Iron Council - China Miéville

   2004; 564 pages.  Book 3 in the “Bas-Lag” trilogy.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Steampunk Fantasy; Sword and Sorcery; Weird Fantasy.  Laurels: 2005 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (winner).  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Three men, all of them believers, all of them revolutionaries, all of them searching for something.

 

    Cutter is wandering through the wastelands, searching for Judah Low and the Iron Council.  He wants to warn them that the city-state mega-power, New Crobuzon, has dispatched forces to seek out and destroy them.

 

    Judah Low is the Iron Council’s somaturge (their what??).  He’s dedicated his life to the overthrow of New Crobuzon.  He’s searching for others that share his rebellious passion.

 

    Ori is a resident of New Crobuzon, and a jaded member of the underground resistance there.  He’s tired of his compatriots talking the talk, but not walking the walk.  He’s searching for a way to light a spark of action amongst his fellow dissidents.

 

    New Crobuzon can be summed up by three M’s:  Militia, Magisters, and the Mayor.  Maybe even add a fourth, Mages.  They can crush any and all of the resisters.  If only they can locate them.

 

What’s To Like...

    Iron Council is the closing book in China Miéville’s fantastic Bas-Lag trilogy.  The first two books are reviewed here and here.  The three novels are all standalones; the storylines are not connected and the characters are completely different in each tale.  What ties them together is the setting – New Crobuzon, the main city in Bas-Lag.

 

    For the most part, we follow the lives of the three men mentioned in the introduction, primarily how they impact and relate to the Iron Council, which is a group of dissident railroad-builders that have seized one of the government’s trains along with its rail-laying equipment.

 

    China Miéville’s superb writing skills are once again displayed here: incredibly detailed world-building, deep and fascinating character development, a masterful vocabulary, and a complex and compelling storyline.  Our trio of rebel protagonists are pitted against a well-equipped and numerically superior foe, and they find it hard to keep their followers, and themselves, from giving up and running away.

 

    Iron Council is written in English, not American, which is always a treat for me.  It’s both a steampunk and a sword-&-sorcery tale, with weapons such as pistols, crossbows, blunderbusses, rive-bows, and motor-guns.  The magic/thaumaturgy is on a par with the weaponry: you can “glamour” someone, be a whispersmith, or make use of verity-gauging.  Judah Low is a somaturge, a rare magic art that enables him to conjure up golems out of just about any substance, and which he learned while staying with the stiltspears.  Stiltspears and golems are just a smattering of the strange and interesting creatures that you’ll meet along the way in this story.

 

    I liked that the revolutionary heroes portrayed here are not perfect.  They squabble, get depressed, get mad, and have to contend with situational ethics.  One example of the latter is the tagline that appears below, right after the two excerpts.

 

    The ending is both hopeful and sad, as well as brilliantly unexpected while at the same time slightly anticlimactic.  Judah Low conceives and constructs it, and it's a wonderful answer to the dilemma of what to do when one is up against overwhelming odds.  It leaves the door open for a sequel, but China Miéville has not penned one in the 19+ years since Iron Council was published, so I think we can safely say the series is complete.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Cacotopic (adj.) : of an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be.

Others: Chaverim (n., plural); Boscage (n.), Somaturge (n.); Gurned (v.), Hadal (adj.); Tain (n.); and dozens more.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 964 ratings and 170 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.72/5 based on 15,293 ratings and 1,077 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Toro’s out there and he’s doing something, yeah?  He’s fighting, and he’s not waiting like you keep waiting.  And you sit and wait, and tell him he’s getting ahead of himself?

    It’s not like that.  I won’t snip at anyone fighting the magisters, or the militia, or the Mayor, but Toro can’t change things on his own, or with his little crew, Jack . . .”

    “Yeah but he’s changing something.”

    “Not enough.”

    “But he’s changing something.”  (pg. 76)

 

    “We have a responsibility,” Ann-Hari said.  Cutter never felt eased in her presence.  The fervour in her unnerved him—it made him tired and uncertain of himself, as though she might win him over against his will.  He knew he was jealous—no one had had such as effect on Judah Low as Ann-Hari.

    “We’re a dream,” she said.  “The dream of the commons.  Everything came to this, everything came here.  We got to here.  This is what we are.  History’s pushing us.  (pg. 514)

 

If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better?  If two deaths’ll save a city?  (pg. 370)

    There are some quibbles.  China Miéville has never shied away from using cusswords in his novels, and here I counted 34 cases in the first 10% of the book.  That doesn’t include the clever use of “faux cussing”, including terms like “for Jabber’s sake”, “godsdamn”, and “in Jabber’s name.”  There’s also several instances of several types of sex—hetero, homo, manual—and a bit of cross-dressing.

