About the Author

China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His novel Embassytown was a first and widely praised foray into science fiction.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR CHINA MIeVILLE
Kraken
"The stakes [are] driven high and almost anything can happen. The reader is primed for a memorable payoff, and Mieville more than delivers."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
The City & The City
"If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble . . . "The City & The City.""--"Los Angeles Times
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Perdido Street Station
"Compulsively readable . . . impossible to expunge from memory."--"The Washington Post Book World"
The Scar
"A fantastic setting for an unforgettable tale . . . memorable because of Mieville's vivid language [and] rich imagination."--"The Philadelphia Inquirer
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Iron Council
"A masterwork . . . a story that pops with creativity."--"Wired "
Un Lun Dun
"Endlessly inventive . . . [a] hybrid of "Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz "and "The Phantom Tollbooth.""--Salonk." -"New Y

Avice Benner Cho is a born exile, one of a small human colony on a world in which the locals, the Ariekei, can incorporate humans into their weirdly literal language but not speak to or understand them-except for the Ambassadors, doubled humans bred and raised into an illusion of being a single creature. Made into a living simile as a child, Avice escapes to crew an interstellar ship, only to return to indulge her linguist husband's fascination with her home world. Both become caught up in the Ariekei's evolving view of their own language and the cataclysmic changes that result. Verdict Mieville's (The City & the City) latest novel is incisive, insightful, disturbing, and occasionally even uplifting. For its portrait of aliens that are convincing yet sympathetic, it ranks up with the works of Vernor Vinge and Candas Jane Dorsey's A Paradigm of Earth; for complex cultural interaction, with Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Occasionally, Mieville's worldbuilding is inconsistent, as when a culture of "property-based" marital forms gives its children to be raised by "shiftparents"; Avice's central role in the aliens' mental shift verges on excessive upstaging, and overcleverness like her ABC name can puncture the reader's suspension of disbelief. Still, overall, this is one of the best sf books of this or any decade and likely to reach beyond the genre to appeal to book clubs and other literary fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10.]-Meredith Schwartz, New York (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.