China Mieville - The Scar

Having created the magnificent city of New Crobuzon in his previous novel, this starts with a ship leaving there - and eventually getting taken to the equally extraordinary new pirate city of Armada, a huge flotilla of ships tied together into a city. The rest of this 800-page novel is, it turns out, one big plot, with key ( Read more... )

China Mieville - Perdido Street Station

New Crobuzon is surely the most impressive fictional locale ever created. Its SF and fantasy elements are impressive, strong, resonant and original, with a constantly surprising blend of robots, magic, physics, monsters, nonhuman races and so on. But what makes it tower above any competition I can think of is ( Read more... )

China Mieville - Un Lun Dun

This is apparently for younger readers: I guess his linguistic flair is reined in a little, and the protagonist is a teenage girl. Vitally, he does not rein in his imagination, and the alternate-dimension London she needs to save is full of bizarre ideas. Among the key characters, besides the Chosen One and her sidekick, ( Read more... )

China Mieville - The City and the City

A police procedural, except set in an Eastern European city which shares its space with another city. They intersect in complex ways, and the citizens are basically banned from interacting with the other city, or even from looking at it. If they so much as look straight at any part or person from the other city ( Read more... )

China Mieville - Kraken

This is absolutely magnificent: any time you can have a character say, "If it's just some piddling little apocalypse, we needn't worry," and that makes sense, you are writing on a grand scale. At another point, a tattoo threatens to declare war on the ocean, and that makes sense too. It centres on a giant squid vanishing from ( Read more... )

China Mieville - Looking for Jake and other stories
His 2nd and 3rd novels, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, are, for my money, two of the very best books of the last decade or so. His 4th was noticeably less wonderful, and his first isn't really wonderful at all, though I kind of liked it. It's not clear when these stories (one a comic story, ( Read more... )