Iron Council

Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon — this time, decades later.

It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.

In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope. In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon's most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council....

The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.

"In this stunning new novel set mainly in the decadent and magical city of New Crobuzon, British author Miéville (The Scar) charts the course of a proletarian revolution like no other. The capitalists of New Crobuzon are pushing hard. More and more people are being arrested on petty charges and 'Remade' into monstrous slaves, some half animal, others half machine. Uniformed militia are patrolling the streets and watching the city from their dirigibles. They turn a blind eye when racists stage pogroms in neighborhoods inhabited by non-humans. An overseas war is going badly, and horrific, seemingly meaningless terrorist acts occur with increasing frequency. Radical groups are springing up across the city. The spark that will ignite the revolution, however, is the Perpetual Train. Workers building the first transcontinental railroad, badly mistreated by their overseers, have literally stolen a train, laying track into the wild back-country west of the great city, tearing up track behind them, fighting off the militia sent to arrest them, even daring to enter the catotopic zone, that transdimensional continental scar where anything is possible. Full of warped and memorable characters, this violent and intensely political novel smoothly combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, even the western. Miéville represents much of what is new and good in contemporary dark fantasy, and his work is must reading for devotees of that genre. Agent, Mic Cheetham. 8-city author tour. (July 27) FYI: Miéville has won Arthur C. Clarke, British Science Fiction and British Fantasy awards." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Prodigiously inventive — Miéville dreams up and throws away more astonishing ideas in a paragraph than most writers manage in a lifetime..." Kirkus Reviews

"Miéville moves effortlessly into the first division of those who use the tools and weapons of the fantastic to define and create the fiction of the coming century." Neil Gaiman

"Continuously fascinating....Miéville creates a world of outrageous inventiveness." The Denver Post

"[Miéville's] verbal and imaginative largesse may throw some readers while utterly engrossing others. No doubt about it, he's an original." Ray Olson, Booklist

"[Miéville] assaults the reader's senses with a cornucopia of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, bringing his brilliantly imagined world to life. Strongly recommended for most sf or speculative fiction collections." Library Journal

A sequel to Perdido Street returns readers to New Crobuzon, where a new cast of characters shares mythical adventures in the sprawling, phantasmagoric city. By the author of The Scar.

China Miéville was born in 1972. He is the author of King Rat, which was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Prize; Perdido Street Station, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; and The Scar, which won the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Hugo Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives and works in London.