![]() A young girl has been found dead in a seedy part of the city, and he discovers that she was from the (superimposed) city of Ul Qoma. Inspector Tyador Borlu is a middle-aged career policeman with the Extreme Crime Squad of the city of Beszel. ![]() ![]() So what’s the plot of the police procedural? And yet, somehow connections between the two cities persist. People who have breached disappear forever, and no one knows what happens to them. If you seem to recognize or interact with anyone in the other city, you will be picked up by a mysterious force known as Breach. Whichever one you grew up in, you have been trained to “unsee” the other one. In the same space, you are either in Beszel city or Ul Qoma. In Mieville’s book, the city and the city reflect this paradox. That is, Mieville sets up his cities like Schroedinger’s famous cat. ![]() It seems that the whole rest of the world exists more or less as it does now, but two cities – somewhere on the edge of Europe – exist in a quantum state. This latest book, his attempt at a “police procedural” (he has said he wants to write a book in every genre, but somehow I’m guessing he’ll skip “chick lit”) is very different from the average murder mystery (or even the non-average murder mystery). If you are familiar with any of his other books, such as Perdido Street Station or The Scar, you know that he has an incredibly fecund mind that creates complex alternative worlds in which to set his stories. ![]()
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