China Miéville

Stand-alone novels:

King Rat — (1998) Publisher: Saul is hauled out of bed by the police and charged with hurling his father from a top-floor window. While lying dazed in a cell, he is visited by a sharp-featured stranger who leads him on a gravity-defying escape. After introducing himself as Saul's uncle, King Rat, he explains Saul is half rat.

King Rat

An urban fantasy set in London, China Miéville’s debut novel King Rat tells the story of Saul Garamond, the Prince of Rats. Unfortunately for London’s rats, the Pied Piper of Hamelin has recently come to town.

Saul returns home from a camping trip to find his stepfather murdered. Before he knows what’s happening, Saul meets the King of Rats and is inducted into the seedy underbelly of London — an underbelly fit for a king of rats. Under King Rat’s care, Saul learns to eat garbage and climb walls. He discovers his “rat strength.”

Unfortunately, Saul’s new powers come with a few responsibilities.

It turns out that the Piper is hunting King Rat. The Piper controls the minds of his victims using his flute. When the Piper joins forces with drum & bass DJ Natasha, he finds a way to control not only animals but humans as well. Joined by Anansi, King of Spiders, and Loplop, King of Birds, King Rat and Saul are forced to explore their relationship while battling the Piper.

Miéville’s debut contains many of the ingredients of his later work, including an unusual urban setting, a revisionist approach to fantasy, and an original vocabulary. As we might expect, Miéville tosses in a few great ideas, my favorite here being the rebellion of the rats against their king. Compared to other urban fantasies, King Rat feels hip and adult, perhaps because Miéville focuses on drum & bass culture as much as he does on rat powers and life in the sewers.

Many readers will approach King Rat in the hopes of reading something more akin to Miéville’s later work, and these readers may find themselves a little disappointed. However, urban fantasy fans will find a great deal to love in King Rat. Though King Rat may not be as exciting and “weird” as his later novels, China Miéville was already off to a good start when he wrote King Rat. —Ryan Skardal

Un Lun Dun — (2007) Young adult. Publisher: What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up... and some of its lost and broken people, too-including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book. When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

Un Lun Dun

China Miéville has become known for his genre-defying work, but to some extent many of his novels embrace a specific genre. As much as Iron Council is a western and The City & The City is a police procedural, Un Lun Dun is a young adult urban fantasy. Of course, with Miéville, these sorts of distinctions are usually just amusing starting points before readers revel in genre twists and unusual monsters.

Zanna is not a monster. In fact, Zanna was just another schoolgirl in London until she discovered Un Lun Dun — London’s fantasy mirror world. Sadly, things aren’t going very well in Un Lun Dun: horrifying Smog threatens to destroy the entire city. Fortunately, it turns out that Zanna isn’t just a schoolgirl after all. She’s the “Shwazzy,” or chosen one. When she first battles the Smog, she miraculously summons a wind to battle it.

Most fantasy readers should have an idea of what usually comes next. Cue the moments of confusion, denial, acceptance, and righteous heroism. Since this is a young adult fantasy, we should see a love triangle as well. This is where Miéville dubs Un Lun Dun a part of his canon.

Zanna doesn’t do any of those things. In fact, she is defeated and returns to London without any memory of her destiny. Instead, it falls on Deeba to defeat the Smog and save Un Lun Dun. She’s… the UnChosen one.

It’s a ploy that confounds expectations and reflects Miéville’s work as a whole. However, it’s also a gesture that plays well to what we would expect to see in young adult literature. Rather than giving in or waiting for someone else to solve Un Lun Dun’s problems, Deeba takes control of the situation. It is a meaningful lesson for students about to inherit a world in the grip of climate change, economic recession, and an unfortunately long list of other daunting issues.

Regardless of their age, fans of Miéville’s work will find satisfaction in the fantastic creations on display in Un Lun Dun. Some notable examples here include extreme librarians who place returned books on a cliff of bookshelves, and bus conductors who “conduct” electricity. And it would be wrong to omit the “binja” — not quite garbage bins and not quite ninjas. To his usually well-described creations, Miéville has added charming illustrations throughout the text.

Among other accomplishments, Miéville’s willingness to meld genres has earned him a considerable audience, but that may work against him here. Fans of Miéville’s more daring and adult moments may find Un Lun Dun’s plot somewhat unsatisfying. Ironically, young adult readers accustomed to the relentless plotting of The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) or Uglies (Scott Westerfeld) may find Un Lun Dun’s plot too drawn to its creations and characters. However, readers prepared to explore Un Lun Dun on its own terms should find it a satisfying young adult digression from one of our best fantasy writers. —Ryan Skardal

Looking for Jake — (2005) A collection of stories. Publisher: What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant young writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales — one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon. Among the fourteen superb fictions are “Jack” — Following the events of his acclaimed novel Perdido Street Station, this tale of twisted attachment and horrific revenge traces the rise and fall of the Remade Robin Hood known as Jack Half-a-Prayer. “Familiar” — Spurned by its creator, a sorceress’s familiar embarks on a strange and unsettling odyssey of self-discovery in a coming-of-age story like no other.

