We're having an open book discussion of this book here . Do come and join! More & more, when it comes to China Mieville, for me, it's lurrvve lurve LURVE! I'm starting to get to the point where I miss his 'voice' when I'm not busy reading a Miéville... In this amusing and inventive coming-of-age story, Miéville pulls out all the Postmodernist stops & creates a work that is at the same time immediate, as it is highly allusive & metafictional.Some of the characteristics of Pomo fiction, especiall...

I've only read one book by China Mieville, but I've heard many good things about his writing from many smart people. So I grabbed this book when I was away at a convention and needed something to read. But Honestly? I'm not sure how I felt about it. It was well-written. And it was clever. It made me chuckle in certain places. There was interesting, even unique worldbuilding.... But I just don't know. I feel like I *want* to like it more than I actually did like it. It might simply be an issue of...

May 2012Are those moldywarpe bones towering over New Crobuzon?Now there's a thought. But it ain't true, sorry. This ain't a Bas-Lag book. It's more fun than that.Sham Yes ap Soorap ("Call me Sham") is just a mediocre doctor's assistant aboard the Medes, a moletrain hunting the railsea for, well, you get it--& its one-armed captain is on the lookout for the biggest moldywarpe ever: Mocker-Jack, the great white mole himself! Yeah, it's kinda like Moby-Dick-with-trains, only it's not, too--far as I...

"This is the story of a bloodstained boy." That's the first line of this strange and fantastical tale of giant creatures that "swim" in the earth's soil and the brave and flawed "molers" who chase them for profit and life purpose. Mieville has created a dystopian world covered in railway ties with skies poisoned by chemicals and filled with monstrous, alien creatures who feast on those who get too close. But, there may just be something beyond the rails, if the characters in this story are deter...

What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us, but to one place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?CM certainly appreciates the hothouse of lexicon. One senses the work and wonder at play. Railsea doesn't wear any undue YA infamy, well, not until the concluding third. I found the exhumation of languag...

This month's book recommendation: RAILSEA by China Mieville. Here is a truly original writer, someone who takes sentences and reinvents them. I love how he says things. You have to focus because if you don't pay attention you will miss what he is getting at. But this mostly YA book is a retelling of MOBY DICK, and it is a resounding success. I just loved it. I've been a China fan since reading KRAKEN and CITY AND THE CITY among others. He can be a tough read, but no one ever said that good books...

Leave it to China Miéville to write a young adult novel and so obfuscate his intentions (via complex vocabulary, a tricky literary style, dense prose, measured pacing, a total lack of plot threads about which boy is cuter) that I've had more than one conversation with youth librarians here on Goodreads who swear up and down that this isn't a young adult book. My evidence is, of course, rather shaky at best: the publisher says so, and why should I complain, because that means the hardcover costs

5 StarsOnce again I am blown away by China Mieville. Railsea is a young adult oriented delight. It is like all Mieville novels in that it is tough to put it in a category. It is part fantasy, part dystopian, a smattering of steampunk and science fiction, and all Mieville. Parents can take delight knowing that if their child takes up this amazing piece of fiction, they will also be taking up the Webster dictionary. Mieville creates a fun and three dimensional cast of characters and side character...

Only China Miéville can write like this. Not just writing about a whole new world but also writing it in a whole new style. He has a wonderful way with words, sometimes using them in unusual ways and sometimes just making them up but always to great effect. This book is supposedly aimed at Young Adults and it does have a YA feel about it but it is also very readable for any age. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys the weird and the wonderful in the hands of an excellent writer.

