My Random Rants

This is an interview with Samit Basu,  one of my favorite authors. I have a feeling that had he been British or American with a snazzy bestseller name he would have won a closet full of awards by now. I have enjoyed reading his work immensely and his debut, the Gameworld trilogy(as I have made clear here ) has the effect of sticking to my hands whenever I pick it up and leaving only when its done . Heck I even enjoy reading his 140 character tweets . His last two novels Terror on the Titanic and Turbulence are great rides, written with a verve and panache that few authors match. He has also written short stories(One of which was in an anthology of erotic fiction) and comics. All in all he is just a fantastic talent and US and UK readers should get a taste of his work soon when Turbulence is published there. You wrote this trilogy called the Gameworld trilogy(which was absolutely gobsmackingly brilliant and fantastic by the way). Any plans on doing another ...

Thinking fast and slow is the culmination of the decades of research of Daniel Kahneman and his  posthumous colleague Amos Tversky. (For the ones who give weight to awards Kahneman is a Psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, a strange quirk) Daniel Kahneman talks about how minds are divided into two systems System 1 and System 2. System 1 is our intuition, the fast one, the quick and the default decision maker. System 2 is the rational one, the one that does the hard thinking. Kahneman of course makes the point that System1 and System2 are convenient abstractions and are only models that make it much easier to think about how the the mind works. The best way to describe the book would be say that it resembles Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, only its a lot more rigorous. He talks about several human fallacies and how man is in fact not rational but can be manipulated. He talks about experts in which fields are really experts. He points out that to truly become a...

If you ever wanted to find out how Google does what it does In The Plex is the book. I have read a few Google stories and none are even remotely as good as this. Steven Levy was granted a lot of access and he made full use of it. The book is rich in detail and deftly puts together the way Google took search, a concept no one thought could be monetized successfully and turned it into a money spinning machine. Many products are given short shrift but that is understandable given the scope and breadth of the tale. Levy paints the broad strokes using Search, Gmail, Android and Chrome as the anchors. He also takes us through what Google went through in China and how censorship and governmental controls made the time a tumultuous one. He talks about the impact that Google has had and the privacy concerns that crop up all time. Its a brilliant, fascinating and intriguing read about what makes Google tick. It talks about its reliance on data above all else, its grandiose a...

Steve Jobs is A sublime biography. Its beautifully written and presents Steve Jobs in all his avatars. From a megalomaniac to a supreme charmer. I read this in a single stretch in one go so so that must mean something. Isaacson brings out the contradictions of a man at the cutting of technology who lived like a monk nonetheless. A man who repeatedly says that its not about the money but becomes a millionaire and cheats his best friend Steve Wozniak out of his fair share of the profits. The way he disregards authority but is the most commanding person around himself. How even though he liked to hack other people's work(telephone lines and the like) and wouldn't allow the same to his products.(People will screw things up if they can open them) It is also an intriguing look at his years of failure, after he was ousted from Apple and went on to found NeXT. The creation of Pixar is present as well. It is an intriguing look at the dynamics and how he ran it differently fro...

Imagine a world(or a galaxy rather) where your mind can be downloaded into any body(called a sleeve) you desire at a cost of course. This is the premise that Richard Morgan starts out with in Altered Carbon , his debut novel. The rich live forever, have backup memories that are synced with data banks. The poor suffer as always. Takeshi Kovacs is dead. He had no intentions of coming back to life. It is at this point that he is brought back from the dead to investigate the murder of Laurens Bancroft, who is of course extremely rich, powerful and has all the latest bells and whistles . Takeshi Kovacs happens to be an envoy(a part of an elite military unit trained specifically to adapt to different body types). It builds in classic noir fashion where a murder turns into a much larger conspiracy. Its amazing how far Morgan takes the concept of mind and body being separate(he calls them stacks and sleeves). Multiple copies of the same person exist. Takeshi Kovacs calmly talks to s...

Endymion is the third book in Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos series and it is quite simply brilliant. Endymion is driven by its characters, indeed the science fiction elements are incidental to the story.(Not to say that the science isn't well done of course). The characters are fascinating and their dilemmas draw you in. The plot is very complex(to say the least, there is time travel, there is AI and what not) but in broad strokes it is about  about a certain Raul Endymion who is named after the planet Endymion. He somehow gets caught up in a rescue mission but rather than doing the rescuing ends up being the one rescued. The pursuers are the more interesting lot though and their harrowing space travels are described in great detail. The writing is top notch. Dan Simmons is a deft writer choosing his words carefully and keeping the plot on a tight leash. He has this ability to paint pictures with words which shines through particularly in Endymion. Hyperio...

