China Miéville

Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to a fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the Journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a talented linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage—and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactacae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada's agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters—terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission.

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies.Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released.The city is gripped by an alien terror. The fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades. A reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of brick and wood and steel under the vaults of Perdido Street Station.It is too late to escape.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too–including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book. When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar , acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later.It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . .The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council : the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.

On board the moletrain Medes , Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea–even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it's a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—leads to considerably more than he'd bargained for. Soon he's hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.From China Miéville comes a novel for readers of all ages, a gripping and brilliantly imagined take on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that confirms his status as "the most original and talented voice to appear in several years." ( Science Fiction Chronicle )

Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul Garamond's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into Saul's prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat, who reveals Saul's royal heritage, a heritage that opens a new world to Saul, the world below London's streets--a heritage that also drags Saul into King Rat's plan for revenge against his ancient enemy,. With drum 'n' bass pounding the backstreets, Saul must confront the forces that would use him, the forces that would destroy him, and the forces that shape his own bizarre identity.

For readers of George Saunders, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell, This Census Taker is the poignant and uncanny new novella from award-winning and bestselling author China Miéville. After witnessing a profoundly traumatic event, a boy is left alone in a remote house on a hilltop with his increasingly deranged parent. When a stranger knocks on his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation are over—but by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? Is he the boy’s friend? His enemy? Or something altogether other?

A thriller of war that never was—of survival in an impossible city—of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new.“Beauty will be convulsive. . . .”1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseilles, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibault, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Résistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and the Exquisite Corpse.But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties—to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.

In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later, it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions?This is the story of the extraordinary months between those upheavals, in February and October, of the forces and individuals who made 1917 so epochal a year, of their intrigues, negotiations, conflicts and catastrophes. From familiar names like Lenin and Trotsky to their opponents Kornilov and Kerensky; from the byzantine squabbles of urban activists to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire; from the revolutionary railroad Sublime to the ciphers and static of coup by telegram; from grand sweep to forgotten detail.Historians have debated the revolution for a hundred years, its portents and possibilities: the mass of literature can be daunting. But here is a book for those new to the events, told not only in their historical import but in all their passion and drama and strangeness. Because as well as a political event of profound and ongoing consequence, Miéville reveals the Russian Revolution as a breathtaking story.From the Hardcover edition.

What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant young writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales–one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon. Among the fourteen superb fictions are“Jack”–Following the events of his acclaimed novel Perdido Street Station, this tale of twisted attachment and horrific revenge traces the rise and fall of the Remade Robin Hood known as Jack Half-a-Prayer. “Familiar”–Spurned by its creator, a sorceress’s familiar embarks on a strange and unsettling odyssey of self-discovery in a coming-of-age story like no other.Looking for JakeFoundationThe ball room / co-written with Emma Bircham and Max SchaeferReports of certain events in LondonFamiliarEntry taken from a medical encyclopaediaDetailsGo betweenDifferent skiesAn end to hunger'Tis the seasonJackOn the way to the front / illustrated by Liam SharpThe Tain

London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse's bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves—Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of our most original voices.

What would happen if you discovered a powerful artifact that turned you into a super hero? What if that device threatened the entire world? These are just some of the questions asked in this thrilling and inventive storyline written by the bestselling, award-winning novelist China Mieville!

China Miéville's riveting engagement with the Communist Manifesto offers a lyrical introduction and a spirited defense of the modern world's most influential political document.Few written works can so confidently claim to have shaped the course of history as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party. Since first rattling the gates of the ruling order in 1848, this incendiary pamphlet has never ceased providing fuel for the fire in the hearts of those who dream of a better world. Nor has it stopped haunting the nightmares of those who sit atop the vastly unequal social system it condemns.In this strikingly imaginative introduction, China Miéville provides readers with a guide to understanding the Manifesto and the many specters it has conjured. Through his unique and unorthodox reading, Miéville offers a spirited defense of the enduring relevance of Marx and Engels’ ideas.Presented along with the full text of the Communist Manifesto, Miéville's guide has something to offer first-time readers, revolutionary partisans, and even the most hard-nosed skeptics.

The tale takes place in a ravaged, post-apocalyptic London. A man named Sholl survives by knowing the safe parts of town, and those where people go in and never come out. He’s been living on his own for a while, and decides to befriend a makeshift unit of soldiers camped out in the south of Hampstead Heath. They seem to have their wits about them, unlike other units scattered throughout London who will shoot anything that moves. He wants them to join him. Sholl has a plan to deal with the enemy....

