Railsea

If you were to think of the works of China Mieville as a multicourse meal, Railsea would act as something like a palate cleanser between heavier, more consuming courses (that's right, I just called it Mieville's lemon sherbet). Following such weighty tomes as The City and the City, Embassytown, and Kraken, Mieville's latest work is still filled with ideas but is not philosophically complex. This is not to say that there aren't fresh ideas in Railsea—on the contrary, Railsea is packed with ideas that would give a lot of other writers an entire career to explore; Railsea instead tosses out ideas and moves on, not exploring every nook and cranny of them in the detail of Mieville's previous three novels. In fact, this novel acts more as a playground for Mieville as he experiments with narrative technique and voice, delighting the audience with light fare rather than delighting them with deep ideas.

The story follows Shamus ap Soorap as he attempts to discover a career for himself in a world where trains move between communities like sailing vessels of old (hence the title of the book). Sham, as he is known, finds himself the doctor's assistant on a train dedicated to hunting the prodigious subterranean creatures of this world—mole rats, burrowinging turtles, and digger bees (oh my!)—when all he really wants to be is a scavenger, dedicating his life to salvage the strange treasures that lie just underground and sometimes above it. The reader is immediately thrown into a hunt for a giant mole, establishing the explosiveness and momentum Railsea maintains throughout. The pace is often frenetic and when, about halfway through the novel, the narration divides into three parts, it only grows more frantic. And through it all Mieville uses a narrative voice that is not only omniscient but deliberate—the narrator discusses where to go next in the story, teasing the reader about when the story will return to the thread that the narrator imagines the reader finds most important (and by doing so making that thread the most important).

Described everywhere as a "young adult" novel (a term I have grown to despise—fodder for another blog entry perhaps), Railsea incorporates the balancing act that such fare must have. Consider the best "all ages" media (a MUCH better term): the story has to both entertain the younger audience and yet remain appealing to the adult audience. This is the great success of Pixar movies and the best animation, like Warner Brothers cartoons—children are enthralled by the escapades and adults appreciate the depth and humor that is often outside the younger audience's experience. What fertile ground for Mieville, whose career is made of playing with the borders of genre and trope! And he revels in the dance, appropriating the narrative techniques used for younger audiences and still writing a story that adults can return to. Children don't really care about the background of how this fantastic world was created, but adults will appreciate that the Earth has lost all of its seas to a global multinational war, and in fact that the railseas that the trains ride on are the actual beds of our oceans.

Similarly, younger readers will revel in Sham's captain, Naphi, and her quest for the great albino mole rat, Mocker Jack. Adults will recognize the parallels to Moby Dick, and appreciate the idea that each hunting captain pursues a great beast of their own across the wastes, a quest the captains term their philosophy. Melville plays with this idea giddily, pondering what happens when a captain achieves his or her philosophy—even going so far as to imagine a museum of completed philosophies, where the great captains enshrine their epic quests' souvenirs—and what happens if captains unintentionally share a philosophy. And adult readers read this and ponder life's obsessions, while younger readers can just be amazed at the tales of hunting giant burrowing locusts.

As always, Mieville's language is astounding. The sentences rattle with the life that Mieville gives them, fairly leaping off the page despite the neologisms that this new world forces into them. The setting and the plot spark allusions to such disparate stories as Mad Max and Dune, the effect of Mieville's conglomerative passion for pulling together wildly different influences in order to poke at their similarities.

The sum total of all the parts is fun—Railsea is a romp on many levels, moving quickly from idea to idea in a delight of creative excess. It continues Mieville's pattern of weird, and the weird made more weird by its similarity to what passes as normal. And while it invites more thought, unlike his more recent work, Railsea doesn't require a large commitment of thinking time. Railsea is thus a great summertime read for all ages and a tremendous introduction to the works of China Mieville and the potentials of the newer voices in speculative fiction.

