In "The City & The City", Mieville has created a fantastic story set in our own time within a pair of fictional European cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma. The cities are each sovereign nations with their own laws, customs and languages; however, they physically exist within the same space. The denizens of each city learn from birth to "unsee" the people, buildings, cars and anything else that are not a part of their own nation.
The plot of the story, to me, is there only as a vehicle to carry this incredible concept. A woman is murdered in Ul Qoma and found in Beszel where Tyador Borlu of Beszel's Extreme Crime Squad is assigned to the case. While solving the convoluted mystery the realities of living in the "city and the city" are revealed.
China Mieville has fast become one of my favorite authors. His writing is described as "science fantasy" and "abstract"; however, I find the worlds he creates fascinating. Each book has its own rhythm, it's characters their own language that set them apart from anything else I have read.
A fantastic book from Banks. I've read a few biography/auto-biography type books about rock bands; including The Stones, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie. The drama, drugs, success and excess that is woven throughout this story could easily have been taken from any of the lives of those real groups.
I want to quote a little piece from near the end of the book. To me, this portion of a long, run-on sentence, contains the entire point of what Banks was trying to say with Espedair Street.
"...it felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and dispair, and you were lucky and sometimes you weren't, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can always be better, and things can always be worse."
I highly recommend this book in particular and any of Iain Bank's books in general. Whether straight fiction or his space opera science fiction, he is an incredibly talented writer.
I knew a little about Plath's life before I started reading this, but didn't realize "The Bell Jar" was autobiographical. I honestly don't know if knowing that beforehand would have changed my feelings about it. I understood and identified with her main character so well that I've begun to question my own sanity.
The story is simple, but written in a way that had me comparing her characters to people I know in my life. But can a person truly know another? Even close friends and family may be hiding stress, guilt and depression behind contented masks. You hear of perfectly "normal" people committing suicide and family and friends closest to them not realizing anything was wrong.
You can tell from her writing that Sylvia Plath was also a poet. The way she describes the people, settings and actions taken are all charged with meaning. From a jazz club in New York City to the Boston Common and on to the asylum she was committed to. Each becomes vivid in your mind.
"I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue."
So........until this book I've always enjoyed David Weber. His Honor Harrington books caught me years ago and I've read most of that series. Now this.
The first 95% of the book is a decent, fairly standard, alien apocalypse story. Set in the very near future with likable, well developed human good guys vs. over confident, very naive alien bad guys who do a Pearl Harbor sneak attack on the Earth from space by hitting all the major cities, and anyplace remotely military related, with big rocks. More than half the Earth's population killed the first day.
Then comes the standard guerrilla warfare from our heroes. To stubborn to give up and aliens to stupid to win. Lots of good action and I only felt slightly overwhelmed by Weber's highly detailed descriptions of every piece of military equipment and weapon used by our heroes.
The story progresses nicely through all this with the humans making it very costly for the aliens, the aliens still thinking they can beat the lower tech humans, but continuing to slowly lose. The aliens finely decide its to much trouble and plan on developing a biochemical to exterminate the rest of the humans.
Now, to the part that completely ruined the book and makes me think that David Weber may have gone insane..............
Our human heroes are saved from extinction by the appearance of Drakulya, Vlad the Impaler, who has, until now, been fighting in Romania as part of a successful guerrilla group. For some reason he had forgotten who he was and has been living as a human. Once he remembers who he is he quickly sweeps through all of the remaining alien installations on the planet, killing every alien, before hitching a ride on the outside of fleeing shuttles with his recently changed vampire army and killing all of the aliens on the ships in orbit.
How the hell does that even make sense? I've read sci-fi vampire stories before and I'm OK with the concept, but this was completely out of left field. Very few people I know approve of a "deus ex machina" ending, but this one takes the cake.
Saying all of that, I won't give up on Weber. There's still a few Harrington books I need to finish and I'm sure he has better in him. I truly hope he doesn't try to make this a series. I, for one, will NOT waste the time on a sequel.