Call me childish, but I love all the nonsense – the snow, the trees, the tinsel, the turkey. I love presents. I love carols and cheesy songs. I just love Christmas™.'It would be a dream come true to be able to celebrate Christmas properly: to wake up to a Stocking™, visit Santa™ and open Presents™ around the Christmas Tree™. But this is a luxury reserved for those with shares in YuleCo – controllers of this joyful season – who don’t agree that it’s a holiday for one and all.In this short story, China Miéville’s astonishing imagination allows us a glimpse of how a dystopian Christmas might be.

What would happen if you discovered the H Dial, an unbelievably powerful artifact that turned you into a super hero?Nelson and Roxie are on the trail to unlock the mysteries of the H-dial while being stalked by the mysterious Centipede, who may have the answers they are looking for...and his own dark and deadly motivations. It will take every ounce of courage and luck for our unlikely heroes to discover secrets of the H Dials before their enemies finds them.Collects #7-15 of Dial H.

London’s Overthrow is a potent polemic describing the capital in a time of austerity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Award-winning author and essayist China Miéville cuts through the hyperbole of our politicians to present a view from ordinary London – of the inequality, oppression and indignity and the hidden, subversive sentiment pervading throughout our streets.

A gorgeous and hilarious picture book about the most unusual breakfast two sisters ever ate.Two sisters sit down for breakfast, and one remembers a really gross breakfast they once had, and reminds her sister about it. But her little sister doesn't remember. So then she starts describing all of the really gross things that were in the worst breakfast they ever had, until all they can picture is a table piled sky high with the weirdest, yuckiest, grossest, slimiest, slickest, stinkiest breakfast two kids can ever have. And then they have a really good breakfast.China Miéville is the author of numerous books, including The City & The City, Embassytown, Railsea, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (three times). He lives and works in London.Zak Smith is an artist who first came to prominence with his mammoth work Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow. Smith's paintings and drawings are held in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives and works in Los Angeles and tries to answer all of his mail.

When the narrator was a boy, cold titanic masses appeared in the skies above London: Icebergs. As explorers both official and amateur try to climb the snowy peaks, packs of children follow in their frigid shadows.

“China Mieville’s brilliantly original book is an indispensable guide for anyone concerned with international law. It is the most comprehensive scholarly account available of the central theoretical debates about the foundations of international law. It offers a guide for the lay reader into the central texts in the field.”—Peter Gowan, Professor, International Relations, London Metropolitan University.Mieville critically examines existing theories of international law and offers a compelling alternative Marxist view.China Mieville, PhD, International Relations, London School of Economics, is an independent researcher and an award-winning novelist. His novel Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

A brand new series by bestselling and Hugo Award-winning novelist China Mieville! What would happen if you discovered the H Dial, an unbelievably powerful artifact that turned you into a super hero? What if you found out that the very device that’s become your uncontrollable obsession threatens the entire world?

An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse’s bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

What do you want to see?What is the nature of your enterprise?When did you become aware of what the rope is?

One of the first users of the H Dial learns a horrible secret that spells certain doom for the future! The re-imagining of the classic hero by fan-favorite author China Mieville continues!

Saturnalia es una excepcional antología de relatos extraños, inquietantes, festivos, originales, fantasiosos que dan una vuelta de tuerca a los tradicionales cuentos de Navidad. Incluye, «Noche de paz», del aclamado autor británico China Miéville, una divertida sátira del consumismo navideño; «Ola de frío», un cuento inquietante del premiado Robert Shearman; «A casa por Navidad», un relato sobre la soledad y los secretos que guardan nuestras más queridas posesiones de Nina K. Hoffman, y «Si la Vigilia del Dragón estuviera fría y despejada», de Ken Scholes, que cuenta la historia de un milagro navideño en un mundo carente de esperanza.

On 20 February 2012, a new kind of publication was born - a sumptuously illustrated digital quarterly dedicated to exploring the future. At once wildly imaginative and deadly serious, Arc brings together thinkers, designers and writers to explore the possibilities of tomorrow.Here is Arc’s first year in its entirety: every feature, every essay, every story. Issue by issue, you’ll explore unexpected possibilities, measure humanity’s chances, contemplate society’s collapse, and wonder as its artefacts come to life. You’ll find feature writers and essayists who approach the future with humanity, as well as imagination; who look beyond the usual doomsday scenarios and technical quick fixes to discover what the future might actually feel like. You’ll gather insights from all quarters: from animators and anarchists, professors and producers, professional futurists and eccentrics with an axe to grind. And as you explore original work from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Bruce Sterling, M John Harrison and Nick Harkaway, China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, Alastair Reynolds and Liz Jensen, you’ll discover why Arc is quickly establishing itself as an important and original voice, both in science fiction and in the wider world of letters, design and technology.We hope you enjoy the ride.