 

    There’s an extended backstory/flashback section early on telling how the Iron Council came to be.  It comes without any warning to the reader, which confused me at first, but you’ll know you’ve hit it when the new chapters are no longer numbered.

 

    China Miéville is an unabashedly left-leaning activist (read the Wikipedia article), and a lot of readers seemed to be upset that this is reflected in the Iron Council storyline, which may explain how a Locus Award-winning novel can have such mediocre ratings at Amazon and Goodreads.

 

    Some of the vocabulary the author utilizes will keep you resorting to Google for enlightenment.  Personally I had fun discovering which words were incredibly obscure (such as “tain”), and which were made-up ones by Miéville (such as “somaturge”).

 

    Finally, and repeating a quibble from my reviews of the previous two tales, this series screams for a map and a Cast of Characters.

 

    I thoroughly enjoyed Iron Council, and the Bas-Lag trilogy as a whole.  Those quibbles just mean Miéville is treating the reader as an adult, and the lushness and complexity of the text and storyline mean that he also assumes that the reader is reasonably intelligent and imaginative.  This was my ninth China Miéville book, and none of them have disappointed me.

 

    9 Stars.  China Miéville is renowned and respected enough that the definitions for even his made-up words can be found by googling them.  “Somaturge” was confusing me until I looked it up.

The Scar - China Miéville

   2002; 578 pages.  Book Two (out of three) in the “Bas-Lag” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Steampunk Fiction; Weird Fantasy.  Laurels: 2003 British Fantasy Award (winner); 2003 Locus Award (winner); nominated for 2002 British Science Fiction Award, 2002 Phillip K. Dick Award, 2003 Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2003 Hugo Award, and 2003 World Fantasy Award.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Bellis Coldwine is going on an extended cruise.  She boarded the ship Terpsichoria in the capital city of New Crobuzon and is headed for the distant port of Nova Esperium.

 

    The Terpsichoria is not your typical cruise ship though.  It’s primarily used to transport slaves throughout the empire although paying passengers such as Bellis are also welcomed.  But this is not a pleasure voyage for Bellis; it’s one of desperation.  Her friends and acquaintances in New Crobuzon have been “disappearing” in the middle of the night, and it's not hard to figure out that it won’t be long before whoever the abductors are, probably the New Crobuzon militia, will soon be coming for her as well.

 

    Alas, Fate has a detour in store for Bellis.  The open sea is a dangerous place, and the Terpsichoria has just been captured by pirates.  They’re freeing the slaves and press-ganging both them and passengers into becoming residents of the floating pirate metropolis of Armada.

 

    Oh well.  Any port in a storm is fine by Bellis.  What’s important to her is where she’s fleeing from, not where she is, or where she’s going.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Scar is the second book in China Miéville’s “Bas-Lag” trilogy.  It’s not really a sequel, but it’s set in the same world as Book One, Perdido Street Station, which I read more than ten years ago and is reviewed here.

 

    China Miéville’s world-building in The Scar is both ambitious and masterfully done.  Most of the story takes place on the giant ocean-borne city of Armada, which has citizens dwelling both above and below the water surface.  The city itself is made up of dozens upon dozens of watercraft seized by the pirates, welded together, and converted into an urban area.  That may sound a bit contrived, but in Miéville’s hands it works perfectly.

 

    The character development is equally dazzling.  For the most part, we follow Bellis's adventures and intrigues, as she struggles to come to grips with the fact that Armada is both her new and permanent home.  We meet all sorts of sentient species that have found a haven in, under, and around Armada, including crays (half-human/half crayfish), cactacae (“cactus people”), dinichthys (“bonefish”), vampires (called “vampir”), anophelli (“mosquito people”), scabmettlers, grindylow, and the bizarre, artificially-fashioned “Remade”.  Who knows, maybe we'll even spot a creature called the godwhale, otherwise known as the "mountain-that-swims".

 

    Lots of species means lots of spoken languages, and Bellis finds herself in a key position of a translator due to her working knowledge of some of the more arcane tongues.  She may not be fluent in all of these, but for now she’s the best resource the wandering pirates have got.

 

    The storyline is complex, which is typical for China Miéville novels.  The reasons for Bellis’s fleeing New Crobuzon remain obscure for a long time, as does her determination to eventually return there.  Other press-ganged passengers from the Terpsichoria have their own reasons for wanting to contact New Crobuzon officials and some pirate leaders have their own agendas for steering Armada to uncharted waters.  It was a fun challenge to figure out who was using whom, and what ulterior motives the various main characters had.  It takes a while for the action to kick in alongside the intrigue, but once it does, you are treated to several exciting, chapter-long battle scenes.

