Kraken
Kraken is a fantasy novel by British author China Miéville. It is published in the UK by Macmillan, and in the US by Del Rey Books. The book bears the subtitle "An Anatomy" on the title page. It was the winner for the 2011 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Miéville has described the book as "a dark comedy about a squid-worshipping cult and the end of the world. It takes the idea of the squid cult very seriously. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd."
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What Hacker News says
- If you enjoy encountering new words and phrases such as 'theurgic vermin' then you might like China Miéville’s Kraken. I had to read it with a copy of the OED and Wikipedia to get the most from it.
- Besides The City & The City I really enjoyed Kraken and Un Lun Dun by China Miéville.
Kraken is the hunt for a giant squid after it vanished from a London museum.
Un Lun Dun is a young adult story of two friends who end up in a whimsical version of London.
- (source: am a literature student - UK open university)
I just asked get ChatGPT a question about use of language in a specific book (China Miéville's Kraken). It gave a plausible answer but used a common English word ('knackering') instead of the word 'knacking' that is actually used (the word 'knackering' isn't in the text). I then asked it to give me a quote using 'knackering' and it gave me a quote with the word 'knacking'. I asked it to put the quote into Harvard reference style which it did, but didn't provide a page number, which it said I'd have to look up myself.
I think relying on ChatGPT for an essay would be fairly frustrating, and if you used ChatGPT to develop your thesis, you could very quickly get a generic plagiaristic answer (based on the quotes everyone else used) rather than one than that captured your own response to the text, and which contained factual errors.
[Edit] It also said that "gods inhabiting USB sticks are presented matter-of-factly" in Kraken which is false (there are no mentions of USB). When I asked it for a quote to support its assertion, it replied "While the novel doesn't explicitly depict gods inhabiting USB sticks..."
- > Anyone else remember less from reading an ebook compared to a physical one? [...] But in a physical book, I often remember that a phrase was at the top or middle or left side of a page, or that I was sitting in a particular chair when I read it.
This seems weird to me. Does your ebook reader not have a "page" concept? I read China Mieville's Kraken on a Rakuten Kobo about 6 months ago and I distinctly remember the layout of the page where the protagonist does something that shows the culmination of his personal growth throughout the novel, or the page where you find out who is burning the past and why. I also remember distinctly where I was sitting when I read both of those passages.
The biggest difference between the eBook and physical book experiences for me is the smell--I miss the smell of the binding glue when cracking open a new book, or the pleasantly-stale paper smell of an old library book. I'm not saying that the eBook and physical book experiences are equivalent at all. I'm just saying the specific examples you're pointing out seem odd to me.
I'm also highly skeptical of the observations that come from a mind perceiving itself; one of the most striking takeaways from all the neuroscience I've read in the past few decades is that a lot of previous philosophy and psychology theory on how the brain works based on self-perception is blatantly just wrong.
- The last bullet point reminds me of the description from a game in China Miéville's Kraken.
> The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was... It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.