Looking for Jake

Looking for Jake is a collection of short stories by China Miéville, who has emerged as one of the most highly acclaimed fantasy authors of the 21st century. In Looking for Jake, Miéville freely explores whatever ideas take his fancy, without the burden of smoothing everything into a sensible narrative.

Not surprisingly, many of the stories in Looking for Jake therefore have a sort of experimental flavor. For example, “Reports of Certain Events in London” is an account of sentient streets that phase in and out of existence. In it, narrator China Miéville attempts to learn about the conflicts and character of these streets. As a writer, how would you approach such an idea to fit it into a conventional short story? Perhaps “not easily” would be Miéville’s answer. Although “Reports” is unique and captivating in its premise, it ends somewhat awkwardly.

Fortunately, other stories are fantastically successful, and no doubt all readers will find their own favorites — certainly I did. “Details” tells the story of a woman who has begun to see “the devil in the details” of everything: lines in a wall or stripes in a sweater. She lives her life trying to escape from a demon that waits for her everywhere. And most fantasy readers will enjoy “Familiar,” the tale of a discarded familiar and its struggle to survive without a master.

In Looking for Jake, Miéville moves effortlessly from one genre to another, ranging from graphic stories to ghost stories to medical entries. As with the best short story collections, readers must be prepared to move from one idea to the next. Unfortunately, some readers may not prove equal to the restlessness of Miéville’s muse, and not a few readers will walk away from one or two of the stories in this collection. However, given the variety on display here, perhaps the misfires will only serve to make the favorites shine brighter.

Because Miéville has earned the reputation of a weird writer among weird writers, some readers may see Looking for Jake as a sort of sampler plate. If so, beware: Miéville does not reach the same heights here as he does in Perdido Street Station or in later successes like The City & The City. Then again, Miéville’s greatest strength as a writer may be his overwhelming originality, and the stories collected in Looking for Jake certainly stand witness to his versatility and potential. —Ryan Skardal

The City & the City — (2009) Publisher: New York Times bestselling author China Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in an enthralling city that is unlike any other — real or imagined When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. It is a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen, a journey to Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & The City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

The City & The City

It’s impossible to discuss China Mieville’s The City & The City without discussing its premise. I don’t consider this much of a spoiler, as the reader is pretty fully confronted with the premise about 20-30 pages in, but it is led into with hints here and there so before hitting the premise, I’ll offer a very short summation and recommendation in the next two paragraphs, followed by the full discussion which includes the premise.

Despite the title’s promise of more urban New Weird fantasy along the lines of Perdido Street Station, anyone coming to The City & The City expecting more Bas-Lag fantastical settings and inhabitants, or the wild abundance of imagination that was the city in Un-Lun-Dun will find all that stripped away. The same for those looking for Mieville’s sometimes-baroque style or mini-treatises on economics/socialism. The City & The City tweaks reality in a tiny, almost singular fashion and runs with it. It’s a laser beam fantasy, not a Vegas show of neon. It’s more noir police procedural than fantasy, although the fantastical element is essential.

The police procedural part is compelling — filled with murder, red herrings, conspiracy theories, good cops fighting red tape, mysterious figures, pawns, buddy cops, chase scenes. The main character (it’s told from first person), a somewhat worn down cop, has a nice world-weary sense of justice to him and is drawn relatively fully, though I thought his character could have been a bit sharper. Secondary characters in general were a bit sketchy. The plot moves along at a strong pace throughout with very few slow spots and it does what this form should — becomes more tense and gripping the closer one gets to the end. The language is wonderful throughout: true-sounding dialogue, vivid descriptions, thoughtful metaphors. It's a great book.

The City & The City is set in two cities that share the same geographic location at a vague edge-of-Europe area. The two cites are Beszel — an old Eastern Europe sort of city with a whiff of decay about it — and Ul Qoma, a more modern type city on the rise. When I say they “share,” I don’t mean they are neighbors, nor are they like the twin cities. They sit basically atop each other, intertwined with one another, weaving in and out of each other, sometimes wholly separate and sometimes overlapping. There are sections that are wholly Beszel, sections that are wholly Ul Qoma, and sections that “crosshatch.”

What keeps the cities separate is the mental processes of each city’s inhabitants: they see only those in their city and “unsee” those in the other. To acknowledge the other city’s residents, to talk to or touch one, accidentally crash a car into a “foreign” car, is a “Breach” — a crime that is swiftly and often harshly dealt with by mysterious agents of Breach who appear as if out of nowhere.

The City & The City opens with Tyador Borlu, Extreme Crime Squad Inspector of Beszel, called to the scene of a murder. The murder, of course, is only part of something larger and soon Borlu is dealing with a possible Breach and then ends up having to “travel” to Ul Qomo and work with a partner there to pursue his investigation.

I found the premise both utter genius and utterly unbelievable. Those who can set aside disbelief will find the way the premise colors the events of the book and lingers in one’s mind afterward to be absolutely brilliant and thought-provoking. Those who can’t will toss the book down within 50 pages.