Thank you, China Miéville. Thank you. Thank you! In the last week & a half, full of 14-hour work days, lack of sleep, physical & mental exhaustion & near-constant feeling of overwhelmed inadequacy CM provided me with the sanctuary of a few precious hours when none of that mattered, when I was completely under the spell of this weirdly fascinating, ridiculous but engrossing universe, when I felt that Miéville's boundless imagination has given me a safe haven where I could breathe free. Theref

Urged on by his guardian cousins, young Sham Yes ap Soorap gets apprenticed to a doctor on a moletrain, riding the Railsea in search of moldywarpe, giant moles hunted for food. Captain Naphi of the Medes, the train Sham sails aboard, is obsessed with Mocker Jack, the biggest moldywarpe of them all, & will do anything to find her prey...Remember that game you used to play when you were a kid, when the living room floor was either molten lava or shark-infested waters, & you had to leap from chair

Call me Sham Yes ap Soorap.I wonder how many reviews have started this way? Certainly Mieville dropped a letter & flattered Melville the old sincerest way, but this book is so much more than a modern revisionist re-telling of the great American novel. There is also a tip of the literary hat to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped & the briefest of wink & nudge at Robinson Crusoe. But tying it all together is Mieville’s inimitable narrative ability. China Mieville’s 2012 publication Railsea is a ch...

DNF at page 150Ok, so what are the reasons why I didn’t like this retelling of Moby-Dick. (In fact I haven’t read any retellings of Moby-D before, at all :D) The world building, the writing and the language are strange and quite odd for me. At first I couldn’t get used to all that & signs, oddly formed sentences, but it’s not a big problem. This book is peculiar. I must admit, there were some funny puns thrown and that’s one of the points why I didn’t DNF it at the very start. Also it has some k...

It could make a person despair, to dwell on how many parts of everything have been neglected. Have not even been discussed, writes China Miéville near the end of Railsea, his latest novel for readers "of all ages". But nothing’s done. If you tell any of this to others, you can drive, & if you wish, go elsewhere on the way. Until then, safe travels & thank you.This kind of meta eye-winking can be charming and occurs frequently in Railsea, which often references and comments on itself. Miéville's

I generally like YA sci-fi/fantasy novels but I rarely consider them anything more than lite fun between “big” books and because of it I tend to be less critical towards them but every now and than one comes along that is good by any standard and reminds me to take this sub-genres seriously.Un Lun Dun,Half a king, Wizard of Earthsea (yes I do consider this book to be YA but not rest of the series), Graveyard book, Chaos Walking and now Railsea joins the group.If I had to label it this would be Y...

“Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.” In so far as Railsea features a captain obsessed with hunting down a behemoth mole, China

Once again, China Miéville delivers one of the most unique, imaginative worlds I’ve ever spent time in. I sometimes wonder if this man is taking some sort of imagination supplements that the rest of us don’t know about (Hallucinogenic drugs perhaps? Dreamshit?). How does he even come up with these things? I mean, I was pretty skeptical about giant moles as monsters, but he really sold it:"The mole rats shook off earth. Like hairless, wrinkled mammal newborn, swollen to dog-size, snapping dreadfu...

There's truly a lot to enjoy here, especially if you're a fan of philosophy and moles.Sometimes together. No, no, scratch that. You can't separate the philosophy from the moles.Every captain must have a philosophy to chase after, and truly, it DOESN'T REALLY MATTER if you're missing an arm or a leg, Okay? Just trust me on this. Don't go chopping off perfectly good appendages just because some bloody mole popped out of one of the seven layered seas and ruined my perfectly happy steampunk reverie....

"Our minds we salvage from history’s rubbish, & they are machines to make chaos into story."- China Miéville, Railsea I enjoyed it. Not fantastic Miéville, but an amazingly constructed universe. The story was well-developed and the characters were interesting. Very steampunky. Very weird. But when Miéville is ON he is really ON and his prose train is moving. There is a genius engine under his hood. He has produced some of my favorite books, and I still don't think he is close to writing his grea...

You probably wouldn't have wanted to read my original review that was lost in the ether (as apocalyptic fantasies not grounded in some semblance of reality don't really do anything for me) but China Miéville's Young Adult (or so they say, but good luck, young readers parsing this "Railcreole") homage to Moby Dick (with a decimated world covered with seas of railroad tracks, poisoned lands, and ruled by burrowing, larger-than-life animals like antlions, earwigs, blood rabbits, naked moles (with g...