 

    There is some magic (called “thaumaturgy”) present in the tale, including some very useful charmed artifacts, but it doesn’t overwhelm the storyline.  I liked the concept of “probability mining”, and chuckled at the fact that book-hoarding was considered a serious crime in the Garwater sector of Armada.  Miéville's choice of words is a vocabulary-lover’s delight: my favorites are given below, but there were lots more.

 

    Everything builds to a suitably exciting ending, including several twists to keep you on the edge of your seat.  In the end, Armada and its inhabitants are saved from a dire fate.  Or did they chicken out and miss a chance to gain unprecedented power?  That remains for the surviving characters, as well as the reader, to ponder.  Only China Miéville knows the answer.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Gurned (v.) : made a grotesque face (British).

Others: Disphotic (adj.); Integument (n.), Adumbrating (v.); Fatuous (adj.), Raddled (v.); Delimited (v.), Pusillanimous (adj.); Tup (v.), Detumescent (adj.); Bathetic (adj.), Benthic (adj.); Kitted (v., British), Blebbed (adj.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 527 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.17/5 based on 29,260 ratings and 1,817 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    In New Crobuzon, what was not regulated was illicit.  In Armada, things were different.  It was, after all, a pirate city.  What did not directly threaten the city did not concern its authorities.  Bellis’ message, like other secrets, did not have to strive to be covert, as it might back home to avoid the militia.  Instead, it sped through this wrangling city with ease and speed, leaving a little trail for those who knew how to look.  (loc. 6141)

 

    “They knew how to pick at the might-have-beens and pull out the best of them, use them to shape the world.  For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes.  Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers—and one comes true.

    “But the Ghosthead knew how to tap some of those that might have been.”  (loc. 6703)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Scar is presently priced at $11.99 at Amazon.  The other two books in the series go for $9.99 (Perdido Street Station) and $10.99 (The Iron Council).  China Miéville has another dozen or so full-length e-books for your Kindle, most of them fiction, ranging in price from $7.99 to $13.99.

 

Let’s help you come up with my plan.  (loc. 3646)

    It’s hard to find anything to quibble about in The Scar.  It took me a while to figure out what the main plotline was, but I suspect this was a deliberate on the part of Miéville, since it allows the reader to soak up the mesmerizing atmosphere of life on Armada.

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing, with the f-bomb and variations of damn being the most popular choices, although the fabulous word "shat" also makes an appearance.  Cusswords involving deities are common too, with a majority of them invoking a local god called “Jabber”.  There are a couple rolls-in-the-hay by Bellis, one allusion to auto-eroticism, and repeated instances of "statuary-eroticism".  I'll let you muse on that last one.

 

    My final gripe is also the nit-pickiest: there are no maps, at least in the Kindle version of The Scar.  Given all the seafaring travel that Bellis and the pirates do, my brain was screaming for a chart showing this world.

 

    9½ Stars.  I’m of the opinion that, since the passing of Kurt Vonnegut some years back, the most skilled contemporary author is now China Miéville.  The Scar did nothing to change my viewpoint.  I have two more of his books sitting on my TBR shelf: Iron Council, which is the final book in this Bas-Lag trilogy, and October, a non-fiction historical account of the Russian revolution in October, 1917.  It’s a pleasant quandary to decide which of these I should read next.

Embassytown - China Miéville

   2011; 369 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Steampunk; Hard Science Fiction.  Laurels: 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Embassytown lies at the edge of our universe.  Literally.  It straddles the hazy line between the Immer (the “Always”) and the Manchmal (the “Sometimes”).  You and I would call the Immer the Universe.  No one is sure exactly what the Manchmal is like.  Those who have bravely journeyed there have never returned.

    Avice Brenner Cho was born and raised in Embassytown.  She is an “Immerser”, meaning she’s traveled the Immer,  That's somewhat unusual for somebody from her hometown.  Now she's returned to her roots, which is even more uncommon.  Hardly nobody who leaves Embassytown ever wants to return home.

    The city hosts all sorts of ambassadors from all sorts of other parts of the cosmos.  Kedis, Shur’asi, Pannegetch, and of course, humans from Terre.  The proper term for the sentient natives of this land is “the Ariekei”, but they're more commonly referred to as “the Hosts”.

    Communicating with the Hosts is a daunting task, and is mostly relegated to ambassadors.  The Hosts rarely deign to communicate with anyone less than an envoy, but recently they’ve taken interest in Avice.  For reasons unknown, they want her to perform something called a “simile” ritual, with the promise that she will not be harmed and will be amply compensated for her participation.

    Avice complies, and apparently lived up to Ariekei expectations.  They have declared Avice to now be a simile.  And a very specific one at that.

    Henceforth, Avice is the simile known as “a girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her.”

What’s To Like...

    The storyline in Embassytown is anything but typical.  We aren’t saving the galaxy from annihilation or rescuing a princess; indeed, we’re doing little more than defending a city and trying to understand what makes the Ariekei tick.

