Railsea

Starred review from April 9, 2012
Miéville (Un Lun Dun) returns to YA fiction with a superb, swashbuckling tale of adventure on the railsea, a vast prairie densely crisscrossed by train tracks: “Tracks & ties, in the random meanders of geography & ages, in all directions. Extending forever.” Sham, an orphan, has gone to railsea as apprentice to a train’s doctor. That train, the Medes, is a moletrain that plies the railsea hunting the great moldywarpes (giant moles) that live beneath the dirt, harpooning the subterranean creatures when they surface and rendering them down for meat, fat, and fur to be sold on the mainland. The train’s captain, Naphi, is a strange, charismatic woman who lost her arm to an enormous ivory mole, Mocker-Jack; obsessed with killing the creature, she’s willing to sail to the mythical ends of the railsea to catch him. Working variations on such classics as Moby-Dick, Robinson Crusoe, and A Wizard of Earthsea, this massively imaginative and frequently playful novel features eccentric characters, amazing monsters, and, at its heart, an intense sense of wonder. Ages 12–up. Agent: Mic Cheetham Literary Agency.

June 15, 2012
Moby-Dick meets Kidnapped by way of the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic: Another astonishing blend of cyberpunk, steampunk, fantasy and science fiction, from the hugely talented author of Embassytown (2011, etc.). In a world of endless land threaded and interwoven with train tracks, gigantic and voracious subterranean rats, stoats, millipedes and the like, layer upon layer of archaeological remains and a poisonous upper sky inhabited by flying angels, Capt. Naphi of the moletrain Medes hunts Mocker-Jack, a colossal yellow molelike moldywarpe. Other moletrain captains like Naphi are equally obsessed with pursuing their "philosophy," while other trains make a living salvaging the plentiful and often incomprehensible detritus of past civilizations and the discarded junk of passing aliens, while still others ply more orthodox trades. Young Sham Yes ap Soorap is Medes' apprentice doctor, a profession he has little aptitude for or interest in. While investigating a wrecked train, with which the landscape is littered, he discovers an ancient camera card whose pictures show, impossibly, a part of the Railsea that has narrowed down to a single set of tracks. Who took the pictures, and where might the tracks lead? Many folks, including pirates and some of Medes' own crew, dream of treasure. Mieville's omniscient, detachedly amused narrator (whose identity is eventually, slyly, revealed) follows these and other points of view in relating a yarn that can be read as pure adventure, tongue-in-cheek homage, gleeful satire or philosophical meditation. It's billed as YA and, indeed, Mieville's usual high level of violence and sex is toned down, often to the point where the characters appear gender free (in one case, literally so). Eye-bulging escapades tempered with invention and mordant wit, perfectly complemented by the author's own pen-and-ink drawings of the Railsea's weird denizens.

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Starred review from May 15, 2012
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Mieville, who last dabbled in the YA world with Un Lun Dun (2007), has done something very odd here indeed. While it's tempting to call this a steampunk spin on Moby-Dick, that would be as reductive and limiting as calling Moby-Dick itself a sea shanty. Instead of chasing whales on the sea, the crew of the diesel train Medes hunt moldywarpesenormous, man-eating, molelike creatures who are only one of the countless menacing species who burrow in the perilous earth beneath a tangled ocean of train tracks. And it is one moldywarpe in particular, the great Mocker-Jack, that Captain Naphi is afterit's trendy for any captain worth her iron to have such a defining obsession, and she is fully aware that they hunt metaphor in beast form. Aboard for the grand adventure is your hero, young Sham (don't call him Ishmael). The world building is both dazzling and baffling, but the real show here are the stylistic whorls and eddies as Mieville pushes his prose into some very neat places. Hardly a sentence goes by without some invented word or feat of tricky phrasing that echoes the thorny prose of Melville's original. Both the world and the halting, chugging syntax take some time to get acclimated to, but when it all takes off, does it ever move. Though it is informed by both the themes and kaleidoscopic storytelling of Melville's great American novel, this is easily one of the most inventive and original YA fantasies in some time. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Mieville is that rare breed of author who is both a best-seller and a critical darling. His return to YA literature is cause for much ballyhoo.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)