I have to say: the premise bothered me throughout. I think part of the reason for that is that the book is so mundane otherwise, so I’m being asked to believe regular people in our regular world would act this way. But, I managed to inhibit my rejection because I felt the premise forced the reader to question our ways of seeing, how and what we choose to look at and look away from, our motivations for doing so, how we separate and group ourselves, the ways in which we are always being “watched” and what effect that has on us, how we define culture and nation, how we can and cannot control our thoughts and language, how and whether we doubt our own perceptions, how we monitor ourselves constantly and pretend or edit or “unsee.”

The premise also added to the plot in a more mundane sense: it produced a thoroughly original chase scene! But what the premise did best was take a standard police procedural and turn it into a “big book” — one full of ideas, deep ideas, thoughtful ideas. It makes the book not simply compelling or interesting or entertaining, but thought-provoking. —Bill Capossere

The City & The City

Tyador Borlu is a police inspector in Beszel, an Eastern European city-nation. Borlu is good at his job and two things that make him good at it are a dogged persistence and a willingness to bend — or break — certain rules. When he gets called to scene where the body of a woman has been dumped, he cannot know, at first, the impact this single case will have on his life.

The anonymous woman is no unlucky prostitute or party girl fallen victim to a predator. She is something more mysterious and pivotal. Borlu and his assistant Lizbyet Corwi soon draw the conclusion that their Fulana (what we would call a “Jane Doe”) was murdered in a completely different city and dumped in Beszel. This creates a bureaucratic and diplomatic incident of dramatic proportions, for their Fulana lived, and died, in Ul Qoma.

Ul Qoma, a city with a different language, culture and customs, occupies exactly the same space and time as Beszel, but a different dimension. Mostly the two cities are discrete, but in places they cross-hatch, or bleed through. Most cross-hatching is thoroughly mapped, and citizens of each municipality are trained from childhood to “unsee” the incursions of their neighbor. To make contact across dimensions — to breach — without authorization will bring down instant action from the mysterious all-powerful entity also known as Breach.

Borlu, our first person narrator, never tells us all this straight out. He lets us discover it for ourselves as we ride along with him on his investigation. He speaks in the slightly world-weary tone of a good cop who, while disappointed by things he has seen in his work, is still not jaded. His stubbornness and his imagination, both of which he will need to solve the mystery of the murdered woman, have also made him a chronic crypto-criminal. Borlu frequently breaches, refusing to “unsee,” once even deliberately making eye contact with a woman on an elevated train in Ul Qoma.

Once the experienced reader knows that Borlu commits breach, he or she will know exactly where the book is headed. This does not lessen the enjoyment or the impact of the book in the least. Miéville constructs a convincing police procedural against the backdrop of these two cities. He uses tiny details to build up the mosaic of our understanding. To call someone in Ul Qoma from Beszel, even though the two cities are in the same place and the person you are calling might be standing right next to you (or right where you’re standing) it takes an international phone call. People in Beszel are banned from wearing certain colors, colors common in Ul Qoma, so that passers-by aren’t confused and don’t inadvertently breach.

Borlu’s investigation takes him into Ul Qoma legally, where he partners with a detective named Dhatt. Dhatt is a good investigator, if a very different kind of cop than Borlu, accepting the “cop discount” from local diners and having a fondness for what Borlu diplomatically calls “assertive interrogation techniques.” The case takes them to an archeological dig where the murdered woman, an American graduate student, worked. The artifacts, believed to be from a time deep in history or even pre-history when the cities were one, are intriguing and incomprehensible. Clues lead Borlu to nationalist terrorist groups in each city and the more elusive unificationists, who want to do away with Breach and unify the two cities. Along the way, more people are killed, but Borlu does not stop, confronting Breach itself to solve the mystery.

In some ways Miéville has returned to his literary roots, the sundered London of King Rat. His artistic triumph here is not the vision of two cities interlaced across dimensions, clever and thought-provoking as it is. It’s his exploration of how quickly humans adapt, how willingly we learn to “unsee” and “unknow.” Clearly this can be read as a metaphor for the things we choose not to see in our own cities or our own lives, but Miéville also celebrates the elasticity of the human mind. In the Ul Qoma section of the book, Borlu sits with Dhatt at a club. He looks across the street and sees, stuck on a wall, a poster of the murdered woman. He quickly tries to unsee it, in case it is one he posted in Beszel before he knew the woman’s identity. However, there is a chance, implied at least, that the poster he is not-seeing is in Ul Qoma, posted by the dead woman’s colleagues, and therefore no breach to observe. What do you unsee? What do you unknow? How do you know?

Borlu, inhabitant of the nested cities, is someone who rebels. He chooses to see. He always chooses to see. This lets him solve the mystery, and seals his fate.

Miéville manages to pull off a police procedural, and a surprisingly linear novel, that involves quantum theory. The City & the City succeeds on every level. —Marion Deeds

Kraken — (2010) Publisher: The Natural History Museum's prize exhibit — a giant squid — suddenly disappears. This audacious theft leads Clem, the research scientist who has recently finished preserving the exhibit, into a dark urban underworld of warring cults and surreal magic. It seems that for some, the squid represents a god and should be worshiped as such. Clem gradually comes to realise that someone may be attempting to use the squid to trigger an apocalypse. And so it is now up to him and a renegade squid-worshiper named Dean to find a way of stopping thedestruction of the world as they know it whilst themselves surviving the all out-gang warfare that they have unwittingly been drawn into.

