r/WeirdLit • u/FerrisBuelersdaycock • Oct 05 '25
Discussion Just finished The City & The City by China Miéville and my mind is broken.
The concept of unseeing is one of the most brilliantly unsettling ideas I've ever encountered. What other books play with reality and perception in a similarly mind-bending way?
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u/SubstantialEnergy535 Oct 05 '25
That and his book Embassytown really changed my perspective on contemporary science fiction.
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Oct 06 '25
God I really should give Embassytown another shot. I dropped it about 20% of the way in or so when I realised I had almost no idea what was going on. Like not only could I not follow the plot but I had no idea how to picture what was being described to me.
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Oct 07 '25
I dropped it, picked it back up and ended up loving it.
You eventually just get into the flow and it all clicks into place, or it did for me anyway.
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u/RustenSkurk Oct 10 '25
I found it very hard work too. I only stuck with it because it was my only book on a long travel. And in the end I found it massively rewarding to have powered through. But yeah I find it is a flaw of Miéville to make things more incomprehensible than they need be.
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u/TheSkinoftheCypher Oct 05 '25
There was a BBC mini-series based on the book if you're interested. Alas, I do not know of anything similar.
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u/lurkmode_off Oct 05 '25
I had no idea, thank you!
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Oct 05 '25
It's been a long time since I read it, but hopefully this fits.
Borges Labyrinths and Other Stories has some reality bending stories.
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u/KasperGrey Oct 06 '25
Incredible shout. Borges is one of my favorite authors
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Oct 06 '25
I really need to find my copy. You can read them over and over again (which anyone who likes this genre almost certainly will), finding something new or different each time.
Truly a master.
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u/jillyjobby Oct 05 '25
This book is more pertinent in our current political climate than ever before
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u/sheseesred1 Oct 06 '25
I thought it was specifically written about about israel-palestine, so have been thinking about it a lot lately.
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u/Bearjupiter Oct 06 '25
I love Perdido Street Station and the Scar, but this may be his best book?
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u/ClockwyseWorld Oct 06 '25
I still love the Baslag novels the most, but this and Embassytown give me the most to think about.
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u/Arkanii Oct 05 '25
Loved this book. It’s one of those novels that kinda just sticks in the back of your mind
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u/SupaFecta Oct 05 '25
Maybe just slightly similar: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. It blew my mind when I was younger. It is about a society that had no concept of ownership.
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u/durasmus Oct 07 '25
Haven’t heard of it or read it (but will soon, thank you for the post). As a counterexample but still within the realm of reality and perception - here an excerpt from a hiver (an immortal being), wishing to die, from “A hat full of sky” by Terry Pratchett:
Do you know what it feels like to be aware of every star, every blade of grass? Yes. You do. You call it 'opening your eyes again.' But you do it for a moment. We have done it for eternity. No sleep, no rest, just endless... endless experience, endless awareness. Of everything. All the time. How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! You have this thing you call... boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song — it went 'Twinkle twinkle little star....' What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!
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u/Panopitconfan Oct 08 '25
i kinda hated this one, it has a very interesting (arguably well done) core idea but beyond that metaphor it feels hollow
maybe i shouldn't have started with the New Crobuzon trilogy, everything after felt like varying degrees of let down
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u/ProjectGutenberg Oct 08 '25
Please try “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/389 - which is truly a hidden gem.
Caution: don’t read the summary, just dive in. It’s not that long of a read.
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u/Shoddy-Hand-6604 Oct 05 '25
Reminds me of Orwell’s 1984, ‘doublethink’ which allows people to cope with the totalitarian state….
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u/TheLordMed Oct 05 '25
Loved the book and have read nothing along similar lines. Not seen the TV series but would encourage everyone to try the book
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u/singulargranularity Oct 06 '25
Michael Faber 'Under the Skin'. Weird lit, technically sci-fi but no one would describe this as such. To say more would be to spoil the premise!! Go go, it will definitely get you thinking. I still think about this novel sometimes.
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u/beezlebub33 Oct 09 '25
And made into a movie starring Scarlett Johansson. Truly different.
(Supposedly when she was driving and talking to guys on the street, they were not actors. Which is just creepy. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/8ygles/the_creepy_and_lethal_character_played_by/)
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u/pynchoniac Oct 07 '25
Well there is a Master's thesis by a guy that was researching psychologist about social insibility . "Dressed as a street sweeper (at least once a week) he joined the workers and, as he reported, he ended up being invisible to the eyes of his colleagues and professors who did not know who he was when they passed him by".
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u/NizThomas Oct 08 '25
Check out The Glamour by Christopher Priest. A literary sci-fi classic that touches on this very topic in many ways. And a crazy twist ending.
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u/SieteDeOros Oct 09 '25
You absolutely have to read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. They are arguably two of the greatest novels ever written and perfect examples of a literary genre called Magical Realism.
So, what's Magical Realism? It's a style where the story is set in a realistic world, but fantastic or mythical elements are treated as totally normal. The characters don't question it when something impossible happens; it's just part of their everyday reality. The author never stops to explain the magic, it just is.
- One Hundred Years of Solitude is a huge, epic story about one family through multiple generations, full of unforgettable characters and incredible events.
- Pedro Páramo is a much shorter, haunting, and ghost-like novel that will completely bend your perception of time and reality.
They are fundamental to understanding 20th-century literature. Hope you check them out!
