From the Bookshelf of Beyond Reality…

The City & the City

China Miéville

Start date: February 1, 2018

Finish date: February 28, 2018

Discussion: Previous BotM--DISCUSSIONS

Why we're reading this: The group previously read this book in Sept. 2009.
[close] The group previously read this book in Sept. 2009.

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Previous BotM--DISCUSSIONS

Mockingbird (6/25): Finished Reading (Spoilers OK)
By Kathi , Moderator & Book Lover · 8 posts · 13 views

last updated Jun 28, 2025 02:11PM

Mockingbird (6/25): Roll Call *No Spoilers*
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last updated Jun 14, 2025 05:06PM

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What Members Thought

Jul 29, 2014 Maggie K rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fanchallenge2015, wwe-ryo-2015-detectives

So, the actual fantastical part of this is a little hard to describe, but oh so creative! It's about two cities that share the same space, and its inhabitants who studiously ignore anything that might be the other town. This dichotomy has created a whole 'in-between' world, that may or may not actually be there!

When a murder mystery occurs wherein the victim was killed in one of the towns and dumped in the other, two detectives have to put aside their inbred denial and deal with the other city a ...more

12 likes · Like · see review

Mar 27, 2011 Jason rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-2011, e-books

4 stars

China Mieville is one of my very favorite current authors, and I always am eagerly waiting for more. If you have not been exposed to the "new weird" or Mieville than you should be sure to add him to your reading queue. I would recommend Perdido Street Station first, as I consider it to be a near masterpiece.

City & the City is about two cities that occupy the same space, not time, straight out of your favorite science fiction. Take this deep and complex setting and tell it with Mieville's ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Aug 04, 2011 Kevin Xu rated it liked it

I first discovered him through looking up James Clavell's book, King Rat, discovering his book at the same time. I love that every book that he writes is so different from each other, while still writing fantasy and science. This book was not really for me. ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Jan 29, 2018 Kathi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves an engrossing plot, intriguing characters, and a highly original setting(s).

At its heart, this is a murder mystery and the hard-working, determined detectives are the pulse of the story. But the city of Besźel, the city of Ul Qoma, and the unknown space between them wrap around the story and transform it from a basic crime-solving procedural to a uniquely inventive tale.

The narrator, Besź Inspector Tyador Borlú, and his assistant Corwi, form a par ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

May 26, 2011 Ric rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I found it hard to get started with this book. Part of it was my incredulity with the premise(view spoiler). After reading other GR reviews, it turns out that this is a common aspect of Mieville novels. The other part was that I was a Mieville virgin, in the sense that this was the first book of his I had ever read.

But it grew on me, this book. Noir and police detectives, quite a throwback, but effective. Once I was past t

...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Mar 17, 2014 Tomislav rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, mystery, 5-stars, read-3-times, fiction, sff-2018-read-all-the-books

third read - 14 February 2018 - ***** I read a trade paperback edition of China Miéville’s 2009 The City & The City. I had previously read it in 2010 and in 2015. In spite of generally preferring science fiction over fantasy, I have also read and enjoyed a number of Miéville’s other novels.

This is a book that deserves re-reading. On the first read, it takes quite a while to really understand how the citizens of Besźel, Ul Qoma, Breach, and the possibility of Orciny all coexist in one physical ci third read - 14 February 2018 - ***** I read a trade paperback edition of China Miéville’s 2009 The City & The City. I had previously read it in 2010 and in 2015. In spite of generally preferring science fiction over fantasy, I have also read and enjoyed a number of Miéville’s other novels.

This is a book that deserves re-reading. On the first read, it takes quite a while to really understand how the citizens of Besźel, Ul Qoma, Breach, and the possibility of Orciny all coexist in one physical city – and that is a lot of fun. On the re-read, I found there were items even in the very first chapter that I failed to notice or misunderstood. And on the re-reads, I could focus back onto the murder mystery and the thriller that is set in that city. I still basically stand by the opinions I made after my first two reads (below), but with a few additional observations. At this point, I am moving deeply into spoilers, so am blocking out the rest of my third review.
(view spoiler)

Second read - 31 August 2015 - ***** This book is easily worth a second reading. I looked back over my comments from 2010 below, and see that most of them are based on my reactions to the first part of the book. On this read, I already understood unseeing was purely a social construct, and paid attention to the characters' own awareness that they were deliberately not seeing, how it is necessary first to see in order to decide to unsee, and to the role of Breach. Breach certainly does not have the manpower or the territorial control to be an unwilling enforcer. "It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time... you can't come back from that." So it is a statement of how all social codes work, and the role of enforcement. Highest recommendations, again.

first read – 28 February 2010 - ***** The setting of this book is a vague somewhere in South Central Europe. I'm Croatian-American, and have traveled some to areas from the Czech Republic to Bulgaria, and a lot of the countries between. I thought I had the setting narrowed down to the Dobrudja coastal area of Romania, but eventually the geographic and linguistic clues, taken together, exclude every real place. The place names and character names are not authentically in any specific language, occasionally betraying a sort of naive perspective of a writer from as far away as Great Britain. Maybe this is deliberate, but I doubt it. For example, in no language of the region, would "Tyador" be abbreviated as "Tye" - more likely the single-syllable "Tyad" or even "Dor". Probably this only matters to someone like me, but it was kind of fun trying to pin down the locale until that became impossible.

On the face of it, this is a murder mystery. The body of a murder victim is found near a public skate park in Besźel, and Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is assigned to the case. As in good mysteries, the scope of the case grows more complicated and runs deeper that initially thought. However, Besźel is one of two cities in two different countries that exist on overlapping territory. I don't mean one on each side of the river, like my Grandfather's birthtown of Brod - but with detailed house-by-house zones that belong alternately to Besźel, or to Ul Qoma, or are in crosshatched areas that are in common. However, even within the crosshatched areas, a careful code of behavior allows citizens of one to unsee and unhear the citizens of the other with whom they may walk a sidewalk or drive a street. There is a mysterious enforcement known as Breach that all live in fear of. There is one location at city center where crossing may be made. It is possible for one to walk from one's house, go through customs, and return along the alternate version of the same streets - and because you would now be in the other country, speaking another language, and in a different frame of mind, you would not see your own house. In my understanding, there is nothing of parallel universes or that sort of thing involved here, although the reader is teased with the possibility during the first half of the book. No, people are raised to see and interact only with their own kind, to be unaware of the other - a situation that nearly in fact exists in some towns in that part of the world. Maybe in the UK and the US too?

I was unsure in which category of SF to count this. I'm tempted to say it's not speculative fiction at all, as it is not science fiction nor fantasy nor alternate history. The only speculative element is the extent to which the two cultures have ingrained in their citizens an inability to recognize the other, beyond what we practice in the real world, and the social institutions that support that world-view. It illuminates how social codes and laws are not matters strictly of enforcement, but of convention, expectation, and learned blindnesses. So I'm going to stretch things, and call it social sf. But I'm afraid the category pigeon-holes this book a lot more than it deserves. This should be treated as literary fiction, more akin with writers like Franz Kafka than to the SF genre. ...more

2 likes · Like · see review