by China Mieville (Mieville)
The City & The City, by British author China Mieville, was one of the most acclaimed SF novels of 2009, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and being a finalist for the Nebula Award.
This novel is what you get when you
cross a noir-ish gritty police procedural with mind-blowing alternate history
and high-concept scifi. Trying to describe this novel in a nutshell is quite
difficult, as the author himself takes many chapters to even begin to let you
in on the secrets of his world. Narrated by world-weary Tyador Borlu, an
investigator in the Extreme Crime Squad in the fictional small East European
nation/state of Beszel. He is called in to investigate when the disfigured body
of a foreign student is found dumped in his territory. The complication is that
his country of Beszel occupies the same physical space as another country, Ul
Qoma — they overlap but residents of one country have been trained by lifetimes
of experience to “unsee” residents and buildings from their twin. Was the
murder victim killed in Borlu’s own Beszel or was she killed in Ul Qoma and
dumped in Beszel? How can a detective investigate a crime, when he cannot even
directly acknowledge part of the space he finds himself in. Through in radical
students, “freedom fighters” and visiting foreigners with inexplicable motives,
and mysterious enforcers whose job is to make sure the citizens of both Beszel
and Ul Qoma don’t “see” each other, and you’ve got one of the most challenging
SF puzzlers in many years. The City & The City is a complex and
complicated work. But if you’re willing to dedicate the time to get fully
sucked into Mieville’s world, you won’t be disappointed!
( Wikipedia page for China
Mieville )
Recommended
by Scott
C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service
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