I think you could give Michael Lewis a random set of numbers and he would still be able to build a narrative to tie them all up. Moneyball is about Oakland A. A baseball team which doesn't have much money but they still manage to win games(a lot of games) and make the playoffs. To achieve this Billy Beane(their general manager) and Paul(their statistician, a Harvard graduate straight out of college) redefine the metrics they will use to measure player performance. In essence it is about seeing value where no one else does. It is also about figuring out where players are overvalued in the baseball market. Right from the outset Michael Lewis draws you in with Billy Beane. Billy Beane is archetypal perfect baseball player, the perfect athlete whose career does not play out the way it is expected to. This causes him to have a healthy disrespect for  gut instincts and conventional ways of measuring value. This is in essence how the tale is setup.   Mich...

This is an interview that I had the opportunity to do with Mark Charan Newton, who was gracious enough to oblige. Mark Charan Newton is the author of the Legends of the Red Sun series of which three books have been published. The books are self contained and are some of the best written fiction out there. I reviewed City of ruins here  which I thought was a fascinating read from start to finish. If there is an author that you want to read he would be a good start. Anyways enough of the introductions and onto the main stuff. In City of ruin the characters who are the most heroic are also the most socially deviant. Commander Brynd Lathrea and Jeryd to name a few. Is this a deliberate choice? I think I find socially deviant characters more interesting! It's certainly not a conscious choice, though - I mean, it's a case that these particular characters have an certain, different outlook on life, and therefore make for slightly unusual perspectives on a story. As lo...

The first book of Neal Stephenson's that I picked up was Anathem and I found that to be really tough going. This one though turned out to be a totally different beast( and a beast it is, at around 1100 pages). I was hooked in the first 100 pages(although admittedly it took me really long to finish) Cryptonomicon connects two story lines one based in World War II and the other in 1990s internet era and they are connected by some strange family coincidences. There is a lot of math and computer science going on here and Neal Stephenson does an admirable job of explaining it all. This is a geek novel if ever there was one with the most developed character being a fantasy card playing, slightly round around the paunches unix loving geek.The novel is very detailed in everything that it does and Stephenson takes great pains to explain everything that is being talked about and even goes so far as to provide equations. Heck there is a perl script thrown in with the actual text ...

Success changes most things but the thing it does really well is change perception. He is a micromanager. He gives no one any freedom, everything has to be exactly as he says, He is a bloody control freak. On succeeding he is called a perfectionist. He is too set in his ways. He never listens to anyone. He never takes any advice. On succeeding he is said to have conviction in his ideas and having a vision no one else had at the time. He is an arrogant bastard. He is rude to people. He doesn't hesitate to expect the best out of people. He lacks all social niceties On succeeding he is said to have a cavalier disregard towards rules. It is said that he makes his own. He doesn't get what he should say in any situation. He has this tendency to blurt out anything that strikes his fancy. On succeeding it is said that he always speaks his mind irrespective of the situation he is in. He is quiet. He doesn't know how to make his presence felt. On succeeding he is said t...

Freedom of speech is an interesting concept because people always think that they should have it but the asshole next to him doesn't deserve it. In most places freedom of speech is an ideal and indeed the rules and the media do their best to ensure that it remains an ideal. Indeed I doubt there is any place where there is actual freedom of speech. Shoaib Akhtar can come in and say, write whatever he wants to about Sachin and it shouldn't really matter because he has the right of expressing his opinions.(His opinion might even be an informed one seeing that he actually bowled to him several times). Nobody should be allowed to ban his book event simply because he presents disagreeable views. No book should be stopped from being published because it offends someone's religious sensibilities(Harry Potter, Satanic Verses etc etc). A release of a movie should not be stopped because it handles a difficult subject or indeed dares to present truth but alas the real world is no...

