Bücher von China Mieville

'Fiction of the new century' - Neil Gaiman

Winner of the August Derleth award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative fantasy thriller, and the first of China Mieville'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 and arcane races throng 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.

China Mieville's reading of the modern world's most controversial and enduring political document: the Communist Manifesto.

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, China Mieville'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.

Weaving together the historical and the imagined, China Mieville'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 Andre 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.

Auf einem Berg oberhalb des Brückendorfes, in einem abgelegenen Haus, lebt ein Junge mit seinen Eltern. Der Vater ist Schlüsselmacher und wird weithin für seine Kunst gerühmt. Oft steigen die Leute den Berg hinauf und tragen ihr Anliegen vor. Von den Schlüsseln erzählt man sich, dass sie magische Kräfte haben, und niemals sieht der Junge die Kunden seines Vaters ein zweites Mal. Doch dann wird er Zeuge einer grausamen Tat und muss hinunter ins Dorf fliehen. Die Leute dort erwarten ihn bereits und wollen wissen, was geschehen ist. Außer Atem, mit blutigen Händen und zitternd vor Angst erzählt der Junge, seine Mutter habe seinen Vater erstochen. Sicher ist er sich aber nicht. Vielleicht war es auch der Vater, der die Mutter getötet hat ... Einmal mehr lotet China Miéville die Grenzen der fantastischen Literatur aus. »Dieser Volkszähler« ist ein virtuos erzähltes, atmosphärisch dichtes Buch, das unsere Wahrnehmung der gegenwärtigen Welt verzerrt, um das zu enthüllen, was uns in ihr verborgen bleibt.

Willkommen in der unmöglichen Stadt!Eine Stadt, eine Welt für sich, ein Moloch: Das ist New Crobuzon, bevölkert von Milliarden Menschen und Mutanten, unterjocht von einem strengen Regime und angefüllt mit den ungezählten Sehnsüchten, Ängsten, Problemen und Kämpfen seiner Bewohner. Als eines Tages ein seltsames Wesen den geheimen Laboren der Stadt entflieht, ahnt niemand, dass dies der Untergang New Crobuzons sein könnte. Auch Isaac Dan dar Grimnebulin ahnt die Gefahr nicht, als er dem Wesen begegnet ...

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 Mieville.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.