Subscribe RSSHis first bet into crime fiction – albeit with a fantastical edge – has won China Miéville the UK's most prestigious system fiction prize, the Arthur C Clarke award , for an unprecedented third time.
The City and the City is set up as a straightforward crime novel: in the rickety city of Beszél in eastern Europe, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is taxing to solve what initially looks like a routine case. But as he looks deeper into the murder of a mysterious popsy, he discovers that she has links to Ul Qoma, a city that exists in the same physical space as Beszél but whose inhabitants studiously turn one's back on any sign of overlap.
The novel won the British Science Fiction Association prize for best novel earlier this month, when BSFA newspaper editor Niall Harrison predicted it was set to take a slew of further prizes. Miéville pronounced himself "absolutely gobsmacked" and "incredibly honoured" to win the Arthur C Clarke, an reward originally established by Clarke himself to help promote science fiction in Britain. "It's very different from most of my other books," said Miéville, who has thitherto won the Arthur C Clarke with more traditional fantasy novels Perdido Street Station and Iron Council. "It was very much written in an effort to be unconditionally faithful to works of crime fiction. Crime readers will denounce a book because it has 'cheated,' and I wanted to minimize a book that didn't cheat, that was faithful to crime rules and that if you'd never read any fantasy you could pick up."