Kraken

There are two adjectives for China Miéville’s Kraken: “fun” and “exhilarating.”

Miéville’s longer works have always seemed serious to me. Intricately imagined, believably peopled with intriguing characters, and told with elaborate arabesques and flourishes of language, they were still serious, even grave. Kraken is not. Maybe Miéville just needed to burn off some energy after coming off his stylistically restrained The City and the City, but Kraken is not a serious book, even though serious things happen. Good people die, others suffer great loss, the End of Days is upon us, and it still reads like a world-class thrill ride.

Billy Harrow is a curator at a natural history museum in London. The museum boasts a specimen of architeuthis, a giant squid, that Billy actually helped preserve. Billy’s carefree existence of work, listening to music, reading books and sipping a pint with his old college friend Leon ends abruptly when the squid and its glass tank disappear from the display room, something that should be impossible. In short order, Billy is interrogated by some very unusual cops from the Cult Squad, abducted by a man and a boy who unfold, origami-like, from a package, threatened by a sentient tattoo, and introduced to the Church of the Kraken, a group that worships the missing squid as God.

Billy quickly learns that in addition to quotidian London there is a layer he never saw before, Magical London, and all of Magical London wants the squid. The Church of the Kraken wants it because it is sacred. The Londonmancers want it to keep it safe. The followers of a dead criminal/magician/cultist want it. The Tattoo wants it because other people want it. Most of them think Billy has it, and those who don’t think he can find it. He is forced to put his trust in Kraken true-believer Dane in order to survive this strange new world.

Miéville is a highly-educated, well-read, powerful writer who thinks about economics, politics, faith and science. He also frolics in the pop-culture environment like a dolphin in tropical surf. Kraken is filled with pop-culture references, many of them science-fictional and fantastical, some I didn’t even get. Whether it’s Harry Potter, Men in Black, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Blake’s Seven or any generation of Star Trek, it gets a nod, as do more esoteric offerings like Farscape and Lexx. Star Trek, represented by a functioning phaser and a James T. Kirk figurine, plays prominently in the plot.

In Looking for Jake, Miéville has a story called “’Tis the Season.” It is a funny story. Kraken has the same sensibility. One of Billy’s otherworldly allies is a paranormal union organizer, trying to maintain a strike by magical familiars against their magician bosses. The Chaos Nazis are genuine bad-guys who believe in pain, death, anti-Semitism, and looking fabulous, in a velvet-coat-and-lace-cuffs kind of way.

All of Miéville’s trademark weirdness is spread out like a sidewalk market. Humans are metamorphosed into cell phones and radios; tattoos can think, talk and plan revenge; and the ocean has an embassy in London. Marge, Leon’s valiant and devoted girl-friend, enters Magical London with a protective spirit housed in her iPod, and Billy attracts a guardian angel made of bones and bottles.

My complaint? Billy adjusts to the reality of Magical London very easily, as does Marge — although Marge has time to peruse the internet first, and may be slightly better prepared, at least intellectually. We still never see, in either of these characters, a real struggle with disbelief, and the integration of acceptance, or knowledge. I found Billy’s education confusing, too. Early in the book we are told that Billy pursued or attained a higher level degree in theology and then switched to science. Since we have Dane, a true believer, I kept expecting Billy’s education to matter, but the second shoe never dropped. Billy may represent a microcosm of the world in the book. If so, that layer of symbolism wasn’t needed. The dance of religion/science, faith/knowledge, fear/spirituality plays out just fine, and Billy’s possible divinity degree is a distraction.

The City and the City, at heart an origin story, had a gray tone with flashes of color in the cross-hatched areas where the cities bled together. It was almost a police procedural. In contrast, Kraken is an all-access pass to the raucous, smoky, candle-and-neon-lit, swirling, deadly, music-throbbing, beer-guzzling, drug-gulping, ethereal, incense-scented, protean, ink-stained, kaleidoscopic, smile-as-we-cut-your-throat-dangerous, surreal, unreal, godly, squidly, twenty four/seven street carnival of Magical London. It is suspenseful. It is scary. And it’s fun. —Marion Deeds

Kraken

China Mieville’s Kraken is a rollicking head-spinning comic novel set in an alternate London where gods and cults and magic are so interwoven into the daily fabric that there is an entire squad in the London police to deal with those elements, and it is that squad which is called in to investigate when the eponymous Kraken is stolen from the Natural History Museum.

They’re not alone in their desire to find out what happened to the giant squid, however, which also happens to be considered a god by many. Its disappearance has its most direct impact on the employee who preserved it — Billy Harrow — who finds himself thrown into the London underworld and caught in a crossfire of warring goals, including those of the Kraken cult, the aforementioned special police squad, an underworld boss known as The Tattoo, and an ancient Egyptian spirit and labor leader in the midst of organizing a strike by the city’s familiars, who feel they’ve been abused by the local magic users. Throw in sundry other cults beyond the Krakenists, a pair of broadly horrific villains for hire, a host of oddball minor characters such as the one who practices “extreme origami” and a group of picketing pigeons, and not one but two scheduled apocalypses, and you’ve got yourself a wildly exuberant ride.

