This book offers (in the first six chapters) critical readings of six novels by China Miéville, which are followed (in the seventh chapter) by a theoretical meditation on some of the conceptual issues raised by and engaged in the Miéville oeuvre. There comes a moment in The City & the City, though it is not necessarily the same moment for every reader, when you realise that Beszel and Ul Qoma are not separate realms but the same space divided. Likewise, art and idea are often subject to absurd partition, but then along comes an author such as China Miéville who shows them to be, in truth, indissoluble. So argues Freedman's inordinately readable and just as rigorous account of Miéville's major novels. Highly recommended. (Mark Bould, University of the West of England) Freedman offers a compelling interpretation of Miéville's novels informed equally by an impressive range of literary influences and a carefully documented exploration of historical antecedents. Seeing Miéville's genre hybridity as an illustration of the power of dialectical thinking, Freedman illuminates the complex utopian project of Miéville's fiction. Freedman is one of our finest critical voices on Miéville, one of the most important speculative writers of the 21st century. (Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside)

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 Marseille, 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, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance 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 rebellion: 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. Praise for The Last Days of New Paris “Beautiful, stunningly realized . . . [The Last Days of New Paris] is a brief vacation in alien latitudes, a midnight layover in an imaginary place.”—NPR “A thoughtful, highbrow novella . . . Miéville’s self-assured style offers up a strong sense of humanity, while the strange Surrealist monsters give Last Days a fun and complementary mad-science component.”—USA Today “[A] testament to the necessary, progressive power of art . . . Both moving and disturbingly timely.”—Newsday “A novel both unhinged and utterly compelling, a kind of guerrilla warfare waged by art itself, combining both meticulous historical research and Miéville’s unparalleled inventiveness.”—Chicago Tribune “An extraordinarily original work that foregrounds Mieville’s considerable ingenuity and innovation.”—The Millions “Hauntingly poetic, strangely beautiful, and erratically intense.”—San Francisco Book Review “Dazzling . . . quite a feat.”—The Guardian

A major critical engagement with a major contemporary writer: absolutely essential reading. --Adam Roberts, author of New Model Army (2010), Jack Glass (2012) and Bête (2014), and winner of the British Science Fiction Award This critical anthology, the first devoted exclusively to the works of China Miéville, sets a high standard for the other such volumes that will surely follow. All the chapters in this collection should be highly recommended to the large and growing number of readers who rightly regard Miéville as one of the pre-eminent imaginative writers of the 21st century. --Carl Freedman, Russell B. Long Professor of English at Louisiana State University and author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville (2015) An exemplary addition to the Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series, this challenging and fascinating collection is as demanding as its subject. Crucial for those interested in the weird, in science fiction and in the turns of contemporary British fiction. --Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London Since the publication of his first novel in 1998, China Miéville has distinguished himself as one of the most exciting and inventive writers working in any genre in contemporary British fiction. The author of nine novels and two short story collections to date, as well as comics script-writing, numerous critical works on science fiction, and legal scholarship, Miéville is a critically acclaimed writer who has also achieved popular success. The chapters in this collection respond to the range of interests that have shaped Miéville's fiction from his influential role in contemporary genre debates, to his ability to pose serious philosophical questions about state control, revolutionary struggle, regimes of apartheid, and the function of international law in a globalized world. This collection demonstrates how Miéville's fictions offer a striking example of contemporary literature's ability to imagine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism at a time of crisis for leftist ideas within the political realm.

“Other names besides [Herman] Melville’s will surely come to mind as you read this thrilling tale—there’s Dune’s Frank Herbert. . . . But in this, as in all of his works, Miéville has that special knack for evoking other writers even while making the story wholly his own.”—Los Angeles Times On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death & the other’s glory. Spectacular as it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than the endless rails of the railsea—even if his captain thinks only of hunting the ivory-colored mole that took her arm years ago. But when they come across a wrecked train, Sham finds something—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—that leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters & salvage-scrabblers. & it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “[Miéville] gives all readers a lot to dig into here, be it emotional drama, Godzilla-esque monster carnage, or the high adventure that comes only with riding the rails.”—USA Today “Superb . . . massively imaginative.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Riveting . . . a great adventure.”—NPR “Wildly inventive . . . Every sentence is packed with wit.”—The Guardian (London)

Award-winning author China Miéville began his astounding career with King Rat—now in a new Tor Essentials edition—a mix of a young man's search for identity with a pulse-pounding story of revenge and madness. With a new introduction by Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail. 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. King Rat reveals to Saul his own royal heritage, a heritage that opens a new world for him, the world below London's streets. With drum-and-bass pounding the backstreets, Saul must confront the forces that would use him, the ones that would destroy him, and those that have shaped his own bizarre identity. Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

For readers of George Saunders, Kelly Link, David Mitchell, and Karen Russell, This Census-Taker is a stunning, uncanny, and profoundly moving novella from multiple-award-winning and bestselling author China Miéville. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries—and fails—to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether? Filled with beauty, terror, and strangeness, This Census-Taker is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity. Praise for This Census-Taker “China Miéville is a magician . . . who can both blow your mind with ideas as big as the universe and break your heart with language so precise and polished, it’s like he’s writing with diamonds.”—NPR “The book haunts the reader; what actually happened seems always just out of reach, glimpsed in shadow as it rounds a corner ahead of our vision.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “[Mieville’s] been compared to Karen Russell and George Saunders, and rightfully so.”—The Huffington Post “Marvellous.”—The Guardian “Lingers in the mind like an unsettling dream.”—Financial Times “A thought-provoking fairy tale for adults . . . [This Census-Taker] resembles the narrative style, quirkiness, and plotting found in the works of Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, or Steven Millhauser.”—Booklist “Brief and dreamlike . . . a deceptively simple story whose plot could be taken as a symbolic representation of an aspect of humanity as big as an entire society and as small as a single soul.”—Kirkus Reviews