The section describing the birth of the railway, as it pulls shanty towns, whores, gamblers and gunslingers in its wake, is a rather splendid reimagining of the wild west.
There are many wondrous scenes and sequences. Can it escape its hunters? Can it help its comrade citizens? Thus, a Marxian romance, a quest narrative of revolutionary politics. Judah Low, a golemist who can conjure and direct monsters made of rock, iron and dust, sets out to find the legendary train. Something like revolution or total war is coming.
A strange spiral-drawing man gives the people dreams of freedom. Now, back in the oppressed city, there is ferment. It is pursued implacably by the militia of the city-state of New Crobuzon, from where the train first set out in an effort to build the first transcontinental line. It is rumoured there is a train called Iron Council that wanders the wastelands, laying track before it and pulling it up after, populated by workers and escaped prisoners.
It tells the story of industrial action on a railway - which, this being fantasy fiction, is more colourful than a day of commuter misery at Waterloo. China Miéville's new novel takes place in the same world as Perdido Street Station and The Scar, a kind of steampunk milieu furnished by clockwork engines (here we see the invention of the phonograph), electrified by magic ("thaumaturgy"), and populated by an improbable variety of sentient life-forms.
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