Born in 1972, and presently holding a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics, China Miéville is a Marxist who writes sprawling fantasy novels. London is his city, and it takes two forms in his books: one, as the real London, which is the case with his first novel, Rat King; two, as an unreal, otherworldly London called New Crobuzon, which is found in Perdido Street Station and his most recent novel, Iron Council. Both Londons are sublime, as the critic Carl Freedman points out in his splendid essay "Towards A Marxist Urban Sublime." Freedman writes: "The urban sublime--the awe-inspiring (if frequently unbeautiful) grandeur of the modern capitalist metropolis, in all its unfathomable heterogeneity and hybridity--has been a frequent effect of literary representation from Blake onwards, but in recent literature it has rarely been attained more brilliantly than in King Rat."

"Frequently unbeautiful" is the best way to describe Mieville's cities and writing. The pace of his prose is as quick as William Gibson's, the size of his novels are as thick as Salman Rushdie's, and the urban worlds that realize his politically driven plots are largely messy. You would vomit instantly if you happened to be teleported to the middle of New Crobuzon, a city that is too alive--creatures of all kinds in bars and factories, monster birds shitting everywhere, and the air a miasma of foods fried and boiled in alien kitchens. But how awesome this city is. From Perdido Street Station: "[In Dog Fenn, a neighborhood in New Crobuzon,] ladders left against a wall one day were hammered into place the next, reinforced after that, and within a week had become the stairwells to a new storey, thrown precariously between two drooping roofs."

Even the architecture is alive in this city with no architects. And in both Rat King and Perdido Street Station, the forces of evil, as with the forces of capitalism in our world, want to end this thriving and dangerously unmanageable diversity (the multitude) of human and inhuman things.

China Miéville reads at University Book Store (4326 University Way NE, 634-3400) at 7 pm on Fri July 30, and it's free. I See London, I See Rats