Search results for ""Author China Mieville""

Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More's Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering.But there has always been a shadow at the heart of Utopia. If this is a depiction of the perfect state, why, as well as wonder, does it provoke a growing unease?In this quincentenary edition, published in conjunction with Somerset House, More's text is introduced by multi-award-winning author China Miéville and accompanied by four essays from Ursula K. Le Guin, today's most distinguished utopian writer and thinker.

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THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER - A mind-blowing epic from Keanu Reeves and China Mieville, unlike anything these two genre-bending pioneers have created before, inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books.'An exceptionally innovative collaboration from two remarkable minds.' William Gibson, author of Neuromancer'What an extraordinary book! China Mieville's brilliance as a writer combined with Keanu Reeves's quite magnificently wild imagination make for a compulsive read. Unlike anything else. Boom!' Stephen Fry'A gripping, hugely intelligent and beautifully-realised nightmare. It's clever, brilliant and horrifying.' Daily Mail'A rattlingly good read . . . has much in common with Reeve's best film roles.' Sunday Times'A pulpy, adrenaline-fueled thriller, but it's also a moody, experimental novel about mortality, the slippery nature of time and what it means to be human.'

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Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Kraken is a darkly comic, wildly absurd adventure by author of Perdido Street Station, China Miéville.Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears? For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god. A god that someone is hoping will end the world.

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China Miéville's brilliant reading of the modern world's most controversial and enduring political document: The Communist Manifesto. 'It's thrilling to accompany Miéville... as he wrestles – in critical good faith and incandescent commitment – with a manifesto that still calls on us to build a new world' Naomi Klein 'Read this and be dazzled by its contemporaneity' Mike Davis 'A rich, luminous reflection of and on a light that never quite goes out' Andreas Malm 'Reading with [Miéville] today sharpens our senses to contemporary internationalist movements from below' Ruth Wilson Gilmore '[Written] with diligence and a ruthlessly critical eye worthy of Marx himself' Sarah Jaffe In 1848, a strange political tract was published by two German émigrés. Marx and Engles's apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system, which penetrates every corner of the globe, reduces every relationship to that of profit, and bursts asunder the old forms of production and of politics, remains a picture of our world. And the vampiric energy of that system is once again highly contentious. The Manifesto shows no sign of fading into antiquarian obscurity, and remains a key touchstone for modern political debate. China Miéville is not a writer hemmed in by conventions of disciplinary boundaries or genre, and this is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today. Like the Manifesto itself, this is a book haunted by ghosts, sorcery and creative destruction.

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Weaving together the historical and the imagined, China Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris is a surreal and extraordinary work, from the author of The City & The City.1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer and occult disciple Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world for ever.1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts - and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, Thibaut must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties - to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.

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The multi-award-winning China Miéville has been called 'the equal of David Mitchell or Zadie Smith' (Scotland on Sunday), a writer whose 'inventiveness and precision is awesome' (Independent), and who writes with 'an imagination of immense power' (Guardian).In these twenty-eight short stories, glistening icebergs float above urban horizons; a burning stag runs wild through the city; the ruins of industry emerge unsteadily from the sea; and the abandoned generations in a decayed space-elevator look not up at the stars but down at the Earth. Ranging from portraits of childhood to chilling ghost stories, from dystopian visions to poignant evocations of uncanny love, with beautiful prose and melancholy wit, Three Moments of an Explosion is a breath-taking collection that poses searching questions of what it is to be human in an unquiet world. It is a humane and unsentimental investigation of our society, our world, and ourselves.

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King Rat blends eerie fairy tale and contemporary urban fantasy in China Miéville's fantastical debut.Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime. But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into his prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat. In the night-land behind London's façade, in sewers and slums and rotting dead spaces, Saul must learn his true nature. Grotesque murders rock the city like a curse. Mysterious forces prepare for a showdown. With Drum and Bass pounding the backstreets, Saul confronts his bizarre inheritance - in the badlands of South London, in the heart of darkness, at the gathering of the Junglist Massive. Like the DJ says: 'Time for the Badman.'

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Savage giant moles, rail pirates, and explorers abound in China Miéville's thrilling young adult novel, Railsea.On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt. The giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory – are extraordinary. But no matter how spectacular it is, travelling the endless rails of the railsea, Sham senses that there’s more to life. Even if his captain can think only of her obsessive hunt for one savage mole. When they find a wrecked train, it's a welcome distraction. But the impossible salvage Sham finds there leads to trouble. Soon he's hunted on all sides: by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

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The iron wheel began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The room grew darker. As the light lessened, so did the sound. Deeba and Zanna stared at each other in wonder. The noise of the cars and vans and motorbikes outside grew tinny . . . The wheel turned off all the cars and turned off all the lamps. It was turning off London. Zanna and Deeba are two girls leading ordinary lives, until they stumble into the world of UnLondon, an urban Wonderland where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people too. Here discarded umbrellas stalk with spidery menace, carnivorous giraffes roam the streets, and a jungle sprawls beyond the door of an ordinary house. UnLondon is under siege by the sinister Smog and its stink-junkie slaves; it is a city awaiting its hero. Guided by a magic book that can’t quite get its facts straight, and pursued by Hemi the half-ghost boy, the girls set out to stop the poisonous cloud before it burns everything in its path. They are joined in their quest by a motley band of UnLondon locals, including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas, Obaday Fing, a couturier whose head is an enormous pincushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle.Winner of the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun is an extraordinary vivid creation;is populated by astonishing frights and delights that will thrill the imagination.