Embassytown

Prior to his latest novel's release, China Mieville said he was going to do space opera. And to be fair, Embassytown does contain some of the classic elements of that sub-genre: ships that move faster than light without any sort of explanation as to how they can do it, a very large multi-system civilization, and Earth has been lost in the dim reaches of history. But I think it can be argued as well that Embassytown also draws a great deal from the planetary romance subgenre as well, with its emphasis on humans interacting with aliens usually on the alien homeworld, fighting to survive their encounters both with the aliens and with the environment.

But like the best authors, those that stretch beyond the genre elements, Mieville only uses them as a framework and a springboard into a thoughtful consideration of language and communication. While it's something of a science fiction trope that humans have to develop a method of communicating with alien cultures, it generally gets passed over fairly quickly with just a knowing nod ("and after the usual five or six hours of study, the universal translator worked well for us"). But Mieville first imagines the Ariekei (or Hosts as they are colloquially called) as truly alien—that is, they don't think in the way that humans do and so some sort of paradigm shift has to take place either in human thinking or in the aliens, and then he centers that alien-ness in their language. Granted, his very brief descriptions of the aliens highlight their differences: hairy multi-jointed legs that end in hooves, a "giftwing" and a "fanwing" neither of which appear to be useful for flight, and two mouths. But the essential strangeness of the Ariekei is that they speak simultaneously with their two mouths and cannot understand any species that does not also. And while humans can hear the distinct sounds each mouth of the Ariekei makes as it speaks, the Ariekei simply cannot hear two humans speaking simultaneously, so that those humans have to be connected at least empathically. This leads to genetic manipulation by the humas to create ambassadors to the Ariekei, two individuals linked genetically and empathically and scrubbed every day to keep them from growing apart either physically or mentally. Even more interesting, since the Ariekei are "reading" the empathy behind the words being spoken, they are unable to tell lies.

The humans that live on the Ariekei planet are completely dependent on the biomechanical prowess of the Hosts. The atmosphere of the planet is toxic, but the Ariekei use their expertise to create "areoli" zones that contain breathable air for the humans. They also grow pretty much everything they use, from houses to vehicles to furniture and weapons. They even have modified some farms to grow food that the humans can live off of which becomes the primary food source for the humans since they are so far removed from the nearest human worlds.

Mieville's narrator, Avice Benner Cho, acts at first as a guide through the weirdness of the Ariekei world, eventually becoming a simile—performing an action so that the Ariekei have a truth on which to base their comparisons. But as Avice grows older, she falls into politics and learns some of the underpinnings and subtle machinations of the humans that govern her part of the world, detailing them for the reader as she uncovers them. And while the Ariekei are fascinated with the possibility of learning to lie, to take a step beyond just simile, those leaders make a catastrophic mistake which threatens to bring down not just their part of the Ariekes world, but all of the Ariekei civilization.

There are moments in Embassytown where Mieville's descriptive power is evident, mostly in his descriptions of the alien architecture and landscape. But the real thrust of this novel is in the ideas and an exploration of the power of language. And in this exploration, Mieville reminds me of no one so much as Ursula K. Le Guin, especially in The Left Hand of Darkness, as she insists on seeing the details of the differences between human and alien rather than glossing over them as decoration and trope. Of course, such an examination not illuminates the alien, it also brings the human sharply into focus as well. In many ways, the interaction between the characters in Embassytown surpasses that of any other Mieville novel because so much emphasis on the alien forces the human characters to stand out and carry the narrative weight.

The novel's exploration is a delight even though a world is at peril. The aliens are very alien, reminding me of the best of Vernor Vinge and, again, Le Guin. Though the mostly descriptive opening feels plodding as the scene must be set, when the plot starts moving, it rushes at what feels like breakneck speed, making it difficult to set the book down. The resolution is both heart-breaking and exhilarating, maintaining the realistic sensibility that drives the insistence on aliens that really are alien.

