I finished China Mieville’s The City & The City just before the Christmas holidays hit. It’s a very solid, and very interesting, novel, and speculative fiction if you consider Ruritanias fantasy. A police procedural set in a sort of Trans-Balkens City-State duopoly of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are not just side by side, but deeply intermingled with each other, different addresses on the same block geographically, for example, could be in entirely different cities, with different languages, laws and customs. Residents must “unsee” the residents of other cities as they pass through their daily life, their virtual apartheid guarded by the fearsome, unseen offices of Breach. It starts with Beszel Inspector Tyador Borlu investigating the death of a woman who believed there was an ancient third city, Orciny, dwelling in the shadows of the other two. The more Borlu investigates, the more he realizes that something is wrong, and that his victim’s murderers may dwell much higher among the city (or the city)’s citizens than he ever imagined. The novel works both as police procedural and extended metaphor for the parts of their own cities readers “unsee” every day. It displays the imagination of China’s other novels, but unlike several of his most recent, engages the reader in the plot much earlier.
I’m pretty sure this will have a place on both my Hugo and Nebula ballots this year.