Perhaps a bit too much so. Kraken reminded me of an adult Un Lun Dun, Mieville’s YA novel, in that there were so many great concepts and ideas flying off the page that I wished he were a bit more selective and we could slow down and visit with a few of them a bit longer. I found that (more so than with his other books) I needed to let the many, many strange words wash over me and just act as unfocused filler that created a sense of a London submerged in magic and religion (lots of cults, lots of gangs, lots of acronyms and names of magical acts). If you stopped to ask yourself just what he was talking about at any given point, you’d just give up the way you would listening to a conversation between two quantum physicists discussing math issues.

While the jargon can at times make for a bumpy ride, and while I’d say the book comes in a bit too long, say 75 pages or so too long, the sheer inventiveness and boisterous wittiness of it sweeps you along through most of what is basically a big book-long chase scene, filled with gleeful stopovers to poke fun at various genre elements (Star Trek gets a few choice cameos on the comic stage). This is Mieville, though, so while you get great bursts of broad humor and quieter moments of chortling wit, you also get some serious sublayers — the most obvious of course being the labor issues, but the role of religion underlies quite a bit of the plot as well.

Characters probably take a back role to setting and plot here; I can’t say there’s much of an emotional attachment. Billy and his partner, a renegade Krakenist, carry just about all of the plot but mostly serve as vehicles for it. It’s really not until the girlfriend of Billy’s best friend becomes involved that I think we really get a character to care much about. When characters do stick in the mind, it’s more for their weirdness and originality than a sense of connection to them: his two villains Goss and Subby are utterly compelling (they’ve terrorized the city for centuries) when on stage and Wati grows on you by the end. I don’t, however, think that the lack of attachment to the characters detracts from the book; it just isn’t that kind of book.

Kraken isn’t an easy read thanks to the sheer flood of strangeness, but if you just ride the wave and let it carry you forward, it’s an exhilarating trip. Recommended. —Bill Capossere

Embassytown — (2011) Publisher: Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts — who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.

Embassytown

And the serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” ~Genesis, 3:4

“...You don’t need to... to link incommensurables. Unlike if you claim: ‘This is that.’ When it patently is not. That’s what we do. That what we call ‘reason,’ that exchange, that metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Tesh-escher wants. To bring in a lie.” He spoke very calmly. “It wants to usher in evil.” ~Embassytown

In the third, or adult, stage of their development, the Ariekene wake knowing Language, innately. There is no less-than-perfect feedback system. They don’t have to learn language in a complex social context. There is no need to struggle to decipher phonetics, facial expressions, tonal changes or physical non-verbal cues. Furthermore, the Ariekene can only speak things that are true. For these and other reasons humans consider the Ariekene Language unique in the galaxy.

It’s tempting to say that China Miéville’s Embassytown is about linguistics, because so much of it focuses on that topic. It’s about so much more, though; politics and art, power, addiction, innocence and wisdom, colonialism and what happens when different cultures engage.

Miéville gives us another interstitial first person narrator, not unlike Tyador in The City and The City, for Embassytown. Avice Benner Cho was born in Embassytown, the one bubble of human colonization on Arieka. Avice is an “immerser,” someone who helps shepherd the galactic ships through the disorienting space called the “immer.” As a child, before she ever left her home planet, Avice ran with a group of kids who tried to push the envelope of the aeoli, the literal bubble of breathable air around Embassytown, to cross the border into the Ariekene city, into the toxic atmosphere of the Hosts. Avice has gone off-world, but now returns with her husband, Scile, a linguist. As she did when she was a child, Avice shuttles across borders and between factions, an in-between person at a crucial moment in her planet’s history.

On Arieka, Avice has a modest measure of fame. When she was a child she was chosen by the Hosts to act out certain behavior. She is a simile. Avice is not the author of the simile, she is the thing itself — not Pablo Picasso, but a Picasso, not Beethoven, one of his sonatas.

The Ariekene have two mouths, and speak a dual-voiced language. Human settlers were quickly able to understand the Ariekene, but the Hosts could not understand humans. It takes a particular kind of human to manage the tonal and vocal needs of Language, and once the colonists in Embassytown realized this, they set about creating that kind of human. The only people who can speak to the Hosts are the genetically engineered Ambassadors.

Miéville takes his time unfolding the story. Scile, Avice’s husband, is particularly fascinated by the Festivals of Lies the Hosts hold, to which they invite the Ambassadors. Ambassadors, being human, can lie effortlessly. “I’m flying,” they’ll say, and the Ariekene, even knowing this is not true, will look skyward. They hold lying contests among themselves, and the contestants strain to lie. One contestant wins a round by calling a yellow object “yellow-beige.” It receives an ovation from its fellows.

Although they can apparently think of things that are not here-and-now true, the Hosts cannot articulate them, and this is why they must create similes like Avice in the material world, so that they can use that simile to talk about things in different ways.