    The world-building is phenomenal.  You’re on a planet far away from Earth, and several centuries in the future.  Things are different, and the English language has evolved.  It's now called Anglo-Ubiq, and China Miéville invents all sorts of new words to tell his story, such as miabs, automs, shiftfather, floaking, trids, corvids, “into the out”, sublux, and exoterres.  Sometimes he gives a brief explanation of what these mean; other times you can figure them out from context.  For example, you can pretty much guess that “sublux” means “less than light speed”.

    Also, the book is written in “English”, not American”, so you have jewellery and licences, colours and rancour, metres and artefacts, etc.  All China Miéville novels are a vocabularian’s delight.  I was delighted to run across ogees (a crossword puzzle word) and politesse (a word I first heard Mick Jagger sing), and the elegant phrase “homo dispora”.

    The story is told in the first-person POV (Avice’s), and the settings are limited to Embassytown and the surrounding countryside.  The Ariekei have a whole different way of looking at language, and are fascinated by the bizarre human habit called “lying”, something totally foreign to them.  They go as far as to hold “Festivals of Lies” to see if any of them are even capable of telling lies.  And just as they start to come to grips with falsehoods, something unprecedented happens.  New ambassadors show up, and the Hosts go berserk.  Literally.

  

    The ensuing chaos builds to a good, logical, not-particularly-twisty ending, which surprisingly has a hopeful tone to it.  There’s certainly literary room for sequels (surely further adventures wait for Avice and the Manchmal begs to be explored), but if Miéville has penned any, I’m not aware of them.

Kewlest New Word...

Polysemy (n.) : the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase.

Others: Semitic (adj.); Politesse (n.); Unbowdlerized (adj.); Louche (adj.); Risible (adj.); Scupper (as a verb); Misprisioned (v.); Necrophage (n.).

Kindle Details...

    Embassytown sells for $12.99 right now, which is fitting for a work by a top-tier steampunk sci-fi author.  China Miéville’s other novels go for anywhere from $4.99 to $13.99.  If you have enough patience, China Miéville occasionally offers generous discounts on his books, sometimes as low as $1.99.

Excerpts...

    “What’s out there?” I said.  Wyatt shook his head.

    “I don’t know.  You’d know better than me, immerser, and you don’t know at all.  But something.  There’s always something.”  There was always something in the immer.  “Why’s there a pharos here?” he said.  “You don’t put a lighthouse where no one’s going to go.  You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go.”  (loc. 3358)

    It had seen us – us similes made of Terre, not merely us similes – as key to some more fundamental and enabling not-truth, spoken with dandy élan though only a word-trick, hinted at that shift born of contact.  Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things.  Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much.  Before the humans came, we didn’t speak.

    Through a dissembling made of omitted clauses it laid out its manifesto.  Before the humans came we didn’t speak: so we will, can, must speak through them.  It made a falsity a true aspiration.  (loc. 4165, and how the Ariekei taught themselves to lie – by dropping clauses from the end of a truth.)

 “This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.”  (loc. 253)

    Overall, I’d call Embassytown a difficult, but not slow, read.  You have to stay alert; it can get confusing at times keeping track of what all those new words mean.  But if you find yourself wondering if you are fully grasping what some of the made-up words mean, head on over to Wikipedia and read their article on the book.  I did, and was pleasantly surprised at my degree of comprehension.

    My main problem while reading Embassytown was figuring out the plotline.  Both the world-building and Avice’s backstory are wonderfully detailed, but it takes a lot of words to present them.  Somewhere around 25%, it dawned on me that I had no idea what the storyline was, mostly because it hadn't been introduced yet.

    Fortunately, China Miéville is a fantastic writer, so much so that even his long and drawn-out planetary descriptions and Avice’s biography held my interest.  I would  however caution other writers not to emulate Miéville in this regard.  Don't wait until the tale is more than one-quarter finished before introducing the main plotline.

    8 Stars.  Here's an excerpt from the Wikipdia article: In attempting to portray an authentically "alien" alien race, Miéville commented that he finds it almost impossible, stating "if you are a writer who happens to be a human, I think it's definitionally beyond your ken to describe something truly inhuman, psychologically, something alien."

    I think that's what China Miéville was trying to accomplish in Embassytown, and FWIW I think he succeeded admirably.

Railsea - China Miéville

   2012; 424 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : YA; Steampunk; Fantasy; “Weird Fiction” (per the author).  Overall Rating : 10*/10.

    On a far-in-the future Earth, things are markedly different.  The ground, and there’s a lot of it, is lethal.  No, it's not poisonous, but it's full of burrowing animals of enormous size, all of which have a taste for human beings.

