The novel could get lost in pondering its endless allegorical possibilities, but the plot conventions of a murder investigation keep it pressing forward.Įach of the Ariekei has a fanwing, a giftwing, several hairy, many-jointed legs and two mouths that speak different words simultaneously, making contrapuntal meaning. A shadowy agency known as Breach enforces the habit of “unseeing” the other city. Miéville’s story-generating methods worked particularly well in his 2009 novel, “The City and the City,” a police procedural set in the twin Balkan cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are imperfectly superimposed over each other so that residents of each are haunted by ghostly neighbors. Thus far, in addition to various subgenres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, he’s sampled the western, the police procedural, the sea adventure and more. The formulas provide the plot structure and momentum that enable his characters to explore the fabulous places he imagines and reveal the underlying forces that make those places tick: colonialism, uneven development, cultural syncretism, urbanism.

The fashioning of intricately conceived parallel worlds plus the recombinant use of popular formulas equals a story-generating method that the 38-year-old Miéville has employed to write eight novels (he has also published short fiction, comics, criticism and a scholarly book based on his doctoral thesis on Marxism and international law). They insist on stories linking them.” To create the necessary narratives, Miéville repurposes genre formulas like a salvage artist, mixing a connoisseur’s respect for recovered materials with heretical joy in putting them to surprising uses. “Unfortunately, you can’t really sell books of monsters to publishers. business for the monsters,” he said in an interview a few years ago. The innovative and protean British writer China Miéville’s declared ambition to write a novel in every genre offers an insight into his powers of invention.

Embassytown book