A Short history of Nearly Everything is Quite a fantastic book. Enjoyed it immensely and laughed a lot as well.  The blurb mentions it as the finest rough guide to science and I cannot think of a better description. Bill Bryson takes on dry subjects with ease and makes them interesting and even fun. The title is an apt description because the book really is about everything. More intriguing than the science itself is the brilliance with with Bryson describes the quirky and eccentric scientists all the while adding his own wry observations. You can buy A Short of Nearly Everything here .

A fantastic read from start to finish. The book in essence is about a detective solving many murders and a general trying to hold of alien beings from invading Villirien. This is straight off inspired from the Bas Lag novels of China Mieville and I couldn't escape the feeling that I had while reading Perdido Street Station.(Which is a good thing) . There are vivid creatures at every turn but Mark Charan Newton doesn't bore with with details and the book never gets expository. Indeed its amazing how much he reveals through bits of conversation along with the biases and racism inherent in any city. He also has a taste for the macabre and the deaths are truly terrifying when they happen. Also the author has a healthy fascination for Whisky. Its a well written and a very accomplished novel and Mark Charan Newton can add me to his growing list of fans. I look forward to seeing what he does next. You can read City of Ruin here .

So yesterday I saw Gone Baby Gone, A  crime thriller and one of the best I have ever seen.  A bit of googling later it turns out to be based on a book by Dennis Lehane, the guy who penned Shutter Island. Dennis Lehane has this knack of taking common situations and making them morally ambiguous by the end and Nothing shows this off better than Gone baby gone. The opening lines of the film are the most poignant. In that southern drawl of his Casey Affleck delivers the lines "I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they'd accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. " The things we cling on to most are not our own but hand me downs. From here on in the movie gets even better holding your attention with the case of a disappeared young girl and the twist in the end just makes th...

This is a story of a time machine operator who talks about time a lot of the time but its more a memoir of a father son relationship. There is sadness and melancholy in equal parts. Also this book gets extremely meta meta in parts. Its probably the geekiest book on father son relationships currently in existence. A good and light read (Although you will get a headache if you dwell deeply on the time loops and start mapping out the time travel like I did). You can buy  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe  here

This is McDonald's third in his novels about developing cities in the future. The law of trilogies tell me that this will be his last in the series for some time to come. The Dervish house is set in Turkey which is at the heart of a nano tech revolution. River of gods was about AIs in India and Brasyl about Quantum in Brazil so I think he has got his bases covered. The plot deals with a few characters linked by a Dervish house and a bomb blast which turns out not to be one. The thing with McDonald is that you know what you are going to get. You know that the prose is going to be bloody brilliant, the plotting is going to be virtuoso but he always manages to surprise. This one is no different. There are passages of such staggering beauty, sections of such brilliance that they make the book worth reading all on their own. No one can meld philosophy and and an action sequence in a single breath the way he does. Also no one, no one writes a football game the way McDonald do...

At its best Science Fiction remakes reality in the way no other genre can. It allows us a glimpse of the future, of unknown lands that we could not have thought of before.  It expands our collective imagination in the way little else can. It is important to remember that everything begins as a thought in someone's mind. Everything starts out as a sketch, an outline on a piece of paper.  This is precisely why a lot of the NASA scientists acknowledge the influence that Science Fiction has had on their work. To read Science Fiction and Fantasy requires at some level a suspension of disbelief and buying into the world that the author sells to you but paradoxically Science Fiction also makes you question the basis of society and everything that you see around you. In a way it exposes one to the hypocrisies latent in human nature. To those who make the argument that Science Fiction is not literature do yourself a favor and read something by ...

It is on a second reading that books really reveal themselves for what they are. You know the big picture so your attention is on the gears that move the world around. You can pick up the subtle clues that the author has left behind and most of all you can really appreciate the writing. Indeed the works of most good authors feel so much better the second time around. I recall reading Harry Potter, the Bartimaeus trilogy, the his Dark Materials trilogy, Lord of the rings as a kid but it was only when I read them again that I took note of themes, leitmotifs that I had not registered the first time around. Indeed anything by Gene Wolfe almost demands that you read it again simply because you cannot possibly understand what is happening the first time around. Every good book deserves to be read twice. I have found this to be true in life as well. It is only the second time around that we do things properly, it is only the second time around that we avoid making the mistakes that we made th...

