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Summary
Summary
FollowingPerdido Street StationandThe 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 inIron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.
Author Notes
China Miéville was born in Norwich, England on September 6, 1972. He received a B.A. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1994, and a Masters' degree with distinction and Ph.D in international relations from the London School of Economics, the latter in 2001. He has also held a Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard University.
His first novel, King Rat, was nominated for both an International Horror Guild and a Bram Stoker award. His other works include Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council, Un Lun Dun, The City and the City, Embassytown, and Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories. He has won numerous awards for his works including three Arthur C. Clarke Awards, two British Fantasy Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, and the 2008 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book.
He also published a book on Marxism and international law called Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this stunning new novel set mainly in the decadent and magical city of New Crobuzon, British author Mieville (The Scar) charts the course of a proletarian revolution like no other. The capitalists of New Crobuzon are pushing hard. More and more people are being arrested on petty charges and "Remade" into monstrous slaves, some half animal, others half machine. Uniformed militia are patrolling the streets and watching the city from their dirigibles. They turn a blind eye when racists stage pogroms in neighborhoods inhabited by non-humans. An overseas war is going badly, and horrific, seemingly meaningless terrorist acts occur with increasing frequency. Radical groups are springing up across the city. The spark that will ignite the revolution, however, is the Perpetual Train. Workers building the first transcontinental railroad, badly mistreated by their overseers, have literally stolen a train, laying track into the wild back-country west of the great city, tearing up track behind them, fighting off the militia sent to arrest them, even daring to enter the catotopic zone, that transdimensional continental scar where anything is possible. Full of warped and memorable characters, this violent and intensely political novel smoothly combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, even the western. Mieville represents much of what is new and good in contemporary dark fantasy, and his work is must reading for devotees of that genre. Agent, Mic Cheetham. 8-city author tour. (July 27) FYI: Mieville has won Arthur C. Clarke, British Science Fiction and British Fantasy awards. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Third foray into the fantasy world of New Crobuzon (The Scar, 2002, etc.), a city unlike any other. Think Calcutta, then add magic, aliens, alchemy, and other disciplines almost unimaginably strange and alarming. New Crobuzon's rulers, a quasi-democratic, utterly ruthless capitalist gang, enforce their will through militia equipped with firearms and magic, perhaps mounted upon Remade steeds with steam-piston legs. Citizens who transgress are likely to find their heads and torsos grafted on to a horse's body . . . facing the horse's rear end. The city has chosen to fight a war with remote Tesh, whose utterly mysterious leaders retaliate with terrible, incomprehensible magical weapons. Revolution is in the air. Shopkeeper Cutter treks into the wilderness in search of his lover, the revolutionary Judah Low. Judah intends to bring about the return of the Iron Council, a train with crew and passengers that was expelled from the city years ago and has since inched across the continent, laying track down before, ripping it up behind. Ori Ciuraz yearns to move beyond pamphlets and talk to violent sedition; through the old, half-mad revolutionary Spiral Jacobs, he contacts Toro, whose magical bull's mask can tweak open doorways between dimensions. As usual, however, nothing is what it seems; the unexpected is the norm. Prodigiously inventive--MiÉville dreams up and throws away more astonishing ideas in a paragraph than most writers manage in a lifetime--but bogged down with sheer tonnage; the hardworking experimental prose doesn't help. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the forest Rudewood, Cutter waits for the few who will join him in finding the somaturge, or creator of golems, Judah, and then warning the Iron Council that the militia of the powerful, totalitarian city of New Crobuzon are closing in to destroy it. Meanwhile, in the malign megalopolis, young Ori, seeking to contact a daring urban freedom fighter and strike real blows against New Crobuzon's rulers, gets acquainted with an apparently mad old man said to have been a comrade of legendary outlaw-rebel Jack Half-a-Prayer. Mieville returns to the sublimely weird world of his award-winning Perdido Street Station 0 (2000) and The Scar0 (2002) in a shorter but still sprawling saga that is being boosted as his breakthrough to the kind of popularity fellow English fantasists Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman enjoy. The new book's parts alternate between Cutter's and Ori's adventures, which eventually intersect, and a long flashback tells the backstory of Judah and the Iron Council. Cutter's story unfolds like a blending of western movies and King Kong0 , and Ori's echoes the urban grunge fantasy of Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels. Freighting his prose with arcane botanical and engineering terms as well as neologisms, Mieville writes the intertwined tales in different styles--relatively spare and dry for Cutter's, lush and saturated for Ori's. His verbal and imaginative largesse may throw some readers while utterly engrossing others. No doubt about it, he's an original. --Ray Olson Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
As the city of New Crobuzon carries on an interminable war against the wizards of Tesh, life becomes more and more repressive for the many humans, near humans, nonhumans, and "the Remade"-people subjected to magical body reconstruction as a form of punishment. Cutter, a member of the Caucus, an organization of various factions of rebels, sets off on a journey to locate the legendary Iron Council. In his hardcover debut, the award-winning author of Perdido Street Station assaults the reader's senses with a cornucopia of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, bringing his brilliantly imagined world to life. Strongly recommended for most sf or speculative fiction collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.