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This was a really fantastic novel and I think you should read it. With a heavy hand in world building and exploration of linguistics and translation this novel gave so many hints and tidbits of the world without creating a complete picture which left you will so many paintings of these worlds with just enough to have you pondering the world just outside the frame.

It is really impressive the amount of world building that was built into a standalone novel, I would read anything, including fan fiction, created in the universe after finishing it.

The story itself and it's interactions were fantastic. There was many times I was left feeling so alien from the valleys that divided characters that I truly believed that there was alien consciousnesses so different than ours, rather than a metaphor for human struggles.

The plot was very hard to predict and kept my rapt attention as it twisted and turned building and referencing with clues and surprises that I honestly didn't know where we were going including the conclusion.

China mieville is one of my favourite contemporary authors because his writings bring in politics, class and revolution in such honest and contextual ways that I am left feeling like through the story I am newly a revolutionary within a different world and power dynamics.

I think everyone should read it. And talk about it with friends.

Just finished the last compilation in the METAtropolis series and it is a mixed bag. I was pretty happy with the final two stories in the series which had Bashar reprising his role and the general timeline development across stories and characters which took us from a recent collapse world to what is probably 120 years later.

The first book in the series really felt like a certain idealism, horizontalism, and anti-capitalism diffuse amongst the stories. as the series, and the world, goes on capitalism, class stratification and political power creep back in as it is consolidated and exercised in the radical and new forms of life that developed in the first series.

Positives is carnies made their first appearance in the universe in this book, negatives beyond the above mentioned development in the universe is that the stories just came off more "action-adventure" and less world building and social questions explored.

And there wasn't a new stories from my favourite Ukrainian nuclear fall out specialist !?!

Anyways, jay Lake, the editor and an author from the series died after a fight with cancer a year after this was published and with his passing, the world's of METAtropolis were retired.

RIP Jay RIP METAtropolis