China Miéville

Not a place, an author. A self-described “weird fiction” writer, who aspires to write a novel in every genre.

I read Perdido Street Station in full. “Middle Earth meets the Industrial Revolution,” as one friend put it. It was nominated for (or won) nearly every sci-fi award, as was the follow-up novel, The Scar. I devoured the first novel, but I couldn’t get past chapter one of the second.

Miéville possibly has more imagination and originality than any fantasy writer since Tolkien. He creates a marvelous new world and you want to comprehend it in full. He doles out his vision slowly, with little bread crumbs, and reading the book is like following a trail. You read on merely for the next bit. Once you reach the end of the crumbs, however, there’s not much left to eat. The plot is weak and characters are weaker.

His latest novel, The City & The City, is a crime novel that won the 2010 Hugo and the Clarke awards. My Kindle meter tells me I’m 33% through. I’m not sure if I’ll keep going.

5 Responses

  1. The Scar takes a while to find its stride, but you don’t need to read it to understand the third book in the series — Iron Council.

    And Iron Council is the full expression of what Perdido Street Station began. As a development economist you will find it profoundly satisfying.

  2. Try persevering with the Scar. It takes some while to find its stride, but is incredibly inventive, if rather unrelentingly grim in its underlying message. You may like his latest, Kraken, better – it has a somewhat baggy structure, but is a lot of fun, and certainly cannot be accused of doling out its little bits crumb by crumb. Also worth pointing out that Mieville is the only f/sf writer I am aware of with a Ph.D. in IR (LSE – with Fred Halliday as advisor).

    Bringing the two threads of this comment section together, I’ve just written a piece on Mieville’s The City and the City for Junot Diaz (in addition to being a novelist, he is the books editor for the Boston Review).

  3. If you have it, try again! There are other voices besides the narrator! Think of all the books out there that are so much more than their Chapter 1
    I might be biased, however, from having worked in and written about the Dominican Republic, the historical sections really appeal to me.

  4. Have you read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? It both exalts popular science fiction and uses it as a means by which to understand life in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship. And it’s FANTASTIC.