There isn't much that can be said about Neil Gaiman. All that has to be said has been saidand here is an attempt to say it again. He is one of the world's most popular authors and he wrote this piece called George Martin is not your bitch for which George Martin I think will be perennially grateful. His prose has a poetic quality to it along with being deceptively simple. Remember what is simple is not easy. Indeed what looks simple in the hands of a master is terribly tough to do when one attempts to do the same on his own. His words have a grace that is altogether his own and yet derived from years of reading and standing on the shoulders of giants. The way he writes it seems it all just pops out but of course that is not the case. I suppose the annoying thing is that he makes it look all so easy. American Gods - His de facto novel(He writes comics as well and hence the qualifier) masterpiece. American Gods displays a vast knowledge of mythology. The gods themselves we...

How does Ian McDonald do it. He delighted me with River of Gods. He surprised me with Cyberabad Days and Brasyl is an absolute beauty. There are three parallel stories all set in different times in Brazil. The one I liked most is set in the 17th century and is about a prise Luiss Quinn(that I remember after two weeks ought to speak for the book). The sword fights are the equal to anything that Alexandre Dumas does in Three Musketeers and the writing is fantastic. I also learnt a lot of strange facts about a lot of strange things including the origin of computing. The second arc is set in the present and concerns itself with a reporter on the hunt of disgraced Goalkeeper who lost Brazil the fateful final against Uruguay. This probably has the best description of a football match that I have ever read. (Admittedly I haven't read many but its hard to see how it can get better than this). The third strand is set in the future and I found it to be the most confusing. Qua...

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi  (Don't even try to pronounce the author's name,  I gave up after a few tries) is an extraordinary book. Its hard to see how this is his first novel (Even China Mieville wrote King Rat first up). The book is about the near future and is set in Thailand. The world has been afflicted by a plague due to which new food varities need to be developed again. Human tinkering has produced new cpecies and of course since we have run out of fossil fuels new energy sources have to be found. It is against this backdrop that a rich cast of characters comes to life. The plot concerns itself with a Mr Anderson Lake a factory manager who is actually in Thailand on a covert mission to get the aforementioned foods which somehow Thailand has managed to procure. The other characters includes Enmiko the windup girl, a yellow chinese who has had to migrate to Thailand.  This is a wonderfully realized tale. Bacigalupi walks the tightrope ...

Jamadgini was a great sage, among the most powerful of his era. As can be imagined he lived the most austere of lives with no fancy bells and whistles. Revathi was his wife. They also had five sons, the youngest of them being Parasurama(Literally meaning Rama of the axe(Parasu)). Parshurama would later attain fame as the killer of the entire Kshatriya race and for being a supreme warrior brahmin. Once it so happened that as Revathi was filling up water in the mornings as she usually did, she happened to see Gandharvas and Apsaras frolicking and enjoying themselves. They were beings of such beauty and grace that she could not help but imagine herself amongst them partaking in their activities. While she was imagining things, the pot in her hand slipped thereby breaking the spell. Revathi was too shaken to make any sense of things. She ran back not taking care of the trees and their thorny branches. By the time she arrived back to the ashram she and her clothes were in tatters. Jamadgini...

A brilliant book. Just goes to show that funniest books are actually tragedies. The future it presents is eerily close and feels scary to say the least. I hope the what he says does not happen but a small part of me says that it will. The novel is set in a America of the future and is largely about the story of the Lenny Abramov, a jew who also happens to be a Russian immigrant and a  much younger Korean Eunice. The world goes haywire even as they develop their relationship. Everyone uses a device called an apparat which seems like an extension of cell phones. This is an innovation that tells you everything you need to know about the room, How you rank and what your various indexes are. Scary to say the least. Funny when applied to the predicament of Lenny. Reading is frowned upon and thought to be outdated. Its all streams, images and visuals in the future. In short it takes every predicament that seems to be affecting the world at present and extrapolates it. A beautiful ...

It is amazing how many people are giving advice and earning money out of it these days they do nothing but sprout bullshit doing nothing on their own. The stupid self proclaimed experts who know nothing of the field they talk about. This self esteem movement is doing more to lower self esteem than anything else ever before. Every self help book shows you what you need to do to achieve inner piece. How the fuck does someone decide that they have the answers to all the problems in the world. Its all bullshit folks, its all bullshit.

