The secret to reading a China Miéville story is this: he’s going to give you an impossible premise to accept. It’s going to be weird and unrealistic and against all laws of nature, but you’re going to have to believe that that’s the way this world works. Once you accept it, your reward is a very tightly-woven creation built on an internal logic that always makes sense within the boundaries of his world.
And the first impossible premise of Railsea is this: you can’t walk on the ground.
Read On
China Mieville’s newest book actually came out a couple months ago, but I’ve been saving it for the long flight I’ve got to take next week. So in the meantime I’ll just do a little review of the book that turned me on to his writing in the first place: Perdido Street Station.
I’ll say right from the get-go that I don’t feel this is a steampunk story, though I’ve heard a few people call it that. Steampunk tends to cover a pretty wide range, so I get why people lump Perdido in there. But I think its only steampunk element is that it takes place in an extremely high-tech world that never got further than the steam engine. Instead of planes, you have dirigibles. Instead of robots, you have steam-powered “constructs” clanking past with coal-burning boilers inside. There’s plenty of clockwork and trains and “computers” that are programmed with levers and punch-cards, but that’s where the steampunk element ends. There isn’t much of a Victorian feel to anything, there’s an almost modern industrial grittiness to the world, and the aliens all over the place detract from any steampunk vibes.