Across the immer, the imperial government (never actually seen) is not happy that the power on Arieka rests solely with the Ambassadors, and they create an Ambassador of their own. The readers, who have observed the Festivals of Lies, understand immediately what happens when the Ariekene meet this new Ambassador, but it takes the citizens of Embassytown longer. As Avice puts it, “The sun came out, and the shops still sold things, and people went to work. It was a slow catastrophe.”

As things collapse, Avice, somewhat surprisingly, stays with the Ambassadors, while Scile leaves, disappearing into a hostile countryside. Because of Scile’s scholarship, the books he left, and Avice’s access, as an article of Language, to the Ariekene, Avice actually understands more about Language than the Ambassadors do. In one way, it’s an outsider’s understanding; in another, as a simile, she is immersed in Language.

I was afraid that Scile had been written into the book just to give Avice access to scholarly knowledge, but Scile is a player with his own motives and his own philosophy. He projects innocence onto the Ariekene, and wants to keep their Language uncorrupted, as he defines that, whatever the cost.

The final quarter of the book is a swirl of warfare, strategy, and language — many kinds of language. In the midst of one desperate attempt to control things, Bren, a former Ambassador, reminds Avice, “We aren’t training a new Ambassador. We’re distilling a drug.”

Miéville pitches this book — I’m using that term tonally — at literary readers, with a first person narrator who seems to be someone who is not powering the story, merely present and reporting on the events that happen around her. At the end, though, Avice’s understanding midwifes the cataclysmic change in Ariekene consciousness.

There is so much at work here that some nuance of character gets lost. While I can imagine why Avice falls out of love with Scile, I never see the moment where she falls in love with him, and that would have added poignancy to the ending.

I think the pacing is a little off in Embassytown, and there is a lot of talking, but, after all, it’s a book about language. Miéville wanted to write about how the mind changes language and language changes the mind. He succeeded. He also wrote a good book about power and respect, about colonialism and self-determination. This is a book I will read again, knowing that each read will uncover something new to think about. —Marion Deeds

Embassytown

Embassytown, China Miéville’s latest, is a sharply honed science fiction tale of linguistics. Yes, linguistics. And skeptical as one may be, it more than works. Despite its science fiction trappings, I would place Embassytown very close to The City & The City rather than Perdido Street Station and its sequels or Kraken in terms of style. I say that because while the strange alien race, futuristic bioengineering, etc. add a genre patina, the novel really is driven by a pretty narrowly focused philosophical premise regarding language, much as The City & The City was driven by the singular concept at its core.

The eponymous Embassytown is on a rarely visited backwater planet called Areika at the edge of the “immer,” the medium via which interstellar traffic is conducted. The planet is home to the Arekei, called Hosts by the human populace, which is small, limited to the town, and almost entirely dependent upon the Arekei for “biorigging” — extremely advanced bioengineering that provides power, food, etc. The Arekei have what seems to be an entirely unique language (called, simply, Language):  they are unable to tell lies in it and it can only be understood if spoken by a person ("person" is defined loosely, as there are non-human species) with “thought behind the utterance.” To communicate with the Arekei, though really that is an exaggeration for what actually happens, humans employ specialized Ambassadors. There are other important aspects of Language, as well as Ambassadorship, but to reveal more would ruin some of the slow unfolding of revelation that takes place.

The novel is told from the point of view of Avice, who grew up in Embassytown and then was lucky enough to get out by becoming an “immerser” — one who can easily handle the rigors of immer space. Before she leaves the planet, though, she becomes a simile in Language: “the girl who ate what was given her.” This gives her a bit of cache among the human population as well as with the Hosts, a fact that will allow her to fully take part in the later action of the novel. In the “out,” she meets her husband Scile, a linguist who, enthralled with the idea of Language, convinces her to return to Embassytown and take him with her. Shortly afterward, two major events occur which cause dramatic upheaval first in Embassytown and then planet-wide. One is a movement among the Arekei which grows out of their Festival of Lies (kind of like an open-mic night where individual Arekei try to tell a lie) and the other is the arrival of a new Ambassador from Bremen — the colonial power in this region of space to which Areika owes allegiance.

Structurally, Embassytown early on shifts between contemporary time roughly starting with the arrival of the new Ambassador and flashbacks to Avice’s childhood, her movement into the immer, her meeting Scile and getting married, and their early life together back in Embassytown. The characterization is effective; it does what it needs to do for the purposes of the novel, but nobody — including, unfortunately, Avice — truly pulled me in, save, surprisingly enough, one of the Hosts. It isn’t that the characters don’t feel “real;” Miéville concisely conveys differences even among characters where that is challenging. I think it was perhaps difficult to engage with them partly due to that concision, partly because we don’t spend a lot of time with very many characters, and partly because Avice’s perspective is somewhat distancing.

The alien race here feels truly alien throughout most of the book, thanks to the issues of communication. And their biotechnology is handled with the sort of creative brio one expects from Miéville by now. We don’t spend a lot of time dealing with the “out” or the “immer,” but we get enough to give us a sense of things as well as to tease us with wanting more — not because we need more for the book itself, but because what we’re told is so interesting. It’s a nice balance whereby we have just enough to make us feel grounded in an alternate reality, but I also absolutely would love to see more, a possibility Embassytown leaves quite open with its ending.

