The City & The City
Inspector Tyador Borlú must travel to Ul Qoma to search for answers in the murder of a woman found in the city of Besźel.
Stats for nerds
32recommend
69mentions
55people
2010–2025years
54% recommend43% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'd like to recommend one as well: The City & the City, by China Miéville. A delightful, unique experience! Fresh and original, “fantasy science fiction”. Not a big fan of detective stories and noir, but this is something else.
- I mean far be it from me to extinguish someones hyperbole about literature, but it's simply not that unique or groundbreaking - as for its supposed intellectual insurmountability, it's hardly Finnegan's Wake.
Games like 'What Remains of Edith Finch' handles the literary and primary source based diegetic narrative, with games like Firewatch or similar expanding on the premise as genre-games. Then you have the likes of Journey or To The Moon serving to upturn expectations on concepts of traditional narrative and structure, and things like The Stanley Parable satirically prodding the nature of choice and narrative viz a viz a player's actual agency.
In the ghetto of SCUMMWare point and click games with cartoonish graphics and themes I'm sure Myst was a breath of fresh air. Intellectually, however, any number of games make it look like a remedial student.
Take 'The Fool's Errand'- a 1987 computer game by Cliff Johnson which presents itself as a point and click meta-puzzle with an overarching narrative extrapolated through various visual and logic puzzles and a cryptic treasure map. The game is structured as a storybook divided into five parts, each containing a large number of different chapters; the storybook can be paged through and read as continuous prose on screen. Starting to sound familiar? No doubt, as both it and Myst lift a lot of their inspiration wholesale from Masquerade by Kit Williams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool%27s_Errand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book)
Jumping back to the soft-core philosophical gum-chewing, we can see the same themes emerge in a far more articulate sense as early as the Gibson/Dick-esque dystopian nightmare of Deus Ex in 2000.
Deus Ex played with any number of interesting literary vehicles including a 'novel within a novel', the agency of man vs AI and its textual interaction with the world, the inversion of symbols and signifiers, and a huge debt owed to both Gravity's Rainbow and Foucalt's Pendulum structurally and thematically. Hell, G.K. Chesterton's metaphysical thriller 'The Man Who Was Thursday' is included in excerpts throughout the game simply for flavour!
Nowadays there's plenty of easy and lazy comparisons to make based on similar mechanics and core gameplay loop - The Talos Principle or Soma for example - but I'd go more recently with Disco Elysium, which owes huge amounts thematically to China Mieville's 'The City and the City' and Émile Zola's 'Germinal'. I would like to go on (for thousands of words) but I would only spoil people's enjoyment of a TRUE creative literary tour de force and game that requires appropriate and actual intellectual rigour to engage with.
- The City and the City by China Mieville. The cities are very close but very far away.
- I caught up with some science fiction this year.
The Murderbot diaries books by Martha Wells - 6/10. Mixed on these. They're fun to read. The setting is cool and the worldbuilding is shallow but effective (i.e., don't read it if you want game of thrones in space). Each novella takes an afternoon to read. I think "snarky violent droid" is overcooked these days and lost interest after book 5.
Light by M. John Harrison - 7/10 excellent prose; great multiple-storyline plot; the journey was better than the destination, but it kept me thinking
Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson - 7/10 Fun. If "near future Nigerian/British post-colonial frontier action with guns, robots, and psychic aliens" sounds cool to you, check it out. I liked his Rosewater Trilogy just as much.
Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts - tough to rate these. brilliant ideas, VERY challenging plots. I wish I didn't get so confused by the end of each book.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - 6/10 - this and the Martian read like blog posts pasted together. The grand dilemma is spelled out on page one and never gets any deeper. Pro: the plot is in your face on every page and you will never be confused when reading; Con - there is zero internal character development. Read if you like stories driven by applied science, not comparative moral decision-making.
The City and the City by China Miéville - 9/10 - you will invariably see something like "Kafka meets [some affected crime novelist] to describe this book, and that ain't wrong. Kind of SF, kind of fantasy.
Railsea by China Miéville - 8/10 - great good vs evil YA SF about, well, imagine if trains were like boats. Good character writing, tight plot.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - 8/10 - loved this. More "realist" near-future fabulism than Gibson, but if you love cyberpunk, read this.
The Shipbreaker Triology by Paolo Bacigalupi - 6/10 - near-future YA science fiction with a lot of blood and guns. Pretty good stories.
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers - 9/10 - reread. I had to go back. This gets a near perfect score because of its style, setting, and plot.
The Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) by William Gibson - 9/10 - I had read Neuromancer 3 times but never the next two. I was pleasantly surprised to find the second and third novel easier to read* but just as enjoyable as Neuromancer.
The Bridge trilogy by William Gibson - 8/10 so far. I am in the second book. Can't believe I slept on these for the last couple decades.
non-SF:
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad - 9/10 - if you like punk/hardcore from the 80s, this is a great read.
* Every time I read Neuromancer, Gibson's literary footguns --holograms, false memories, hallucinations, and drug-addled unreality--make me feel crazy for not being able to follow the plot at times. I'm okay with believing that was the intended effect.
- > mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap
You may enjoy China Miéville's The City & the City [1]. The less you read about it ex ante, the better. It's one of those books that gives you a mental model and language that proves surprisingly useful in describing what you saw.
- One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.
