I read this in the collection Looking For Jake. Mieville is well-known as a socialist and anti-imperialist, and really outspoken in his criticism of Blair and UK involvement in the Second Iraq War. It looks like it was originally published in 2004, which would have been early in the Second Iraq War.
The "black and black-red clouds that the earth vomits" mentioned early in the story must tie back to the oil wells set on fire by Saddam Hussein's retreating forces.
I definitely remember Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm. I was a senior in college. A few months later, I had graduated and took a job as an Army civilian engineer. I reviewed several After Action Reports and we made recommendations for system improvements based on those and meetings with soldiers who'd been there. I've subsequently worked on most of the vehicle Mievilles mentions: M1 Abrams, M2 Bradley. Not so much on ACE, but on a smaller air-transportable combat bulldozer, DEUCE.
(Hm, it seems I have not received all notifications since January... So I shall go through them all now.)
Yes, I agree: all these stories with protagonists experiencing strange things we know(ish - haha) isn't real have those layers. A nice question would be: what if the person experiencing it isn't the protagonist but another character/perspective? Are those layers still there then?
There were many stories from the Miéville book I really liked (next to Reports and Foundation). I now check my Goodreads (my external memory):
- The Ball Room (very political this one, anti-capitalist)
- Familiar (with a Clive Barkerish creature)
- Details (Thomas Ligotti-like, very haunting)
- Different skies (Lovecraftian in my opinion)
- An End to Hunger (SF à la Black Mirror)
- The Tain (postapocalyptic novella inspired by 'The Fauna of Mirrors' by Jorge Luis Borges)
About Dunsany: I think his early fantasy tales are most suitable for Elder Sign, because his later work lacks the weird angle. I liked 'The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories' best, but Time and the Gods or A Dreamer's Tales are also suitable.
I love this idea of the layers. I think it works great for the Blackwood story "The Insanity of Jones," too, and, well, probably any of the stories that we'll do in the future that feature a protagonist experiencing things that we know(ish) aren't real.
We aren't really in charge of what we're reading anymore, but what were your favorite stories from Looking for Jake? And do you have any Dunsany suggestions?
I read this story earlier (right after reading the first story of Miéville because it was discussed in Elder Sign) and I was deeply impressed by it. After reading all of the collection 'Looking for Jake and other stories' I learned the typical narration technique of Miéville, which can be stated as: 'Get an (political) idea, choose a symbol for it, make this symbol into something literal and turn it into a weird fictionesque or existential horror story.'
In my opinion Miéville has done this in The Foundation in an extremely powerfull way. It makes the reader look into the real horror of soldiers with ptsd. This horrible foundation is very real for the building whisperer, though we as readers know it's the trauma.
I happen to have read WW I stories by Dunsany some weeks ago and the great WW I novel 'Post voor mevrouw Bromley' ('Mail for mrs. Bromley') by the Flemish writer Stefan Brijs. Both zoom in on the insanity of sending mere children to war and letting them fight in the trenches. Of course, in those time shell shock wasn't also taken seriously with many, many suicides as a result.
I was afraid that the bulldozer element of the story was (based on) something real, and now I know it was thanks to the discussion of the story. I grew up in a very pacifistic family and in a country where 'fighting for your country' is something of the past. So for me as a kid soldiers were simply 'bad men killing people'; a little later I thought of soldiers as 'canon fodder', pawns of other people. Having no experience in war and army at all, it was good for me to hear Brandon and Glenn telling their experiences as soldiers, so I again can adjust my comprehesion of what a soldier is again.
It's great how Miéville uses the concept of 'foundation' in a multi interpretable sense: as a reality in the now (the building whisperer knows a lot about building falacies), as a reality in the past (the bodies in the bulldozer assault), as a trauma/ptsd (the mapping of the one onto the other), and as a symbol - several symbols, according to the reading of the reader (e.g. war as a foundation onto which the (Western) 'civilizations' are built, and/or the dead of the historical past).
To the reader the story is an allegorical or psychological tale, but to the protagonist the story definitely is weird, so you could say there is a weird fiction layer in The Foundation.
Yes, that must be what those clouds are invoking -- that's a great catch. I think, too, that we definitely could have thought a bit more about why in 2004 Mieville decided to write a story about the Gulf War.
All my drill sergeants had been in the Gulf War, though they also had all been in Somalia and that seemed to matter more to them. They also, of course, were all crazy because that's a requirement of being a drill sergeant.