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Comment by freetonik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way.

Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.

As someone who hated The City and The City to the point of never reading Mieville again, I appreciate the warning for Embassytown. I sometimes consider reading his stuff again but I was genuinely offended by the trick in City. Like... I paid money for this? No. It felt like contempt for his audience.

What in particular made you feel this way about The City and The City? Like what were you expecting prior to the reveal?

I hated PSS, and enjoyed Embassytown. I don't understand what's misleading about it.

What's the Embassytown mislead? I read that recently and felt it was pretty direct.

Weirdly, The City & the City reminds me of Martin Cruz Smith's books like Gorky Park set in the Soviet Union (or more recently post-Soviet countries) in that it is a police procedural set in a culture the reader presumably doesn't understand and so the reader is interested in learning how this society functions as much as they are interested in seeing the mystery solved. The difference of course is the societies in The City & the City are of course fictional.

What aspects of the culture in The City & the City stood out to you the most?

Mostly just the explanations of how the two cities could function as separate entities while physically occupying the same land through the use of legally mandated "useeing". The author goes into detail how this works -- obviously at one level people see the people, vehicles, etc. from the other city or they'd run into them, but on a conscious level they act as if they don't exist.

Seconded. One of those books that gives you a crisp metaphor for something powerful you might not have noticed we all do, thereby letting you observe yourself do it and describe it to others. Best read tabula rasa.

Good book and one with a solid BBC adaption into a four part mini series (2018)

https://thetvdb.com/series/345091-show

It's remarkable that they decided to adopt it for TV, because it's one of those novels that's very hard to imagine to put onto a screen. The whole book felt, to me, like I'm in a dream.

Wow, must try to watch it. I remember reading The City & the City and thinking about how visually it would be... different clothes, overlapping murals?

I have zero idea how healthy these are .. but .. try https://ext.to/the-city-and-the-city-s9177/

Best bet looks like: https://ext.to/the-city-and-the-city-season-1-complete-720p-...

If you're in the UK you can watch d/load from the BBC hone site via iPlayer when they rotate available again (currently not on iPlayer): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p061bd5l

My thing about Miéville is that all the books of his I've read (Embassytown, Perdido street Station, and the one about trains that I didn't realize was pretty YA) felt like the endings dissol into B grade action (IMO Stephenson has the same problem). Everything starts off surreal and philosophical and beautiful and then just fizzles into stuff blowing up

iirc all the books you mentioned have action throughout and most of Stephenson is the same

True. But the action seemed to drive forward a big picture message, the action was the means to deliver a message, until the end. Then it was just shooting and explosions without putting a bow on whatever philosophy had been introduced. That's the way I remember these books (and diamond age, snow crash, et al)

I hated it because it felt like a smug trick. Like, I know you ordered steak and paid for steak, but I'm serving you a salad because it's healthier for you, and if you complain it's just your lack of taste.

Embassytown, also by China Miéville, is traditional sci-fi and really good as well.

A book that was even made into a TV miniseries does not fit my definition of "you may never heard of".

tbf the BBC does a lot of mid tv miniseries. I don't feel many people will know this adaptation outside of fans of the book.

I enjoyed the book, but I'm still not sure how it's been classified as science fiction, despite clearly having been pigeonholed into the category. The book has very little to do with real or speculative science. It was also one of the most awarded "science fiction" books of the last couple decades, so isn't really obscure in any sense either.

In some sense I think it does have quite a bit to do with (speculative) social science, especially once you see (spoilers) that there really is nothing supernatural going on at all.

C.J. Cherryh's 1981 novel Wave Without a Shore has something vaguely similar, where the human inhabitants of a planet refuse to notice the non-human natives sharing their cities.

I too adore that one - when describing it to people I've found the term "headfuck police procedural" is the most fitting.

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