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[Chris]

Been on a major Mieville kick pretty much all year long. I am currently re-reading The City & The City for the first time in about a year..

I really don't know why more people aren't into him, or haven't heard of him. He has very quickly climbed into my top 3 authors list at the moment (probably 1. Joe Hill, 2. China Mieville, 3. Nick Harkaway)

Take a look at these synopses, and try these books out.. I guarantee you won't be disappointed:

Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in the European city-state of Besźel, investigates the murder of Mahalia Geary, a foreign student found dead with her face disfigured in a Besźel street. He soon learns that Geary had been involved in the political and cultural turmoil involving Besźel and its twin city of Ul Qoma. His investigations start in his home city of Besźel, lead him to Ul Qoma to assist the Ul Qoman police in their work, and eventually result in an examination of the legend of Orciny, a rumoured third city existing in the spaces between Besźel and Ul Qoma.

The City & the City takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully 'unsee' (that is, consciously erase from their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city — even if they are an inch away. This separation is emphasized by the style of clothing, architecture, gait, and the way denizens of each city generally carry themselves. Residents of the cities are taught from childhood to recognize things belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called "breaching" - a terrible crime by the citizens of the two cities, even worse than murder.

An inexplicable event has occurred at the British Museum of Natural History—a forty foot specimen of giant squid in formalin has disappeared overnight. Additionally, a murder victim is found folded into a glass bottle. Various groups are interested in getting the squid back, including a naive staff member, a secret squad of London police, assorted religious cults, and various supernatural and mostly dead criminal elements. The wondrous squid represents deity to the Church of Kraken Almighty. Did they liberate their god, or could it have been stolen by a rival cult?

Its setting, New Crobuzon, is an audaciously imagined milieu: a city with the dimensions of a world, home to a polyglot civilization of wildly varied species and overlapping and interpenetrating cultures. Seeking to prove his unified energy theory as it relates to organic and mechanical forms, rogue scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin tries to restore the power of flight to Yagharek, a member of the garuda race cruelly shorn of its wings. Isaac's lover, Lin, unconsciously mimics his scientific pursuits when she takes on the seemingly impossible commission of sculpting a patron whose body is a riot of grotesquely mutated and spliced appendages. Their social life is one huge, postgraduate bull session with friends and associates--until a nightmare-inducing grub escapes from Isaac's lab and transforms into a flying monster that imperils the city. This accident precipitates a political crisis, initiates an action-packed manhunt for Isaac and introduces hordes of vividly imagined beings who inhabit the twilight zone between science and sorcery.

In this stand-alone novel set in the same monster-haunted universe as last year's much-praised Perdido Street Station, British author Mieville, one of the most talented new writers in the field, takes us on a gripping hunt to capture a magical sea-creature so large that it could snack on Moby Dick, and that's just for starters. Armada, a floating city made up of the hulls of thousands of captured vessels, travels slowly across the world of Bas-Lag, sending out its pirate ships to prey on the unwary, gradually assembling the supplies and captive personnel it needs to create a stupendous work of dark magic. Bellis Coldwine, an embittered, lonely woman, exiled from the great city of New Crobuzon, is merely one of a host of people accidentally trapped in Armada's far-flung net, but she soon finds herself playing a vital role in the byzantine plans of the city's half-mad rulers. The author creates a marvelously detailed floating civilization filled with dark, eccentric characters worthy of Mervyn Peake or Charles Dickens, including the aptly named Coldwine, a translator who has devoted much of her life to dead languages; Uther Doul, the superhuman soldier/scholar who refuses to do anything more than follow orders; and Silas Fennec, the secret agent whose perverse magic has made him something more and less than human. Together they sail through treacherous, magic-ridden seas, on a quest for the Scar, a place where reality mutates and all things become possible.

In this stunning new novel set mainly in the decadent and magical city of New Crobuzon, British author Miéville (The Scar) charts the course of a proletarian revolution like no other. The capitalists of New Crobuzon are pushing hard. More and more people are being arrested on petty charges and "Remade" into monstrous slaves, some half animal, others half machine. Uniformed militia are patrolling the streets and watching the city from their dirigibles. They turn a blind eye when racists stage pogroms in neighborhoods inhabited by non-humans. An overseas war is going badly, and horrific, seemingly meaningless terrorist acts occur with increasing frequency. Radical groups are springing up across the city. The spark that will ignite the revolution, however, is the Perpetual Train. Workers building the first transcontinental railroad, badly mistreated by their overseers, have literally stolen a train, laying track into the wild back-country west of the great city, tearing up track behind them, fighting off the militia sent to arrest them, even daring to enter the catotopic zone, that transdimensional continental scar where anything is possible.

Saul Garamond is a restless young Londoner, aimlessly adrift, when he is wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his father. Saul is snatched from the authorities by a mysterious savior named King Rat, who claims to be both the deposed leader of the rodent army driven out of Hamelin 700 years before and Saul's real father. Raised as a human, Saul has much to unlearn before King can teach him to become a worthy opponent of the Rat Catcher, who framed Saul for murder and is still pursuing King. Meanwhile, the Rat Catcher forces his friendship on Saul's composer friend, Natasha, by posing as a flautist who hopes to work his melodies into her "drum 'n' bass" dance music and turn London's hip-hop underground into his unwitting stormtroopers.

[NeverReady]

I read Perdido Street Blues earlier this year; a dense read, very demanding of one's attention, but worth the effort, like Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard. The Scar and The City and the City are high on my reading list in the future.

Ach, that's Perdido Street Station. I'm drunker than usual, so I'm drifting towards incoherence. You should see the number of corrections I'm making here.

[xaraan]

I've heard nothing but good stuff about him. I've already picked up a couple of his books to read, just need to squeeze them into my too read pile somewhere.

[Chris]

His most recent, Embassytown, is the only one that hasn't really caught me yet. Good concept, but it's a pretty dense read.

I got about halfway through and gave up. I'm gonna give it another go once I finish this one.

[Royal Nonesuch]

I love China Mieville. He seems pretty well known to me, though.

Anyway, The City and The City is incredible, and Perdido Street and Kraken were really great too. I just bought Embassytown, but haven't started it yet.

[Chris]

I love China Mieville. He seems pretty well known to me, though.

Anyway, The City and The City is incredible, and Perdido Street and Kraken were really great too. I just bought Embassytown, but haven't started it yet.

I hardly ever hear talk of him. And when he is brought up, it tends to be cases like Xaraan, who have heard of him but haven't had a chance to read his stuff yet..



They announced his next one, which is coming in May, called "Railsea".. but if Amazon is to be believed, it's a children's/YA book.

[Punchy]

He's fairly popular in the UK, even getting discussed in the serious literary newspaper supplements.

[Chris]

He's fairly popular in the UK, even getting discussed in the serious literary newspaper supplements.

I really like the covers for the UK books that I posted. Those are much better than what we got here.. if I didn't have most of the books already, I'd seriously consider ordering those from amazon UK.

[contramundi]

i read the city and the city and have at home kraken,perdido street station and the scar

awesome writer