    Mankind and his civilization are confined to stretches of rocky outcroppings.  Burrowing beasties may be deadly, but they can’t dig through solid rock.  Crops are grown on the patches of ground that lay on top of the rock formations.  But it still would be pretty much a hopeless existence.  Except for the railsea.

    Crisscrossing the predator-laden ground are innumerable sets of railroad tracks, going here, there, and anywhere, but never in a straight line.   An expert railsea crew is essential to navigate them, for there’s a lot of switching, doubling-back, braking, and maneuvering through perilous curves along the way.  There are also a few lighthouses to help guide the trains to far-flung towns, where goods can be traded.

    But trade is not the only activity on the railsea.  There are forlorn wrecks of ancient trains, whose salvage is a profitable business.  And a speeding train with a crew of skilled harpoonists can reverse the roles of predator and prey.  Killing a giant moldywarpe can furnish meat for weeks on end for a hungry train crew, and is in huge demand at any port of call.

    So come along with young Shamus (“Sham”) Yes ap Soorap, a doctor’s apprentice on the good ship/moletrain “Medes”, and get a taste of the thrill of the hunt.  You never know what surprises might turn up.

What’s To Like...

    Railsea is another masterpiece of YA steampunk fiction from China Miéville, who I consider to be arguably the most talented author around nowadays.  As with all of his books, the world-building is fantastic, the storytelling superb, and the writing masterful.  Miéville is at his finest here – confident enough to break down the fourth wall at times, and replacing the word “and” by an ampersand (“&”) every time it appears.  This last nuance apparently annoyed some readers, but I thought it was great, and its rationale does get explained on page 163.

    Miéville also tips his hat to some great classics from the past.  You’ll easily recognize the influences of Moby Dick, Dune, and Treasure Island.  Robinson Crusoe gets a brief nod towards the end of the story, and so does Shikasta, which I’m assuming is a quick bow at the great Doris Lessing.

    There are predators aplenty, both in the sky and beneath the soil, and each section starts with a way-kewl drawing of one of them, including my favorite – the blood rabbit.

    I loved the attention to detail.  The futuristic world may be bleak, but it is also rich and complex.  Although this is a steampunk world, there are submarines (which burrow through the underground, just like the critters), and even a few vintage-WW1 era airplanes.  The captains of the ships/trains aspire to have a “philosophy”, which is a nemesis akin to Captain Ahab’s Moby Dick, and it is considered a high honor if one’s philosophy has cost one’s captain an arm or a leg.  Literally.

    The chapters are short: 87 of them for 424 pages.  Those illustrations are an added bonus.  Railsea opens with an exciting moldywarpe chase, which helps the reader instantly get caught up in the daily life of the crew on a moletrain.  Somehow, despite all the attention to detail, the pace of the story remains brisk.

    The ending is superb.  Just when you think we’re going to wander around forever, the focus shifts to a quest for understanding the situation, something that’s been tickling the back of Sham’s mind for most of the book.  In the end everyone, including the reader, is given an inkling of who built the railsea, and why the terrain is the way it is. Railsea is a standalone story, and although it leaves room for a sequel, I don’t think China Miéville has any plans to do one.

Kewlest New Word...

Pootling (n.) : moving or traveling somewhere slowly and with no real purpose.  (a Britishism)

Others: Bolshy (adj.); Phonemes (n., pl.); Chthonic (adj.); Strigine (adj.); Sett (n.); Snaffled (v.).

Excerpts...

    From beneath came a dust-muffled howl.

    Amid strange landforms & stubs of antique plastic, black earth coned into a sudden hill.  & up something clawed.  Such a great & dark beast.

    Soaring from its burrow in a clod-cloud & explosion it came.  A monster.  It roared, it soared, into the air.  It hung a crazy moment at the apex of its leap.  As if surveying. As if to draw attention to its very size.  Crashed at last back down through the topsoil & disappeared into the below.

    The moldywarpe had breached.  (pg. 6)

    Their antique & reclaimed wares were set on stalls on the dockside, according to various taxonomies.  Pitted & oxidized mechanisms from the Heavy Metal Age; shards from the Plastozoic; printouts on thin rubber & ancient ordinator screens from the Computational Era: all choice arche-salvage, from astonishingly long ago.  & the less interesting stuff, too, that discarded or lost anything from a few hundred years ago to yesterday – nu-salvage.  (pg. 109)

 “Sentiment & moletrains don’t mix.”  “There is nowhere,” Fremlo said, “more sentimental than a moletrain.  Thankfully.”  (pg. 319)

    I can’t really think of anything to quibble about for Railsea.  It took me a while to get the hang of the author’s use of whaling/shipping terms for adventuring aboard a land-bound train.  But I blame that mostly on me.  Miéville does stop to give explanations at times (“there are two layers to the sky, & four layers” – page 30), but usually I was like: “Yeah, whatever. Now what happened next?” And one can always consult Wikipedia for a concise synopsis of the Railsea world.

