Railsea by China Miéville
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
It seems likely, in years to come, someone who has read Railsea in their youth upon picking up a copy of
Herman Melville's Moby Dick and thinking to themselves: Hang on, I've already read this!
For the first third or so of the novel, China Miéville is fairly true to his source material. The setting is transformed from
the southern oceans to a landscape criss-crossed by a seemingly infinite number of railway lines. Trains of many kinds run
on these lines, but the one we're particularly interested in is the equivalent of a whaler, hunting for the gigantic beasts
that live under the soil: rats and antlions and especially the mole or moldywarpe.
Railsea by China Miéville
reviewed by Christopher DeFilippis
It's a rollicking adventure book for boys that liberally plies the classic tropes of swashbuckling romances
like Treasure Island and Kidnapped, with a dash of The Odyssey thrown in for good measure. But
at its core, the novel is a retelling of Moby Dick. Only instead of taking place on a whaling ship, it
takes place on a train traversing the railsea -- a jumbled landscape of rails extending in every direction as far as the eye can see.
Embassytown by China Miéville
reviewed by Christopher DeFilippis
The human outpost Embassytown is on the far distant planet Arieka -- accessible only by a dangerous trip through
extra-dimensional space dubbed the immer -- home to a diplomatic corps of specially cloned twins that are
the only line of communication to the native Ariekei, whose unusual double-mouthed physiology makes their language
unique in the known universe. Ariekene speech can only convey literal concepts, so Ariekei can't lie. But they
will occasionally expand their language with the help of human volunteers.
Embassytown by China Miéville
reviewed by Rich Horton
The central idea is Language, which is the language of the Ariekei, the native intelligent species of the remote planet (remote as defined
by its accessibility through human FTL travel, which is based on something like wormholes) of
which Embassytown is the single colony city. Language is unique, in that it is spoken by two voices
simultaneously, in that it will not support a lie, and in that it is unintelligible to the natives if not
spoken by an intelligence.
The City & The City by China Miéville
reviewed by Rich Horton
Beszel and Ul Qoma are two cities that occupy the same geographical space.
They are intricately interwoven, such that some areas are "total" -- all one city or the other -- but some
are "crosshatched," so that one building might be in Beszel and its neighbor in Ul Qoma. The residents have
been trained to "see" and "unsee" their surroundings.
Tyador Borlú is an Inspector for Beszel's Extreme Crime Squad. His new case is the murder of a young woman who turns out to be
an American graduate student in archaeology with an interest in the theory,
generally regarded as crackpot, that there is a third, invisible, city occupying the same area as Beszel and Ul Qoma.
Kraken by China Miéville
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
China Miéville continues to be a word wizard of the first order. He doesn't ever use just any word where
the perfect word will do, and every time reading a Miéville novel will expand your vocabulary exponentially.
He is also a gifted observer and he is capable of sketching out things without dwelling on them, but in such a way
that readers still find those things haunting their dreams days after they have put the finished novel down
and had thought that they were done with it.
The City & The City by China Miéville
reviewed by Martin Lewis
It is hard to think of a more appropriate title for a China Miéville novel. It has always been the
city. He started in his adopted home of London but burrowed underground to find the hidden city, cacotopically
transformed this to create New Crobuzon, struck out for the sea but found a floating city waiting for him before
trekking back through the desert to New Crobuzon and then jumping back to another London, again made strange, made un-London.
Now he has moved East.
Un Lun Dun by China Miéville
reviewed by Jayme Lynn Blaschke
A second, unseen world exists in parallel with our own. Cities in our
reality are mirrored in skewed fashion across the trans-dimensional barrier known as the Odd, sporting names such as
Parisn't and Sans Fransico. These ab-cities are populated by all manner of strange beings, from tailors with
pin-cushion heads to kung fu-fighting garbage cans to sentient schools of fish that navigate on land by donning
deep-sea diving suits.
Un Lun Dun by China Miéville
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
We start in contemporary London, where teenage schoolgirl Zanna and her best friend Deeba seem to be the focus of a series of
strange events. Eventually these lead them through a crack between the worlds into a parallel city, UnLondon, where they
discover that Zanna is the Shwazzy, the Chosen One, destined to lead them to victory against the evil Smog. UnLondon is a
magnificent creation, as vivid, as full of spectacular invention, as New Crobuzon.
