China Miéville - Looking for Jake and Other Stories

CHINA MIÉVILLE’s fiction has won the Arthur C Clarke Award (twice), the British Fantasy Award (twice), the Locus Award, and several others. His nonfiction includes Between Equal Rights, a study of international law. He lives and works in London.

The stories first appeared, some in slightly different forms, in the following venues:

“Looking for Jake” in Neonlit: The Time Out Book of New Writing, Volume 1, ed. Nicholas Royle (Quartet, 1998).

“Foundation” in The Independent on Sunday “Talk of the Town” magazine, 27 April 2003, ed. Ian Irvine.

“Reports of Certain Events in London” in McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, ed. Michael Chabon (Vintage, 2004).

“Familiar” in Conjunctions, 39 ( The New Wave Fabulists ), eds. Peter Straub and Bradford Morrow, 2002.

“Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia,” under its original title “Buscard’s Murrain,” in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, eds. Jeff Vandermeer and Mark Roberts (Night Shade Books, 2003).

“Details” in The Children of Cthulhu, eds. John Pelan and Benjamin Adams (Del Rey Books, 2002).

“Different Skies” in Britpulp!, ed. Tony White (Sceptre, 1999).

“An End to Hunger” in The New English Library Book of Internet Short Stories, ed. Maxim Jakubowski (Hodder and Stoughton, 2000).

“ ’Tis the Season” in Socialist Review, 291, December 2004, ed. Pete Morgan.

The Tain (PS Publishing, 2002).

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., to reprint “Fauna of Mirrors,” from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, with Margarita Guerrero, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, copyright © 1969 by Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

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“I doubt not that you have heard of Mister Jansa— a fellow of lamentable aspect—who is daily seen around the squares of his adopted city where his intense bearing entices crowds of the curious; when surrounded the fellow excoriates ’em in obscure tongues such as would shame the most pious and ecstatic of quakers. Those gathered mock the afflicted with mummery. But horrors! A number of those who have mimicked poor Jansa have fallen to his brain-fever, and are now partners in his unorthodox ministry. ” (Kate Vinegar [ed], The London Letters of Ignatius Sancho [Providence 1954], p. 337.)

There is no record of Haygarth fraternising with or even mentioning Dr. Buscard before or after this time, and the reasons behind his 1775 recommendation are opaque. In his diaries, Haygarth’s assistant William Fin noted “a disparity between Dr. H’s words and his tone when he claimed Dr. Buscard as his very good friend ” (quoted in Marcus Gadd’s A Buscardology Primer [London 1972], p.iii). De Selby, in his unpublished “Notes on Buscard,” claims that Buscard was blackmailing Haygarth. What incriminating material he might have held on his more esteemed colleague remains unknown.

A Posthumous Vindication of Dr. Samuel Buscard: Proof That “Gibbering Fever” Is Indeed Buscard’s Murrain. (London 1782), p. 17.

Ibid., p. 25.

His last known letter (to his son Matthew) is dated January 1783, and contains a hint as to his plans.Jacob complains “I have not even the money to finish this. Carriage to Bled is a scandalous expense!” (Quoted in Ali Khamrein’s Medical Letters [New York 1966], p. 232.)

These notorious “Buscard Shacks” loom large in popular culture of the time. See for example the ballad “Rather the Poorhouse than a Buscard Shack” (reproduced in Cecily Fetchpaw’s Hanoverian Street Songs: Populism and Resistance [Pennsylvania 1988], p. 677).

Contrary to the impression given by the media after the 1986 Statten-Dogger incident, deliberate exposure to the risks of wormword is neither common nor new. Ully Statten was (no doubt unwittingly) continuing a tradition established in the late eighteenth century. In what could be considered a late Georgian extreme sport, London’s young rakes and coffee-house dandies would take turns reading the word aloud, each risking correct pronounciation and thereby infection.

This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Johnson’s work. The man is a liar, a fraud, and a bad writer (whose brother is Britain’s third-largest importer of bergamot oil).

There is a comprehensive list in Gadd, op. cit., p. 74.

“Years of Violent Ransacking Leave Slovenia’s Historic Churches in Ruins,” Financial Times, 3/7/85.