Again Mieville demonstrates why his books are always near the top of my to-read and to-find list. Recent months have seen increased discussion of the literary merit and quality of genre fiction. Embassytown demonstrates that, even from the lowest roots, something thoughtful and powerful can arise.

Kraken

Kraken is a romp, a riotous journey through the imagination and wit of its author, China Mieville. It defies genre classification, but will most likely be found in the sections of book stores and blogs reserved for speculative fiction, if only because of Mieville's previous works (which arguably transcend a lot of genre boundaries as well) and because the book is about the end of the world, and magic plays a part in that end. But like that elusive field called "literary fiction," Kraken uses genre as a foundation and then builds upon it, going places that are interesting for their existence, not just because of the ease of categorizing them, naming them, and filing them away. Kraken is proof that Mieville has become, somewhat like Neil Gaiman before him, renowned for his ideas and defying of genre. But Mieville is far more challenging than Gaiman, and while Gaiman often closes out his works with a wink a gesture towards optimism, Mieville always points out that optimism is a precious commodity and the moments where it wins out are to be treasured before they completely fade.

At first blush, Kraken appears to owe a great deal to Gaiman's Neverwhere: Kraken is set in a London that exists just below the surface of the one we think we know, and its story revolves around a young man who gets accidentally mixed up in events beyond his understanding but with dire consequences for the city (if not the world). Meet Billy Harrow, a specialist in preservation at the Darwin Centre at the Natural History museum in London. Billy is so good at his job at preserving specimens of life from around the world in jars of formaldehyde solution that his coworkers and he joke that he was the first test tube baby, born from a jar. His masterpiece is the preserved giant squid that is the centerpiece of a great display at the Darwin Centre, one that brings visitors from around the world to see the most perfectly preserved example of one of the most mysterious creatures on the planet. And then one day, as Billy leads a tour through the Centre, they discover that the giant squid is missing, along with its giant jar and all of its preservative solution, stolen in broad daylight from the center of the museum without anyone noticing.

And thus Billy is thrust into the steaming underbelly of London as heresiopolis, Mieville's neologism for the great melting pot of cults and sects that form an underground in London as complex and perhaps as dangerous as the criminal underground. Billy's psychopomp is Dane Parnell, exile of the Church of God, Kraken, who believes that the missing giant squid is an avatar of his deity and who is determined to discover who defiled his god with the theft. But the giant squid defies detection, pulling Billy and Dane deeper and deeper into this strange world of belief and the power belief brings. And it turns out that every source they turn to for possible information about the squid can provide no help, but they all are convinced of the impending apocalypse, the destruction of the world somehow involved with the squid and visions of fire. In fact, the communal emotional tide of London is turning odd, as all the usual fortunetellers—astrologers and card readers and so forth—see the doom coming, but are unable to pinpoint details. London itself prepares for its doom, and its inhabitants who cannot touch the belief-based sources of knowledge feel the mood shift and , much as weeks without rain can cause the entire mood of a city to turn.

All of this acts as the canvas on which Mieville just throws ideas, keeping them connected to the advancement of the plot, but ranging through the wide expanse of his fascinating imagination. For instance, Billy is contacted by a section of the British police force specifically designated to attend to problems that arise from the strange cults and sects that roam through the city. Most of their own force don't even know that they exist or what it is exactly they do, but the team that meets with Billy—a constable, a former clergyman who understands how belief works, and what can only be described as a cynical magician in a policewoman's uniform—are determined to find the thieves and stop the apocalypse they can feel coming on. Billy is also approached by evil side of belief, as the city's cult kingpin sends his dreaded hatchetmen Goss and Subby after Billy, since he seems to know the most about the squid. Unfortunately, over the centuries, anyone who has run into Goss and Subby generally ends up dying in particularly brutal ways, including being folded like origami. And the overlord they are working for is really a sentient tattoo, inked onto the back of an unwilling carrier.

