Review: Railsea

Railsea by China Miéville

Imagine the set up of Moby Dick for a moment - a young shipman on a whale-hunter boat with a captain chasing a giant white whale across the ocean. Now forget the ocean and replace it with a seemingly endless expanse of continually connecting railroad tracks. Forget the giant white whale and replace it with a giant white mole. By now, your mind should be thinking "What the heck?" Yep, a giant mole. The whale-hunter boat is a mole-train and the name of the young man is Sham Ap Soorap.

That's about as far as the comparisons go, but it's a fun comparison.

Sham is a timid and bumbling sort of fellow trying, ineffectively, to be a doctor's assistant aboard the mole-train, but when he finds some strange photos aboard a wrecked train, his life turns in a new direction that gets him chased by all sorts of people who also want to find what he's looking for.

This book is a mix somewhere between sci-fi and fantasy, but it isn't heavy on either genre - it is character driven, story driven, and author driven (as the author makes many asides in the book from the very beginning). A couple times the shifts between chapters can feel slightly disjointed just because the author assumes that we, the readers, can fill in the missing moments. And we can and it gets easier to do as the book goes on, but if you're not expecting it, it can throw you off slightly.

This book purposely sets itself up with a ridiculous set-up and strange language to boot, but then it takes itself seriously and pulls you into the lives of the characters, especially Sham who grows throughout the entire book into as capable a hero as any story. And along the way, the book explains its preposterous premise in ways that make you think about modern issues and future consequences.

From start to finish, this book is both enjoyable and thought provoking. The scenario is imaginative and the solutions are clever. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone with a love for thought-provoking adventure and imagination.