    My rule thumb is if I can’t think of any negatives, even trivial ones, about a book, and if the storyline and writing resonates with me, then there’s only one rating to give it.  Hence:

    10 Stars.  I’ve enjoyed every China Miéville book I’ve read, my favorite being another YA novel of his, Un Lun Dun (reviewed here).  I’ve still got 4-5 of his books to go.  I don’t have any good explanation for why I’m behind reading his stuff, except to say that his books rarely show up in used-book stores.

Kraken - China Miéville

   2010; 509 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Urban Fantasy; Weird Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    The kraken’s been kidnapped!  Well, technically, its corpse has, since it was already dead.  It was an exhibit immersed in a tank of Formaldehyde in a London museum.  And technically, it was a giant squid, not a kraken.  So maybe we should call it a squidnapping.

    But the theft has triggered something metaphysical : an end-of-the-world angst felt by every Doomsday cultist in the city.  There are even a few normal people who feel it.  So lots of folks want to get their hands on that purloined piscine, for all sorts of reasons  Some are even willing to kill for it.

    But no one is quite sure who stole it.  Or how.

What’s To Like...

    Kraken is vintage China Miéville.  The writing is superb; the characters are fascinating; and the world-building of a gritty, dark “Other London” will have you wiping the grime from your hands.  The book is written in “English”, as opposed to “American”, and I always eat that up.  You’ll need to keep a dictionary handy (unless you are reading this on your Kindle), for the Britishisms, the Cockney rhyming, the technical terms, and a bunch of regular-but-unfamiliar words.

    The basic storyline involves one Billy Harrow, the guy at the museum who actually pickled the giant squid, and his efforts to retrieve it.  Billy’s motivations are academic; he wants to understand why someone would steal the specimen.  But since he's physically touched the cadaver while prepping it, there are cultists who view him as “The Chosen One”.

    Miéville uses the plot as a vehicle for discussing a number of themes – Doomsday Seers, Evolution, The Flow of Time, Blind Faith, Labor Unions, and Religious Cults.  He refreshingly finds a way to poke gentle fun at all of these topics, while also finding plusses for each.  To keep this from getting preachy or annoying, he infuses a subtle, but steady amount of wit and humor into the tale, including puns and absurdities, such as a gang lord who’s now a tattoo, bullets that hatch, and the spirit-world’s “familiars” going on strike.

     

Kewlest New Word. . .

Pootling (v.)  :  moving or traveling in a leisurely manner.  A Britishism.

Other new words/phrases encountered : Shtum; Dosh; Coco (v.); Benthos; Asymptote; Kip; “Sweet Fanny Adams”; Haruspex; Buboes; Melisma; and Tachyon.  Britishisms in italics.

Excerpts...

    They gathered to compare gnoses, in Edgware cafés over sheesha or pubs in Primrose Hill or somewhere called Almagan Yard, mostly their favoured hangouts in the “trap streets”, Vardy said.  They traded dissident mysteries in vague competition, as if faiths were Top Trumps cards.

    “What about your apocalypse, then?”  “Well, the universe is a leaf on the time-tree, and come autumn it’s going to shrivel and fall off into hell.”  Murmurs of admiration.  “Ooh, nice one.  My new lot say ants are going to eat the sun.”  (pg. 41)

    “What was that squirrel?” Billy said.

    “Freelancer,” Dane said.

    “What?  Freelance what?”

    “Familiar.”  Familiar.  “Don’t look like that.  Familiar.  Don’t act like you’ve never heard of one.”

    Billy thought of black cats.  “Where is it now?”

    “I don’t know, I don’t want to know.  It did what I paid it for.”  Dane did not look at him.  “Job done.  So it’s gone.”

    “What did you pay it?”

    “I paid it nuts, Billy.  What would you think I’d pay a squirrel?”  (pg. 101)

 I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn’t try to kill me to anyone who does.”  (pg.  223)

    Kraken was my fifth China Miéville novel, and my view of him as one of the top authors of the 21st century has not changed a whit.  But before plowing into one of his books, it should be recognized that they are always long, and the reading (unless you are a “skimmer”) will be rewarding, but slow.  Miéville mitigates this by using short chapter lengths here, but it still took me two weeks to finish the book.

    Also, Miéville’s works are character-driven, so at times the pace of the plot slows as the reader is treated to Billy meeting yet another fascinating character, but one who doesn’t get him any closer to solving the squid mystery.

    In the hands of a lesser writer, this is a recipe for a boring book.  But Miéville makes it another scintillating masterpiece.  I've yet to read a mediocre novel by him, let alone a poor one.