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Iron Council by China Miéville
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
This is a fevered dream of a book. It feels more like it should have come out of some hot, humid and voodoo-saturated
bayou. Creatures casually step through veils of space and time -- Remade men and women sporting bodies
of horses or lizards or steam-driven machinery, an assortment
of mages and thaumaturges, flying bird-men and bird-monkeys and heaven alone knows what other flying things, vodyanoi water
people, cactus-people, scarab-headed khepri insect-women, all from the city the world knows as New Crobuzon.
And then, before you've had a chance to properly catch your breath after inhaling the first searing bit of New Crobuzon's pungent
air, you're yanked out of it -- and things get weirder, fast.
The Scar by China Miéville
reviewed by Donna McMahon
Bellis Coldwine is taking passage on a ship, fleeing persecution in her home city of New Crobuzon for an uncertain
future in distant Nova Esperium. An urban intellectual, Bellis loathes the prospect of years of exile in the colonies, but when her
ship is captured by pirates, she realizes she may never see her home again.
The pirates live on Armada, a secret floating city haphazardly lashed together from ships and debris.
The Tain by China Miéville
reviewed by Lisa DuMond
Sholl is a refugee in a war-torn London. This ongoing devastation is not the easily
understood Blitz of World War II, though. The enemy here is like nothing the humans have ever faced, yet is as familiar
as, say, the lines in one's palm. And if there is a way to fight back against the invaders, no one has found it yet. The good
and bad people of Old Blighty are on their way to extinction.
Broken Angels by Richard Morgan,
The Separation by Christopher Priest and
The Tain by China Miéville
reviewed by David Soyka
While Tony Blair lines up behind the Bush administration in positing war with Iraq as a clear-cut case of good versus evil, some of his
countrymen provide persuasive commentary that such a dichotomy is never the case. War is only black and white in movies from the 40s; in
reality, it runs blood red, and its tributaries are not always so easily or clearly defined. Which isn't necessarily to say that war is
never unjustified or unavoidable; only that the "make-believe" needs to be sifted from the actuality in hopes of making reliance on it less likely.
Ironically, it is the purveyors of "make-believe" who articulate doubt upon this simplistic precept invoked by both sides in any
conflict. Although British writers Christopher Priest, Richard Morgan, and China Miéville may all be shelved together in the SF and
Fantasy aisle, each works in decidedly different sub-genres to provide compelling commentary on the considerable shades of gray between
the seeming dark and light.
The Scar by China Miéville
reviewed by William Thompson
In many ways, this novel bids to carry on the existential delving into the hidden
and wounded nature of human experience, reinforced by a return to the wonders and horrors of Perdido Street Station's New Crobuzon.
Here, however, the author chooses to build his city anew, in the form of a floating Armada, a
pelagic architecture constructed of decaying and rusted ships roped together by rigging, catwalks and suspended bridges of cordage
and plank that drifts upon the currents of the sea. Unknown to the authorities of the city-state of New Crobuzon,
Armada is a loose confederation harboring many of their former misfits and criminals, a refuge for escaped Remades, divided into
semi-autonomous ridings that support themselves by their own industry, thaumaturgy and piracy. Strange and exotic
gardens grow and overhang decks and crowded, tottering tenements built upon the raised and gutted hulks of ironclad
steamers and rotted wooden frigates that continuously bob and shift upon the water, weathering calms and storms far
from any shore, dwarfed in the vast expanse of the Swollen Ocean.
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
reviewed by David Soyka
If you're one of those people who avoid fantasy novels for fear of even the slightest whiff of wizards or
elves, here's a well worthy quest: make haste to where your bookstore stuffs the countless Tolkien spawn and rescue
a copy of of this book from the mediocre horde. This is a novel that has more in common with
the work of that similarly named fellow, Melville, than any mere commercial conjuring of fairyland.
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
reviewed by Hank Luttrell
The first few pages are from the viewpoint of a bitter and alien character, and written in a dark
and obscure style. This voice seems appropriate and accurate, even accessible, after you get to know the character.
Next up, the protagonist Isaac and his insect-girl friend are introduced. He is big and blustery, an eccentric,
obsessive, maverick scientist. She is a bohemian artist, outcast from her exotic race of hominid bugs. Their
relationship is incredibly romantic and also forbidden and dangerous.
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