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When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, the multi-award winning The City & The City by China Miéville is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

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On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history.In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world's first workers' state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilisation that still resonates loudly today.

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London's Overthrow is a potent polemic describing the capital in a time of austerity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Award-winning author and essayist China Mieville cuts through the hyperbole of our politicians to present a view from ordinary London - of the inequality, oppression and indignity and the hidden, subversive sentiment pervading throughout our streets.

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Winner of the August Derleth award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative urban fantasy thriller, and the first of China Miéville's novels set in the world of Bas-Lag.The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants linger in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians, junkies and whores. Now a stranger has come, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror – and the fate of millions depends on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crime-lords alike.The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground as battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings. And a reckoning is due at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape.

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Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, China Miéville's astonishing Embassytown is an intelligent and immersive exploration of language in an alien world.Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.

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In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world's first workers' state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilisation that still resonates loudly today. China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history.

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China Miéville's brilliant reading of the modern world's most controversial and enduring political document: The Communist Manifesto. 'It's thrilling to accompany Miéville... as he wrestles – in critical good faith and incandescent commitment – with a manifesto that still calls on us to build a new world' Naomi Klein 'Read this and be dazzled by its contemporaneity' Mike Davis 'A rich, luminous reflection of and on a light that never quite goes out' Andreas Malm 'Reading with [Miéville] today sharpens our senses to contemporary internationalist movements from below' Ruth Wilson Gilmore '[Written] with diligence and a ruthlessly critical eye worthy of Marx himself' Sarah Jaffe In 1848, a strange political tract was published by two German émigrés. Marx and Engles's apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system, which penetrates every corner of the globe, reduces every relationship to that of profit, and bursts asunder the old forms of production and of politics, remains a picture of our world. And the vampiric energy of that system is once again highly contentious. The Manifesto shows no sign of fading into antiquarian obscurity, and remains a key touchstone for modern political debate. China Miéville is not a writer hemmed in by conventions of disciplinary boundaries or genre, and this is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today. Like the Manifesto itself, this is a book haunted by ghosts, sorcery and creative destruction.

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Rebellion and war race to take control of New Crobuzon in the award-winning Iron Council by China Miéville.It is a time of revolts 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 metropolis to the brink. In the midst of this turmoil, 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, an undying legend. In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon's most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the Iron Council.

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Winner of the British Fantasy Award, The Scar by China Miéville is a colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination, set in the richly visualized world of Bas-Lag. A human cargo bound for servitude in exile . . . A pirate city hauled across the oceans . . . A hidden miracle about be revealed . . . These are the ingredients of an astonishing story. It is the story of a prisoner's journey. Of the search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger.

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Science fiction and socialism have always had a close relationship. Many sf novelists and filmmakers are leftists. Others examine explicit or implicit Marxist concerns. As a genre, sf is ideally suited to critiquing the present through its explorations of the social and political possibilities of the future. This is the first collection to combine analyses of sf literature and films within a broader overview of Marxist theory and critical perspectives on the genre. Covering a rich variety of examples from Weimar cinema to mainstream Hollywood films, and novelists from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken MacLeod and Charles Stross, this is an indespensible insight into how Marxism and science fiction go hand-in-hand.

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A fresh post-apocalyptic anthology of 18 stories: the end of the world seen through the salvage and ruins. Featuring Emily St John Mandel, Carmen Maria Machado, Clive Barker, China Mieville, Charlie Jane Anders and more. This anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction asks, what would you save from the fire? In the moments when it all comes crashing down, what will we value the most, and how will we save it? Featuring stories from China Mieville, Emily St John Mandel, Clive Barker, Carmen Maria Machado, Charlie Jane Anders, Samuel R. Delaney, Ramsey Campbell, Lavie Tidhar, Kaaron Warrern, Anna Tambour, Nina Allan, Jeffrey Thomas, Paul Di Filippo, Ron Drummond, Nikhil Singh, John Skipp, Autumn Christian, Chris Kelso, Rumi Kaneko, Nick Mamatas and D.R.G. Sugawara.

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To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future - the Proletarocene - one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.

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J. G. Ballard was, for over fifty years, one of this country's most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, ‘Empire of the Sun’, this revelatory autobiography charts the course of his astonishing life. ‘Miracles of Life’ takes us from the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, to the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp, to Ballard’s arrival in a devastated Britain. Ballard recounts his first attempts at fiction and his part in the social and artistic revolutions of the 60s. He describes his friendships with figures as diverse as Kingsley Amis, Michael Moorcock and Eduardo Paolozzi alongside recollections of his domestic life in Shepperton – raising three children as a single father following the unexpected and premature death of his wife. ‘Miracles of Life’ is both a captivating narrative of the experiences that have shaped this extraordinary writer’s works, his distinctive outlook and his original visions of the future, and is also an account of a remarkable life. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru, Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.

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When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford the invention makes possible one of the oldest dreams of humanity: a journey to the moon. With Bedford motivated by money, and Cavor by the desire for knowledge, the two embark on the expedition. But neither are prepared for what they find - a world of freezing nights, boiling days and sinister alien life, on which they may be trapped forever.

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