Embassytown starts off a little slow, Avice, as mentioned, isn’t easy to engage with, and Miéville throws in a lot of unfamiliar terms, which on the one hand creates a more richly full sense of futurity and difference, but also adds to the distancing effect. However, once we start getting a fuller sense of Language and how the humans and Hosts communicate, the book becomes simply fascinating. In more mundane fashion, it builds interest by ratcheting up the action as it progresses; we get colonial politics, possible rebellions, shooting battles, end-of-the-world scenarios, life-and-death choices, possible inter-species war, and a whole lot of other things that would be telling too much.

But to be honest, the “action” part of the novel was secondary to me. What was truly compelling and thought provoking were the linguistic aspects that drove all of the more typically dramatic events. And Miéville does a great job of slowly revealing those aspects little by little — first simply what they are (how exactly do Hosts talk and listen, what exactly is an Ambassador), then what follows from those revelations (what does it mean to..., what sort of society forms if...), and finally, the repercussions when change enters the system. The nature of communication, of language, of truth, the uses of metaphor and simile: these may seem some pretty dry and abstract points upon which to build a story — and perhaps Miéville’s concern over that is what gets us those more typically dramatic scenes. Or perhaps those dramatic scenes are meant to drive home just how important those allegedly dry and abstract points are to our daily lives. In any case, what we get is a book that melds action with deep thought, something I thought The City & The City did as well. The City & The City ended up as one of my top ten novels for 2009, and while Embassytown isn’t quite that good, it is sitting pretty in my Top Ten for 2011 almost halfway through the year. It’s hard to see something coming along to knock it out. Highly recommended. —Bill Capossere

Embassytown

Avice is a returned outgoer, an immerser, a floaker, and a simile. Unfortunately, she also lives on the one planet in the universe where the Universal Translator fails to communicate, so readers will have to catch up while reading China Miéville’s new novel Embassytown.

Avice is from Embassytown, home to a minority population of humans on a remote planet. She leaves her home to travel the galaxy, a decision that Avice explains rather elegantly: “I was born in a place that I thought for thousands of hours was enough of a universe. Then I knew quite suddenly that it was not.” She only returns after her fourth marriage, this time to a linguist named Scile.

Scile is determined to crack the alien language of the Ariekei, a group of aliens that Avice and others from Embassytown refer to as the Hosts. The Hosts have a unique language (called “Language”), one that relies on the simultaneous expression of two contrasting sounds that “cut” and “turn.” For the Hosts to hear, the speaker must also communicate the originating thought. In “Language,” it is impossible for the Hosts to lie, and a lesser author might have decided it was impossible for humans, with their monovoice, to communicate with these aliens. Not so for Miéville, who always seems to delight in answering his impossible riddles with ingenious solutions that in turn lead to daunting problems.

Readers will enjoy learning how Ambassadors communicate with the Areikei, but the Hosts will remain a mysterious, truly “alien” culture. So it is no surprise that they are often exalted: Language, which contains no lies, seems pure, and the Hosts also have “biorigging” technologies that other races would swear are scientifically impossible. Still, their planet has been colonized by Bremen, and when Bremen sends a new ambassador to destabilize the local politics of Embassytown, the plot takes an unexpected turn, one that transforms this science fiction novel into a Western’s last stand.

Embassytown devotes a great deal of time to language, and it seems fitting that China Miéville showcases his most mature and refined (least pugnacious?) writing to date. The writing suggests and evokes, trusting our imagination to fill in the details. I particularly enjoyed our introduction to the Hosts:

The Host came forward with its swaying grace, in complicated articulations. It looked at me, I think: I think the constellation of forking skin that was its lusterless eyes regarded me. It extended and reclenched a limb. I thought it was reaching for me.

There is a challenge in imagining descriptions like these, but Miéville allows his readers the liberty to imagine interstellar species and worlds as they see fit.

The early plot of Embassytown is decidedly slow, and readers will need to be prepared to revel in this unusual universe, its strange aliens, and the Hosts’ unique Language. Miéville’s heroine, Avice, is often insightful but rarely engaging, which gives the narrative voice a detached feeling, as though we are reading an aristocrat’s history of the Host’s revolution rather than a daring adventure about Avice’s personal journey through the revolution. This distance allows Miéville to outline just how cool his latest setting is, but it just as often mutes the novel’s tension. Consequently, Embassytown may not be the easiest introduction to China Miéville’s writing.