What an outstanding book Hyperion turned out to be. (The cover is extremely tacky though. Brings to mind the old adage, don't judge a book by its cover) Seven pilgrims are chosen and tell their tales en route to Hyperion of how they encountered the Shrike. A god who can play with space and time. The stories are magnificent, each is a novella in itself. There is a reverse aging story that puts Benjamin Button to shame. The first is a story about encountering an alien but not so alien species. There is story of lovers who age at different rates thanks to one of them having to travel in space.  The best one however is told by a poet about his muse and writing, getting his books published,  I suppose this is Dan Simmons way of taking a dig at the publishing industry. Absolutely fantastic and beautifully written. Dan Simmons writes with a deft touch and it is obvious he is well read with many references to the poetry of John Keats but all this doesn't come i...

Cyberabad Days is an absolutely fantastic collection of stories of varying length. I never thought science fiction set in India could be done so well until I read this and River of Gods. The way Ian McDonald writes it seems that he has lived in India forever and his observations about the culture, the ways the caste system works, the preference for a male child are spot on. His prose is electric and Ian McDonald turns even spiritual discourses into absolute page turners. Indeed it is amazing that the best science fiction on India has been written by someone British. There are seven stories in all each of them covering ample terrain.My favorites include  1) The little goddess A child who is annointed as a goddess gets thrust into the real world the moment her blood is spilled. She becomes a carrier of high level AIs. Absolutely brilliant. 2) Vishnu at the cat circus Places the whole of river of gods novel into context. A tale of how a genetically re engineered Br...

I have been listening to quite a lot of soundtracks lately. Two composers in particular stand out, Hans Zimmer and Clint Mansell. I have written about Clint Mansell over here . Hans Zimmer has somehow managed to score a lot of my favorite movies including Inception, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight , the Gladiator, Sherlock, Pirates of the Caribbean just to name a few. In fact chances are that if there is a movie's score you like in the last decade its by Zimmer.(Apart from Lord of the rings of course :)) The thing about Zimmer though is that he is able to deliver even in movies that are not particularly good. Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons come to mind immediately which feature some great violin solos courtesy Joshua Bell. Here are a few of my favorite tracks. Put your headphones on and listen. Discombulate from Sherlock Red Warrior from The Last Samurai Time from Inception Jack Sparrow's Theme Science and Religion from Angels and Demons

Three novellas, seemingly not connected but so intertwined as to be inseparable. The prose is simple but effective. Wolfe writes with great economy and precision and makes the narration in all the novellas seamless. All three are narrated in the first person and so it can get a bit disorienting at times especially the very first story about father and son who turn out to be not so and an aunt who turns out to be a daughter instead. (Yeah I know it sounds insane already but it is a strange book and a mind bender) Two planets share the same orbit. Humans came and took over an entire civilization but there is a catch.The catch being that the aliens were shapeshifters. There are stories that claim that the aliens have impersonated the humans and in fact are not extinct. Now where most authors would adopt a slam bam and thank you madam approach for this sort of tale(I can already imagine a heroic protagonist uncovering a prophecy with him as the saviour and the aliens as villainou...

Zoo City is a strange beast. Some sections especially the news reports are well written. The pop culture references(especially a nod to His dark materials by Philip Pullman is apt along with a fake imdb movie page) but some sections just fall flat and require that you plod through them. The story is set in South Africa where criminals are attached to an animal so that having an animal becomes a marker for having a nefarious past. It turns out that these animals also bestow certain abilities. The protagonist Zinzi December has the ability to find lost things thanks to a sloth. She had been caught in a drug scandal and needs to pay back the mafioso, so she takes up a job she hates, a missing persons job. The novel then proceeds in standard noir fashion to uncover a conspiracy that is larger than what anyone anticipated. There are other animalled characters, an inside guide through the music production business and some gritty fight sequences.  Also because it is based in South...

This is probably the best treatise on what is wrong with the way Maths is taught. I find that it also applies to most subjects including the languages. In fact this is a great critique of the way schooling works. Also look out for the particularly neat proofs for old problems(Why is a area of a triangle so). Read it here . On  a related note the head first series by O Reilly seems to be doing something to change this. I find their books to be great. This lament compares math to art and the different ways in which they are learnt or taught. It also points to the sheer lack of imagination , the dryness of school textbooks and their ability to take an object of beauty and turn it into a torturous affair. I suppose this is even more pertinent in India where everything must be reproduced exactly as is without modification. I think Gauss summarized it best by saying that what we need are notions and not notations.

