Looking for Jake and Other Stories
China Miéville
303 pages
published in 2005

Because of their birth in the pulp magazines of the mid-1920s, science fiction and fantasy used to be dominated by the short story and the novella, long after these story formats had become largely irrelevant in other genres. It was only in the early to mid seventies that the novel finally gained the upper hand on them, but even then there was a place for the short story and the sf magazines as a nursery for new talent. Not any longer, as this China Miéville collection shows. Looking for Jake is his first; it came out seven years after his first novel and five years after the book that made his name, Perdido Street Station. Even more telling, it seems to contain all the short fiction he has written in that time... Clearly, to Miéville at least, writing short stories is not a priority.

The stories seem to reinforce this feeling. Many of them feel slight, little amusements, enjoyed when read but easily forgotten by the next day, as if Miéville wrote them as exercises, scribbles inbetween more important work. Not that this makes them bad stories as such, but they mostly miss the power he packs in his novels. Most of the stories are either horror or "weird fiction", in the tradition of M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Sheridan LeFanu and the like: not quite horror, not quite fantasy, but stories about strange happenings and all. Not quite my genre to be honest, as these stories always seem to run on rails towards set destinations in my experience.

Despite that, I read Looking for Jake in one sitting, so it must've been doing something right. It helped that most of the stories are reasonably short, around twenty pages a piece or even shorter, and that the longest story in the book, The Tain, is also the strongest. What I liked about the stories was the strong sense of place all of them had; almost all are set in or around London and it's the London people actually live in, rather than the London of the tourists. The other recurring theme in these stories is an old New Wave favourite, Entropy and Ennui: the removal of order from the familiar world and with it comes the loss of caring and the liberation it brings.

So in all, is this a collection worth buying? If you're a fan of Miéville, it is. If not, this will probably not make you into one and you're better off trying his novels first. It's interesting, but not essential.

• Looking for Jake
  And then the world changed; but friendship endures.
• Foundation
  Horror is a form of escapism, as it usually portrays horrors and scares that are not real, which you know that cannot hurt you. Here, the horor is something that actually happened, is casually accepted by most of us if not largely forgotten...
• The Ball Room with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer
  A horror story set in one of the temples of young parenthood; if this is ever made into a television story it will scare parents all over Europe...
• Reports of Certain Events in London
  An old format, but one I always liked. The author "accidently" gets a message meant for another hinting at strange, terrible things, goes to investigate, becomes convinced it's real, but real evidence eludes him...
• Familiar
  When a witch dumps his familiar, it doesn't just disappear... Perhaps the best story in the collection.
• Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia
  Details on a particularly nasty fictional (I hope) brain disease...
• Details
  This I found to be the scariest story in the volume; if an impressionable twelve year old will read it, they could've nightmares for weeks...
• Go Between
  Does your work actually matter, does it benefit or harm the world?
• Different Skies
  An old cliche, of the window that shows a different sight than what's really behind it...
• An End to Hunger
  A story I had read before. A tall story about a master hacker (though don't call him that) and the sinister forces behind a glitzy feelgood charity website...
• ’Tis the Season
  I had also read this story before, when it originally appeared, in the Socialist Review, about what happens when Christmas is really commercialised. Features an incredibly bad pun halfway through.
• Jack
  This story does not fit this collection, as it's set in New Crobuzon, featuring Jack Half-a-Prayer. Nice enough, but should've been left out.
• On the Way to the Front artwork by Liam Sharpe
  A short comic about ghost soldiers from World War I travelling through contemporary London, on the way to the front. Unfortunately the artwork was reproduced so muddily and small that a lot of the power of it is lost. For example, I'm not clear whether the soldiers are visible to anybody else but the narrator, as they seem to have been drawn the same as the rest of the "cast".
• The Tain
  The longest story in the collection, it was first published as a chapbook. The tain is about one of the oldest concepts in fantasy or horror, the idea that the people in the mirror are not just your reflection, they're real. And they're angry at their long imprisonment...

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China Miéville, Looking for Jake and Other Stories, fantasy, horror, book review