China Miéville

China Miéville

Author Overview By the Side Quest Book Club Podcast

“Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?” ~ China Miéville, City & the City

Why we love China Miéville

Slava and Jonathan take some stands on China Miéville's The City & The City. 

Author Highlights

Here is what you can expect from a China Miéville story…

  • Wild, genre-bending imagination

  • Dense, immersive world-building

  • Intelligent, idea-driven storytelling

  • Atmospheric, evocative prose

Author Bio

China Miéville is a New York Times-bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction. In 2015 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2018 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. His work has won various prizes, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award, and has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. He has previously been Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and Writer-in-Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago, IL. He is one of founding editors of the journal Salvage.


This bio is taken from China Miéville’s website.

Slava’s Thoughts

China Miéville's The City & the City was the first, and currently, only Miéville book I've read. Two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, occupy the same physical space but are kept rigorously separate by culture, law, and a mysterious force called Breach. Citizens must "unsee" and "unhear" the other city, even when walking the same streets.

The concept is brilliant: it functions as a police procedural, a political allegory, and a metaphysical puzzle all at once. It's the boundary-pushing speculative fiction I'm always chasing, and it's convinced me I need to read more of his work.

Jonathan’s Thoughts

My name is Jeff.

If you like China Miéville, you might like …

The Strugatsky Brothers

Genre: Fantasy

Philip K. Dick

Genre: Speculative, Sci-Fi, Dystopian

Ursala K. Le Guin

Genre: Speculative, Sci-Fi

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