembodied strike leader, and ruthless supernatural gang bosses and their otherworldly henchmen.

All pursue the kraken, and no one knows who squidnapped it: not The Tattoo, a face inked to a poor sap's back; not the squiddity-worshipping Teuthists; not the death-cheating Grisamentum; not even The Ocean, which in Kraken is a cranky intelligent force. Naïve Billy, his protector, Dane, and hilariously profane cop Collingswood — who has her own special "knack," or supernatural mojo — close in on the squid and all its mysteries as Miéville's dark carnival London, "a city of knacks and heretics," faces destruction by righteous memory-consuming fire.

Kraken's a smart, witty read with lots of surprises in its complex, clear and colorful mythology of "gunfarmers" (whose bullets are firearm eggs), "intereffigial unspace" (can't explain it, but it's way cool), and, amusingly for us die-hard Trekkers, obsessive Star Trek paraphernalia collectors.

Del Rey, 528 pp., $26, June 29

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