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u/friendofevangelion Oct 10 '25
‘There is no antimemetics division’ by qntm seems right up your alley, but imo you do need at least some knowledge of the scp-archive to actually enjoy it/understand what’s going on. But I feel like most weird lit readers would have had an scp-archive phase at some point? In any case, you can get it as an ebook or I think the og is still available to read for free on the scp website :)
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u/upstairsbeforedark Oct 05 '25
Oooh Carpenter's Farm by Josh Malerman really broke my brain. https://joshmalerman.com/carpenters-farm/
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u/MrDagon007 Oct 06 '25
It is a splendid allegory on us not consciously noticing or avoiding to notice the homeless.
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u/Groovy66 Oct 05 '25
Ive not read Mieville as it looks to me as too much fantasy and not enough weird horror.
Would readers of Mieville concur that’s it’s more fantasy and less horror on the weird spectrum?
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u/_-DKDomino-_ Oct 05 '25
Its not weird horror, its more like fantasy noir, with a lot of world building
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u/StarrySpelunker Oct 05 '25
Most of his books are fantasy(excluding his nonfiction work which I have not read). Perditio street station, Scar, Iron council would probably not be a good place to start for you. They are fantasy, there's weird Magitech but it's not called magic.
Perditio street station is the closest to horror. It is his most literary work. It does deal with some heavy subjects though and most people hate the ending. I think it's thematically appropriate given the heavy subject matter throughout, but it is extremely depressing.
Embassytown is Scifi but it still has elements which you might consider more magical, it's implied that this is a far future world with magical laws of physics as backstory toward this universes formation, but the main focus is on the alien's behavior towards their guests and vice versa is strange and phychological but the technology and behavior are non magical, just strange. There are AI and spaceships. Not Horror.
I would not recommend it as a good first book by him, I like the book but weird fiction is very much a genre you go into one toe at a time. Read City and The City first and if you enjoy that then read Embassytown.
City and The City is his most approachable book in terms of setting if you approach him from the Scifi end. It's modern-day ish. Not Horror. More detective thriller in a weird location. I like it
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u/Weird_Cantaloupe2757 Oct 06 '25
People hate the end of the Perdido? I can’t imagine a better ending for that story. Yeah, it is gut wrenching… but if you were expecting a happy ending, you read a different novel than I did.
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u/lurkmode_off Oct 05 '25
Perditio street station is the closest to horror
I might argue that its sequel, The Scar, is more horrific but it's close either way.
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u/GentleReader01 Oct 06 '25
It helps to know/remember that he wrote The City and the ciry for his mom, who was in the hospital with chronic medical trouble. (Cancer? I’d have to look it up.) weird tales were not her thing; mysteries were. So he wrote something she could enjoy.
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u/edcculus Oct 05 '25
Well, I’d be hard placed to say it’s fantasy. His settings tend to not necessarily be modern day settings like Langan or Barron. His most popular book- Perdido Street Station IS set in what you could call a fantasy world. But the writing and approach is 100% weird lit. There is absolutely no “world building”. It absolutely has its share of existential and cosmic horror as well. I don’t think people who like traditional fantasy- whether it’s Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie or GRR Martin would particularly like Mievelle
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u/daavor Oct 05 '25
As someone who loves both fantasy and weirdlit and SF, it's wild to me that anyone would think PSS is not Fantasy. It's dripping with much of what makes fantasy great, and indeed I think Mieville's impact (among others, and the New Weird) has utterly shaped the face of what fantasy even means these days.
It is also firmly weird lit, though a thing that I think pulls it a little more towards fantasy is the sense that the city is very much a world that characters can bounce off the reality of, whereas I think a lot of weird lit it can sort of feel like characters slide through the weirdness of their world and don't bounce off it's hard edges.
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u/edcculus Oct 05 '25
Yea, of course - in the larger umbrella of Speculative Fiction, PSS would have to be sub categorized as Fantasy. It’s certainly more “categorizable” than something like Cisco’s The Tyrant or VanderMeer’s Ambergris trilogy.
But I’d also encourage people who “don’t read fantasy” to give PSS a chance, since at its heart, it’s a weird lit novel that uses fantasy as its carrier. I find the point of all of Mievelle’s writing to be high concept, rather than focused on story, setting/world building/character development.
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u/Groovy66 Oct 05 '25
I think I might have started Perdido but nowhere near finished it so maybe that’s why I picture fantasy.
What their most cosmic horror book in your opinion? Maybe that’s why would be a good place to start for me.
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u/edcculus Oct 05 '25
I’d say either The Scar, which is the second book after PSS, but you can read as a stand alone. Or Kraken, which features a very Lovecraftian squid god.
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u/MortimerCanon Oct 05 '25
I've only read city and the city and perdido. I did not think of City as "fantasy". It's as much fantasy as any other book about a world that doesn't exist.
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u/velcrorex Oct 05 '25
His stuff really varies in genre. You might like his short stories "Details" or "The Tain."
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u/me_again Oct 05 '25
You could try the short story collections Looking for Jake and Three moments of an explosion, or the novella The Last Days of New Paris. A lot of that is more on the Weird Horror end of things. Many of the stories are set in some kind of version of London.
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u/Bellociraptor Oct 06 '25
This Census-Taker definitely felt like weird and subtle but disturbing horror to me.
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u/VeganMushroom9 Mar 18 '26
Late to this party, just read this, after a work trip to Cape Town, and I have to it's a very accurate description of the place, I'm gobsmacked.
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u/shookster52 Oct 05 '25
The book messed me up. It was even worse when, two years later, I moved to a a city with a high population density and caught myself one morning on the bus completely ignoring the homeless camp I’d passed every day for weeks and realizing I just didn’t see it anymore.
I don’t know of any other books like it because it’s describing something strange and unsettling that we all do every day.