As Billy and Dane fend off their pursuers and try to find the squid, Mieville demonstrates an explicit joy in the language and the ideas of belief and faith. The novel runs amuck with ideas, most of which could individually inform a single work by a less skilled storyteller. But Mieville loosely captures these ideas, letting them pull the reader pell-mell into this bizarre and half-known world, rushing toward some sort of conclusion much as London rushes towards its fiery doom. The passages are breathtakingly written, and the ideas that unfold are blackly humorous and terrifying, and sometimes both at the same time. Mieville is also able to work in some political theorizing as well, a thread that does not stick out as being misplaced in this tapestry of a surreal and abnatural London. And buried within the craziness are sly commentaries on the human condition which, in the hands of a reader less swept away, might have offered clues to the resolution of the mystery that is the backbone of Kraken. Every scene, nearly every passage, just drips with life and power that make this novel a joy to read.

Even at its conclusion, Mieville refuses to just settle, twisting the narrative process in subtle and powerful ways, still playing games with the nature of knowledge and belief. Ultimately, Mieville pulls off the best magic trick of all: the reader sets down the finished novel with a simultaneous sigh of relief that it's over and wish that there might be more. Kraken will be on many lists of the year's best, both in genre and without. It should be the novel that, despite Mieville's brilliant and award-winning career thus far, pulls him from the gutters of genre fiction into an author to be treasured for a long time to come. It is no wonder that Mieville and Michael Chabon are friends, even though their careers seem to be going in different directions: Chabon uses the prestige of early acclaim and awards to demonstrate the power of genre fiction removed from the wrappings and dross of its very name, while Mieville has based his work on the mixing of genre and distilling from it work that transcends and deserves a larger audience. This is a novel that I will return to many times.

The City and the City

I'm an unabashed proselytizer for China Miéville. Between, Mrs. Speculator, my book group, and a few other innocent bystanders, I've made a few converts. I've also failed a couple of times, when the subject of my evangelism decided that the New Weird, the sub-genre that Miéville once described himself as a part of, was Too Weird. For myself, between the fascinating plots of the stories Miéville tells and his descriptive (I almost used "ornate" but that's not quite right) writing style, I find that I am constantly on the look-out for his new books. He has even joined the ranks of authors for whom I will buy the hardback edition, just to get the book in my hands that much faster.

So you can probably imagine my excitement when I was offered an opportunity to read a prerelease version of The City and the City. When I received the early version, I anxiously read the description on the back cover and then shared it with a Miéville acolyte, the aviator. The press described a murder mystery in the small European/Asian (Eurasian?) country of Beszel, a crime that would lead its detective to the sister country of Ul Qoma, in some ways the opposite of Beszel. The aviator suggested that perhaps this was the first entry in a new sub-genre, New Crime or perhaps New Weird Crime. We chuckled and I dove in.

As it turns out, Beszel and Ul Qoma are not just sister countries; they are tiny city-states somewhere near Turkey that share the same space. The novel starts out being unclear about that space-sharing—inhabitants of Beszel can see inhabitants of Ul Qoma (and vice versa)but ignore them, apparently out of politeness. The impression, at first, is of some sort of dimensional rift separating the two cities, not allowing any sort of physical interaction. But as the noel goes on, the reality turns out to be far more strange: the two countries share the same physical space, sometimes sharing features and sometimes with features clearly "belonging" to one country or the other. Thus a street goes by one name in Beszel and another in Ul Qoma, while a building in Beszel may stand beside a building in Ul Qoma. The separation of the countries is purely one of the mind, but one that is strictly enforced by the mysterious Breach, such that any interaction between the two countries—even looking at a neighbor who happens to be in a different country—is subject to the strictest punishment. Those who breach simply disappear.

Against this peculiar backdrop, the novel describes the investigation of the murder of a young American student whose body is found in Beszel. Our protagonist, Inspector Borlu, is convinced the crime is one of breach and works to get the mysterious enforcers involved in the investigation. But even as he waits for their assistance, he continues to investigate and eventually is forced to believe that perhaps it is not a breach, but requires him to seek aid from the police in Ul Qoma.