    9 Stars.  This was a challenging, thought-provoking read, but I loved it.  Subtract one star if you have a book report due tomorrow, and plan to rush through Kraken.  You’ll either miss the beauty of a Miéville novel due to the requisite skimming, or else find yourself staying up all night as the story pulls you in.

The City and The City - China Miéville

    2000; 312 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Detective Noir; Dystopian Fantasy. Laurels : 2009 Kitschies Award, 2010 Locus Award, 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2010 World Fantasy Award, 2009 British Science Fiction Award, 2010 Hugo Award (tied).  It cleaned up, man.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Ul Qoma and Beszel are sister cities.  In fact, they occupy the same space, just kinda sorta in different dimensions.  Their inhabitants can see each other, but to do so is a serious breach of the law.  So they’ve all been taught to “unsee” and “unhear”.  Kinda.  Sorta.

    Inspector Tyador Borlu has a problem.  A body was dumped in his jurisdiction, Beszel.  But she was apparently murdered in Ul Qoma.  Did the perpetrators breach?  And how does one go about solving the case when half the crime scene is in another dimension?

What’s To Like...
    The City & The City will make you work.  You get dumped into the story from Detective Borlu’s perspective.  He’s lived in Beszel all his life, so he’s used to  the  double-city and “unseeing”.  The reader isn’t, and part of the fun is trying to catch up to Borlu as to how the whole thing works.

    At its core, this is a murder-mystery, but it’s a lot more complex than that.  There is a fantasy element – there are legends of a third dimension, Orciny, hidden in the shadows of both cities.  And there’s a dystopian element – the Breach enforcers who appear out of nowhere when citizens neglect to “unsee” or illegally cross over from one city to the other.  Offenders simply disappear.

      The City & The City is also a vocabularian’s delight with both real words like encomia, carytids, and tendentious to challenge the reader, and made-up ones, like abhistory.  It would feel “forced” if done by most authors; China Miéville makes it flow smoothly.

Kewlest New Word...
Alterity (n.) : The state of being different; “otherness”.

Excerpts...
    It may or may not have been Beszel, that we built, back then, while others may have been building Ul Qoma on the same bones.  Perhaps there was one thing back then that later schismed on the ruins, or perhaps our ancestral Beszel had not yet met and stand-offishly entwined with its neighbour.  I am not a student of the Cleavage, but if I were I still would not know.   (pg.42 )
 
    It was not a soundless dark.  It was not without intrusions.  There were presences within it that asked me questions I could not answer, questions I was aware of as urgencies at which I failed.  Those voices again and again said to me, Breach.  What had touched me sent me not into mindless silence but into a dream arena where I was quarry.  (pg. 241)
 
“(W)hat if we inherited, shit, Ul Qoman sense of timing and Beszel optimism?”  (pg. 161)
    The City and The City is an ambitious novel, what with multiple genres, complex writing, and deliberately making things confusing at the start for the reader.  Indeed, at the end, a number of things are still “hazy”.  But China Miéville makes it work.  This is not something for lesser writers to try. 

    This is my fourth China Miéville book, and they’ve all been superb.  Assuming he has a long writing career, I predict Miéville will be mentioned in the same sci-fi/fantasy company as Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, and Robert Heinlein.  Yeah, he’s that good.  9 Stars.  And if you want something from Miéville a bit lighter and less challenging, may I suggest Un Lun Dun (reviewed here), which is still my favorite book of his.

Perdido Street Station - China Miéville

2000; 710 pages. Genre : Steampunk Horror. Laurels : 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award; 2001 British Fantasy Award, just to name a few. New Author? : No. Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

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Welcome to New Crobuzon, a huge, dark, steampunk city-state that bears an eerie resemblance to a post-holocaust London. It hosts a variety of weird satient species, and is run by a semi-repressive government.

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Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a geeky tinkerer who is visited one day by a garuda. Garudas are birdmen, but this one has had his wings savagely ripped from him as punishment for an unspecified crime. His plea to Isaac : "Make me fly again."

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What's To Like...

Perdido Street Station is a dark, complex saga with three major plotlines; the main one of which doesn't get started until around page 200. They all get resolved, although not simultaneously, and perhaps not in the way you would anticipate.

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What really shines here, though, is the world (called "Bas-Lag") that Miéville convincingly paints. You can "see" the various species that inhabit Bas-Lag (and there are a bunch of them), and you can touch and taste the dark, the grit, and the grime of New Crobuzon.

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The individual characters are 3-D and lushly detailed. Miéville spins the horror tale with a deft touch. One of the plotlines is an inter-species love story. There is a sprinkling of dark humor, as well as a bit of Miéville's insightful social and political views.

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Excerpts...

Lin got half to her feet, her headlegs bristling with astonishment and terror. She gazed at him.

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded. (...)

Mr. Motley paced towards her like a hunter.