Its scary to have high expectations. More often than not you end up devastated but I am happy to say this is not one of those instances. China Mieville has exceeded all my expectations and come up with the most unique book that I have ever read. Embassytown is a science fiction novel that is at once a thriller and a treatise in linguistics and as usual Mieville takes on a genre and turns it on its head. This is at its core a study of language albeit one carried in so thrilling a manner that I hardly paused while reading Embassytown. Imagine there are aliens, of course they have means to communicate with themselves but for them everything is as is, their language does not have a concept of abstraction. They cannot lie and make things up so to speak. What they say has to be the truth. Mieville takes this simple idea and stretches it to its absolute limits, building a world, a system of space travel that is incredibly well realized. The writing is just magnificent. The way Miev...

You think to yourself what can an aging band who haven't recorded stuff for ages come up with. Can they at least come up with something like Hotel California. This is the eagles we are talking about here. And then they come up with Long road out of eden, one of the most exquisite albums that I have heard. New and old at the same time. Bloody brilliant. Stand out tracks include Long road out of eden and waiting in the weeds. Give it a couple of listens. All they have is some video on myspace. Here it is.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a brilliant and utterly fantastic book. It takes an unconventional setting and makes a genius novel out of it. Its the last decade of the 17th century. The Dutch seek to restore a floundering trade relationship with Japan a nation that gives access to a few foreigners. The Dutch have the port town Dejima near Nagasaki. The red haired idealistic Jacob De Zoet enters as a clerk hoping to find his fortune and then proceeds to fall in love of course.(I make it sound as if it cliched but it is anything but). Corruption is rampant and Jacob de Zoet questions his motives many times. Complications arise, a conspiracy is uncovered and an attack on Japan is taken care of with Jacob De Zoet having a prominent hand in the affairs.  The book is beautifully written. The characters are extremely well realized. David Mitchell says a lot but he conveys a lot more by not saying everything out aloud. Also the thousand autumns contains the single g...

If ever there was such a thing as the definitive science fiction novel on India then River of Gods is it. The amount of research that Ian McDonald has done is incredible(either that or he has lived in India for quite a lot of time). He captures India with all its contradictions and uncertainties. A nation which is god fearing, steeped in traditions and rituals and at the same time at the forefront of knowledge. He also manages to write a damn good science fiction novel in the process. The story takes place in 2047, 100 years after India has obtained freedom from the British raj only its not India anymore. Its split up into 12 semi independent states. It hasn't rained in a while so there is a water crisis. The title itself refers to Ganga around which much of the action takes place. The story is written against this backdrop from the point of view of a number of characters who are all well realized. Of course the character arcs intersect by the end to bring the novel to...

Must we have these long fantasy sagas. Why does everything have to be a trilogy or a series. Doesn't a single novel have enough pages to tell al complete tale. Why the rudimentary forgettable details, why the epics. What has happened to the great self contained works of fantasy and science fiction. Books that you could read in a single sitting and were profound, thought provoking. Why do authors want to write the same character again and again. Please give me some stand alone tales that stand tall on their own. I don't want to read sagas, I don't want to wait for the next book of a series. I want to leave a novel satisfied that I have read something. I don't want the moronic cliffhanger endings. Isn't it possible to say your piece in a single novel. I get that trilogies are in but that doesn't mean everybody starts out writing one. More stand alone works of fantasy please.

A hard boiled detective novel is familiar territory. What usually happens is that there is a murder that takes place which seems to be of no consequence but turns out to be anything but. As the story pans out it so happens that there is a larger conspiracy happening and its up to the lone detective to solve the mystery. The City & the City is Mieville's take on the hard boiled detective novel. Is it good? you bet it is. It embraces all the trappings of the genre, enhances it and makes it something more. The premise is simple and yet complex when given a thought. There are two cities, both of which occupy much of the same physical space owing to strange quirk of history. The citizens of each city practice something called unseeing and unhearing to ignore the residents of the other city. The cities have their own arcane rules for passing through of course. A seemingly innocuous murder takes place which quickly becomes something more. Mieville tackles an extremely com...