However, the murder really isn't what the novel is about; it just offers a viewpoint for extended meditation on the nature of these two countries and their shared existence. Nearly every facet of Borlu's investigation serves as a way to expand on the strange circumstances or deal with fringe elements, such as ultranationalists who want the territory to belong to just one country and unificationists that want the land to belong to everyone. That the murder victim is a young archeologist with a professional interest in the history of the two countries just serves to allow Borlu to look at some of the scientific underpinnings of the strange dual existence. In fact, as a mystery story, the novel fails spectacularly—there is no way that the reader can solve the murder, as important information is left unrevealed to the reader until near the climax. Real crime happens this way, that new evidence can suddenly take the investigation into a direction that is completely unexpected. But such events rarely make good a good mystery story, where part of the fascination is in the attempt to solve the crime.

But the meditation on the dual countries, while somewhat interesting, doesn't completely work either. The novel carefully straddles the line between a history of the dualism and a philosophical meditation on the how it affects the citizens of both countries. But it never goes satisfyingly enough in either direction. How such a bizarre geographic situation could have arisen would be a fascinating story in a lot of authors' hands, especially as the novel reveals more and more details about the two countries' differences. But Miéville never takes us there, and so the mystery that really underpins the novel is never revealed. But neither does he go all metaphorical, using the symbolism of the dual countries to explore very much about the nature of the human condition. There are hints at metaphor, the barest promise that all this symbology means something, but it too is never fully fleshed out. So much of the book deals with duality—poverty and wealth, history and modernity, European and Asian—that it seems to want to carry the weight of depth, but it never happens, instead leaving the reader grasping for something beyond "Well, that's odd." The book itself appears to be an artifact of some duality, a mystery and a literary novel, but like the other dualities not really explored in either direction.

Perhaps that is Miéville's ultimate point, that living on the edge of duality is really no existence at all. The events in the story certainly seem to bear that interpretation out. But that feels so clichéd, so Aesop-y, and I've come to expect so much more from Miéville. Perhaps his insight comes from a specific source in Miéville's life, and he feels compelled to share it. But without a frame of reference, the reader can only pocket such advice and hope to remember to use it when circumstances arise. Unfortunately, there is nothing memorable about the book to cause the reader to want to remember the advice. Even Miéville's usually evocative prose is missing in this gray gray story. And as a result, this is by far his weakest fiction (I've not read his non-fiction and so don't wish to compare it).

Any Miéville is a treat, but The City and the City is missing something fundamental to make it stand out, as the rest of his writing usually does.

Un Lun Dun

A good bit of China Mieville's acclaim comes from his ability to use a location as a character in his novels. Perdido Street Station takes place in the city of New Crobuzon, an otherworldly analog to London. In that novel, Mieville allows the city to reflect the attitudes and emotions of its inhabitants, and his descriptions of the various boroughs that his characters pass through evoke just the right mood for the events that subsequently take place. And through it all is permeated a sense of wonder and awe, as we see a city so very near to the one we know and yet different in surprising and important ways. New Crobuzon has a life of its own, and in Perdido Street Station, the reader finds himself as concerned, if not more concerned, about its ongoing survival as for the survival of the characters.

Perhaps there is some work to be done in some literary analysis of the abLondons in speculative fiction. Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere imagines a London that with an entire alternate city lurking just past the next corner and hidden behind the shop wall. Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve, is a young adult novel about a London that is attached to giant caterpillar treads and wanders about its world devouring smaller cities and towns. Part of the appeal of such novels is how they twist the familiar into something different and still are able to evoke the original, a sort of nostalgia for a place that still exists. And now we can add to this quasigenre Mieville's latest novel, Un Lun Dun, his first entry into the young adult field.

