I've known *about* Mieville for a long time. But I don't know if I've ever read one of his books before. Generally speaking though, people I respect enjoy his books, and that's the best way I know to find new things to read. Simply said? I really enjoyed it. Strange enough to be wondrous, but not so bizarre that it's nonsensical. Good story. Good use of language. Good characters. Perhaps more than anything else, I was impressed by the moral ambiguity of the book. And I'm not talking about cheap

Overtly political, teasingly intricate, and deeply intertextual, China Miéville's Iron Council is everything I expect to love in great speculative fiction, and nearly everything I know I love in Miéville's work.Yet, since its publication, I have only read it once, and I still find myself ranking it third of Miéville's Bas-Lag books. I've been baffled by my restraint with Iron Council. My admiration of Miéville's other books is boundless, bordering on madness, and I haven't understood how a book

Iron Council is China Miéville's most overtly political fiction work, but don't pigeonhole it. Between the revolutionary fervor, fantasy, trains, and Western-like parts runs a common theme of love and the painful, desperate, doomed human longing. I loved this book. It was not the insta-love like it was with "The Scar" but a long, careful, slow-to-build-up affair that by the end of the story fully blossomed. This book is fascinating, passionate, brutal at times, thought-provoking and deliberately...

Dear China,It’s not you, it’s me.I wanted to like Iron Council more, and there were parts of it I really did like, but the old magic was just not there.I remember first meeting you on the pages of Kraken, and your fantastic images, scenes and people made me want to spend more time with you.Then we spent some time together stepping in between Besźel and Ul Qoma and I realized the depth and virtuosity was more than a flash in the pan, you were on to some heady stuff, THE NEW WEIRD. I was hooked.Th...

Full review to come at some point in future hopefully.For now like the rest of the series, combination of very weird but very well written steampunk and real world politics with ambiguous sides and no truly right answer.

I gave this four stars, but I also gave Mieville's "The Scar" four stars.But they aren't equal. (This highlights the difficulty with the Goodreads rating system)."The Scar" probably deserved a 4.5 (nearly perfect), where this rates more like a 3.5.This is the third book in the New Crobuzon/Bas Lag series.The first two were "Perdido Street Station" and "The Scar"."The Iron Council" takes place in the same universe but many years later, in the nineteenth century (where the earlier two books were i...

What an absolute trip this series is! As usual with the Bas-Lag books, Iron Council stands alone; but I'd strongly recommend starting with the other two. There's details of the world that come into play, and context that it would be a shame to miss.Perdido Street Station concentrated on New Crobuzon - The Scar took us completely outside of it. Iron Council merges the two approaches, alternating between groups and locales, even times. Mieville's always taken the tantalising approach with Bas-Lag

I don't think I'll ever read a trilogy like New Crobuzon (NC) again. It is hard to pinpoint what I felt when reading the book, but it surely an overwhelming mix of emotions. Iron Council to me is the most emotional of them all. Maybe, because of the point of views of its characters. Perdido Street Station (PDS) was NC seen from the eyes of the elite, the scientist and the artist, the mob boss and the privileged. In The Scar, there was a shift to the vagrants, pirates, the runaways with unseen ye...

Certainly the weakest of the Bas-Lag novels, although in some ways it was probably the most creative. I enjoyed Iron Council enough not to give up halfway through, though were it written by anyone else I probably would have.As per usual, China Mieville's incredible creativity and world-building were in full force, exploring the wide world of the continent of Rohagi, from New Crobuzon to Myrshock to the Torque-spewing Cacotopic Stain. Endless neat new beasts and characters on display, and the nea...

Iron Council, Mieville's most political work of fiction explores Marxist philosophy and views history through the lens of materialism. It concretizes the concept of revolution by setting it on the filthy, war-torn, destructive grounds of New Crobuzon.With its many species, remades, renegade freemades, the militia and the parliament, New Crobuzon is immersed in economic inequalities, species and class based oppressions, police brutality, war, elitism and crime. Its numerous factions are constantl...

I love the first two Bas-Lag books but it took me ages to get around to this third volume due to the relatively high number of less than enthusiastic reviews on Goodreads and elsewhere. Yes, I can be swayed by reviews if the consensus opinion leans towards the negative. At the end of the day though I could not resist picking this book up as it is the last Bas-Lag volume for the foreseeable future (Miéville may come back to it but he seems to have no plan to do so at the moment). Another thing in...

Recall in my review of The Scar how I was whining about my opinion of China Miéville and his novels remaining relatively constant? How I wanted to read something different, something I could say didn't rank equally with the other three novels by him that I have read?This is the story of why I should have been more careful with my wishing.I knew something was wrong—perhaps I should say off—almost from the beginning of this book. The opening was grandiose in Miéville's usual style (which, if you'v...

To the Riverskin StationLike Tsarist Russia in 1917, New Crobuzon is at war with a neighbouring city-state, Tesh. As in St Petersburg, the local insurrectionists, a random collective of variegated runaways (the Collectivists), seize the opportunity to stage a revolutionary overthrow of the oppressive Urban Unity Government. Meanwhile, the Iron Council (which might be analogous to the Central Committee of the Communist/Bolshevik Party) learns of these events and decides, like Lenin, to return fro...

I wanted very much to like Iron Council, considering how much I was drawn into the worlds of Perdido Street Station and The Scar, but despite my best efforts, I couldn't do it. Without question, it's my least favorite of Mieville's three Bas-Lag books, and I am conceding defeat at page 287. Judging from many of the positive (though qualified) reviews of other GR readers, the story is difficult but rewarding, but I think if I don't care what happens by the mid-way point, then it's not going to ha...

So, here we are in Bas Lag again. According to interviews, Mieville sounds like he has every intention of returning to the world of Bas Lag in the future, so I won't refer to this as "the last Bas Lag novel." But, as of 2009, it's the most recent.I found the experience of reading Iron Council markedly different from the first two books set in this world. For one, in this book the story isn't as localised. We have met the city of New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station and the pirate collective of...

A beautiful novel, perhaps the best speculative fiction that I've read, but likewise certainly enriched by reference to its close companion text, The Scar, which parallels it in important ways, as well as to Perdido Street Station, which introduces its setting.As in The Scar, the narrative here involves a group of outcasts who travel on a more or less traditional quest to find something in particular. Both books involve a renegade, mobile city that interacts weirdly with a bizarre breach in the

Enough imagination for eighty books..my favorite of Mieville's anti-trilogy for some reason...seems like you walked into a Bosch painting for most of the book.The most dismissed of Mieville’s books maybe because the first hundred pages are a little confusing and the structure strains a little bit more than usual. While all his books have flaws his enormous imagination and stunning vocabulary (rivaling Wolfe and McCarthy) pave over any hesitations I have. This one focuses on a tragic and costly c...

The novel is luxuriously redundant, but there is too much mixed up in it, and it is almost impossible to isolate the meaning. everything is sinking under the heaps of monstrous creatures of Mievil's fantasy, much to the detriment of emotional attachment. Here it will not be like with a khepri girl, the editor of the "Violent Tramp", Garuda, a scientist in the "Station of Lost Dreams".The coolest book, combining a love story, a political thriller, fantasy, steam, bio and splatterpunk, with a west...

Wow, what a rich novel! China Mieville does with fantasy what I love about radical science fiction: sets a revolution in an imagined world to create an engaging, complex, deep story and character and speak to the real world, the present. I highly recommend the Iron Council to folks who like feminist/leftist science fiction that want to read a fantasy novel that doesn't celebrate the aristocracy. Iron Council is a novel about class struggle and the people in it, and it happens to be fantasy.I'm d...