However, it is remarkable that Miéville has produced such a consistently strong and thoughtful body of work. His fans, as per usual, will have little to complain about. Indeed, Embassytown is yet another piece of evidence suggesting that Miéville’s unusual career path — which defies genres, series, and the sense that there is a limit to anyone’s imagination — has arguably led to the most exciting body of work of our time. —Ryan Skardal

Railsea — (2012) Young adult. Publisher: On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea — even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it's a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict — a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible — leads to considerably more than he'd bargained for. Soon he's hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

Railsea

You just know there are lots of reasons people might give a pass to China Miéville’s newest novel, Railsea. Some will see the YA or sci-fi/fantasy labels hanging on it and dismiss it out of hand. Others will hear it features a captain obsessed with hunting a giant white moldywarpe that cost her an arm and think “I hate parody/allusion” or “I really hated Moby Dick” or “Boy, I hate books with words like ‘moldywarpe” (or all three). Some will sigh mightily at the references to “symbol,” “philosophies,” environmental deprivation, and the woes of capitalism. Finally, some will note the direct address to the readers and discussion of the novel’s own narrative choices, and shrug “Metafiction. Meh.” To which I say they get what they deserve — missing out on a great wild and raucous romp of a novel filled to the brim with all the above plus trains, pirates, nomads, mole hunts, trips to the end of the known world, faithful and brave animal companions, loyal siblings, brilliant wordplay, literary allusions, ampersands, orphans, monsters, twists and turns aplenty, exploration and a plucky young boy who knows little save he has yet to discover his life’s task. Sucks for them, obviously.

The railsea is as the name implies: an ocean of railroads. Switch water for land, boats for trains, and you’ve got the world of Railsea, crisscrossed by a seemingly infinite number of rail lines, cross lines, parallel lines, switches, roundabouts, and the like, all lying atop an earthen world filled with monstrously familiar predators — naked molerats the size of large dogs, huge carnivorous earwhigs, and of course, the great southern moldywarpe, capable of destroying an entire train — while above the habitable area is a poisonous upsky filled with equally fearsome creatures. Humans ply the rails as salvagers, navy folk, slavers and slaves, tourists, and, in the case of our young protagonist, Sham Yes ap Shroop, molers — those who hunt the giant moles for their pelts and flesh. Sham’s Captain Naphi, though, is more — one of those captains obsessed with a particular giant animal. In her case, a giant white mole named Mocker-Jack that took her arm, since replaced by a cybernetic version.

Sham is already feeling out of place on his first voyage on the Medes, where he has shipped out as a doctor’s apprentice. When he discovers a camera memory card amidst a wrecked train they stop to explore for salvage, he soon finds another quest, a more personal one, to replace the one he’d joined only partially of his own choosing.

His goal, however, is shared by a host of others, not all well intentioned. Among these are the Shroak siblings (whose parents took the pictures Sham found), the aforementioned pirate, the agents of an aggressive Railsea state, an independent salvager, and others. What they seek may upend all they know of their world.

To say more would be to ruin half the fun of this novel. Suffice it to say that those simply seeking an exciting action-filled tale will be more than satisfied, especially in the book’s second half. The first half moves at a slower pace, but it’s filled with so much invention — the animals, the trains, the cities, and so on — that one doesn’t really mind or notice. And that isn’t to say there isn’t any action in the first half, which features our first mole hunt, an alleyway mugging, and a drunken pub-crawl. But the book leaps into high gear in the second half, and then into third gear toward the end. Miéville also isn’t afraid, despite the book’s YA nature, to let the bodies fly (some literally), raising the stakes as the book goes on. Maybe because it’s ostensibly a YA book, the plot, despite its twists and turns, is more narrowly focused, speedier, and tighter than many of Miéville’s other works. By the way, one shouldn’t confuse YA with simplistic language. There is no condescension whatsoever to the linguistically challenged here.

The story is well served by its characters, sharply drawn as one has come to expect from this author. Sham is reliably, realistically adolescent: awkward, unsure, confused, prone to fantasies and to backsliding. Captain Naphi is simply fantastic, intriguing at the start but growing utterly can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her fascinating by the end of the novel. Even those characters without a lot of page time have some vivid moments — the first mate, Sham’s lone friend aboard the Medes, a “naval” captain.

This being Miéville, though, we get a lot more than an exciting story and interesting characters, of course. The giant animals the captains hunt and the obsessions to do so aren’t just animals and jobs; they’re “philosophies” that “embodied meanings, potentialities, ways of looking at the world...  a faithfulness to an animal that was now a world-view.” The setting, besides being wildly inventive, is also a commentary on modern capitalism. The book makes direct analogy between the rails and storytelling, calls attention to its own construction, as when it stops to examine a decision regarding point of view: “This train, our story, will not, cannot, veer now from this track on which, though not by choice, Sham is dragged.” Having some knowledge of the arts beyond Moby Dick won’t hurt either, with some of the references more obvious than the others, such as a nod to Odysseus’ negotiation of Scylla and Charybdis. Readers’ mileage will vary on how they respond to such elements. Some will be fine with the metafictional aspect and groan at the politics, others might feel the opposite. I can’t say that Miéville does something with each of these elements that feels wholly satisfying and some of these moments feel a little clumsily inserted, but I’ll take an audacious riot of ideas, even if some don’t wholly succeed, over being served up the same old same old or a tasteless mélange of plot points that never ask much of me.

Last year I ranked Miéville’s Embassytown as one of my top five novels and before that I did the same with The City and The City. Railsea doesn’t have the depth of either of those, but it is in some ways a more enjoyable read than either. I hopped aboard and didn’t get off until I was done several hours later. I recommend you do the same. All aboard! —Bill Capossere