Deeba Rashem finds that her fiend Zanna is getting all sorts of attention from unusual places-graffiti about her pops up on a wall near their school and foxes bow to her as Deeba and Zanna pass them. But none of this compares to one evening when they witness an umbrella crawl across a courtyard and hoist itself to Zanna's windowsill to spy within before heading off down the sidewalk. Curious, they follow its path into a maintenance area and, before Deeba can stop her, Zanna finds and opens a trick door. Suddenly the girls find themselves in a London parallel to their own, UnLondon. Fairly quickly upon their arrival, Zanna is recognized as the Schwazzy, the prophesied savior of UnLondon against the villainous attacks of Smog and they find they must make their way to the city's rulers and present Zanna and save the city.

The Smog is one of the most ingenious villains in recent memory. When London of our earth passed its Clean Air Act of the 1970s, where did all the noxious smoke go? According to Mieville, it worked its way through cracks in the universe to UnLondon, where it continued to grow and gained sentience. The Smog now threatens to take over the city and transform its inhabitants into smoglodytes and its recently deceased into smombies. The Smog can also use its components to create sleeping gases and pellets it can launch like bullets.
Deeba and Zanna gather allies as they travel to meet with the Propheseers: Obaday Fing, a clothier whose head is a pincushion and who makes haute couture clothing from books; Hemi, the son of the union between a ghost and a mortal; Skool, a walking diving suit; Jones, another transportee from our Earth who makes his living as a bus conductor; and Curdle, the charming empty milk carton that wins his way into Deeba's heart. As they travel the city, the reader is given a tour of UnLondon in all its glory--the open markets, the Smeath river that flows in a perfectly straight line through the heart of the city, the UnLondon-I which is a giant waterwheel that powers a large part of the city. Their vehicle for travel is a standard double-decker bus whose upper floor has been replaced with a dirigible type balloon and Jones acts as a tour guide for them as well as for the reader. It turns out that UnLondon is a city made up of the cast-offs of London, both material and people. Buildings are made from London refuse (my favorite is the one that is made of vinyl records), but enough of London emerges from the weirdness that it all feels very comfortable.

Their lazy promenade is interrupted by the allies of the Smog attacking from the backs of giant flies trying to reach the Schwazzy, and smaller adventures take place until the girls reach their destination. Eventually they ally themselves with Brokkenbroll, the great Umbrellisimo who is able to command the broken umbrellas that make their way from London to UnLondon. All together, they discover the great weapon they can use in defense of UnLondon so that perhaps the Schwazzy is not quite needed. So Deeba and Zanna return to London…until Deeba puts together the pieces to realize that UnLondon is in far worse danger than anyone thought. Now she must somehow find her way back to her newfound friends.

Un Lun Dun is a delightful romp. The main characters are flatter than are usually found in Mieville's works, but this is a young adult novel, so character complexity would actually be unfortunate. But the most important character may well be UnLondon itself, as delightfully weird a setting as Oz. And Deeba acts the Dorothy as she attempts to save the city from, in part, a peril from her own city of London. In its broad strokes, the story is a little predictable, but again, young adult novels don't generally travel very far from the beaten path. It is in the details that this novel excels-the descriptions of the parts of UnLondon, the conversations that the characters share, the characters themselves. Even the menace of the Black Windows of Webminster Abbey are fun (as evidenced by Deeba's laughter at the intentionally unintentional puns), but they poise another hazard for the companions to fight through. Adding to the details are the wonderful drawings from Mieville himself, instantiating the macabre and whimsical scenes and characters. My favorites are the binjas, walking trashcans that use martial arts to protect the Propheseers.

And, like most good young adult fiction, there are some details that work only for more mature minds. For instance, while the novel sets itself up as a quest in the mold of popular high fantasy, Mieville completely subverts its ordered and sequential pattern with the impatience of a bored child. There are also allusions to other works of speculative fiction and hints of the size and complexity of the UnEarth that tantalize the adult reader. Mieville even provides an epilogue that goes beyond the usual conclusion of young adult fantasy, successfully tying up a loose end and promising that the story continues to go on even though the book's covers are closed.