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\nRight. China Mi\u00e9ville is one my favourite writers, one of the few (together with Terry Pratchett, Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod) I’ll always buy in hardcover. I love the way in which he fuses science fiction and horror and fantasy together into what he himself has called New Weird, essentially a new genre that emphasises the grotesque and baroque sides of its parent genres. What I also admire in Mi\u00e9ville is that he keeps his imagination firmly grounded in a keen appreciation of political and economical realities, no doubt helped by his background as a proper socialist. That combination made Mi\u00e9ville’s creation of New Crobuzon one of the more fully realised cities in science fiction\/fantasy. With Mi\u00e9ville there’s always the feeling that his heroes do have to work for a living, that the daily struggle for existence is just as important, if not more as whatever existentialist crisis they’re on the fringes of.\n<\/p>\n \nIt’s this sense of realism that links The City & The City<\/cite> with Mi\u00e9ville’s earlier novels. Set on Earth in two fictional Eastern European cities with no fantastical or science fictional elements and written as a police procedural: The City & The City<\/cite> cannot be more different from its predecessors. Yet at the core of the novel are the same political and economical themes Mi\u00e9ville always write about. At its best the police procedural is a very political novel, just because policing itself is intensely political — just think about the decisions being made about which crimes to prosecute and which not, which investigations to support and which to starve of resources. There’s therefore a long tradition of writers using the police procedural as a vehicle for social criticsm and Mi\u00e9ville fits in well with this tradition. Of course Mi\u00e9ville being Mi\u00e9ville he does more than that but we’ll get to that.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe City & The City
\nChina Mi\u00e9ville
\n312 pages
\npublished in 2009
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