"So," he said, from one of the grinning human mouths. "Which do you think is my best side?" (pg. 42)

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I will hear the sounds of Perrick violining or the Gnurr Kett funeral dirge or a Chet stone-riddle, or I will smell the goat porridge they eat in Neovadan or see a doorway painted with the symbols of a Cobsea printer-captain... A long, long way from their homes. Homeless. Home. All around me will be New Crobuzon, seeping through my skin. (pg. 506)

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"I do not know where I will be, Grimnebulin. I shun this city. It hunts me." (pg. 50)

Perdido Street Station is not for everyone. The descriptiveness is superb, but often lengthy, and it sometimes overshadows the story itself. 700+ pages may be too long for some readers. You could probably cull a couple hundred pages from this novel and still tell the story. But then you'd miss the vividness and the detail, and IMHO, that would be a serious loss.
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In a world of copycat writers, China Miéville goes his own literary way. Perdido Street Station was my third Miéville book (see here and here for the other two), and I've enjoyed them all. 8½ Stars.

King Rat - China Miéville

1998; 318 pages. New Author? : No. Genre : Horror Fantasy; and the more generic "New Weird". Awards : Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, and the International Horror Guild Award. Overall Rating : 8*/10.

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Saul Garamond's father takes a dive out of the window in his high, top-floor apartment. Inspector Crowley thinks Saul might have given him a push. Saul quickly finds himself cooling his heels in a London jail, while the police continue their investigation. But a strange being, King Rat, shows up and teaches him how to squeeze through the jail door and effect a miraculous escape. Ah, but the adventure is only beginning...

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What's To Like...

The tension starts quickly (the police are already banging on Saul's door at page 20), and builds throughout the rest of the story. The storyline itself, a strange goth fairy tale, is masterfully done. The relationship between Saul and King Rat is complex and changing. But best of all is Miéville's descriptive skill. When he has finished detailing some seedy part of London, you just want to grab a towel and wipe the soot off your arms.

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There are a few rough edges. The characters of Inspector Crowley and Loplop (the Bird King) are developed nicely, only to see both of them fizzle into oblivion before the climax. And when Saul saves Loplop from certain death at the hands of the Ultimate Evil, you'd think the method used would give our heroes a clue as to how to win the day. It doesn't.

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There also are a lot of pages devoted to a music genre called "Drum and Bass"; including a six-page sermon on pages 206-211. I'll grant that D&B is an important part of the story, but I frankly didn't need to be told all the technical minutiae of it.

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Kewl New Words...

There were Britishisms, Cockney slang, and Miéville's fabulous vocabulary. Whids : slang for a line of malarkey. (I think). Kip : to sleep. Glutinous : sticky, gooey. Crepuscular : dim, like twilight. Entresol : a mezzanine; an intermediate floor in a building. Cynosure : something that provides guidance. Sardonically : sarcastically. Scran : a collection of things to eat. Cagoule : a lightweight parka. Solipsism : the (self-centered) philosophy that the self is all you need to know to exist. Skedge : a lookout (?) Here, "on we trog, slower now, on the skedge for a place to set us down". Cosseting : pampering. Gormenghast : a fictional castle of enormous proportions. Used here in a figurative sense. Darkmans/Lightmans : the dark/the light. Funambulism : walking on a tightrope. Subaltern (adj.) : lower in rank or position. Ineluctably : inescapably. Insouciance : the cheerful feeling you get when nothing is troubling you. Bathetic : effusively or insincerely emotional. Shufti : a quick look around (slang). Fe : slang for ??. I never did figure out exactly what.

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Excerpts...

He read Lenin's exhortations that the future must be grasped, struggled for, molded, and he knew that his father was trying to explain the world to him. His father wanted to be his vanguard. What paralyzes is fear, his father believed, and what makes fear is ignorance. When we learn, we no longer fear. (pg. 27)

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"You can't go back, you know." King Rat looked at Saul from under his eyelids. ...

"I know it," he said.

"They think you did your pa, and they'll do you for that. And now you've slung your hook from their old Bucket they'll have your guts for garters." (pg. 53)

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I'm the one that's always there. I'm the one that sticks. I'm the dispossessed, I'll be back again. I'm why you don't sleep easy in your bed. I'm the one that taught you everything you know, I've got more tricks up my sleeve. I'm the tenacious one, the one that locks my teeth, that won't give up, that won't ever let go.

I'm the survivor.

I'm King Rat. (pg 319; closing sentences)

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"...let's put the 'rat' back into Fraternity" (pg. 317)

This is a horror story told in comic-book hero style; and it works beautifully. The tale's the thing here, therefore the few technical flaws ought to be winked at. King Rat is a great first-effort by China Miéville, and by all accounts, he gets even better in stories like Perdido Street Station and The Scar (neither of which I've yet read), and Un Lun Dun (which I have). Eight Stars.