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    Railsea
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    Railsea
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    Railsea
    Audiobook10 hours

    Railsea

    Written by China Miéville

    Narrated by Jonathan Cowley

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one's death and the other's glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea-even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she's been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it's a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict-a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible-leads to considerably more than he'd bargained for. Soon he's hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

    From China Miéville comes a novel for readers of all ages, a gripping and brilliantly imagined take on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that confirms his status as "the most original and talented voice to appear in several years." (Science Fiction Chronicle)


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 15, 2012
    ISBN9780307967367
    Unavailable
    Railsea
    Author

    China Miéville

    China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His novel Embassytown was a first and widely praised foray into science fiction.

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    Reviews for Railsea

    4/5

    449 ratings58 reviews

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    • 3/5
      What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us, but to one place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?

      CM certainly appreciates the hothouse of lexicon. One senses the work and wonder at play. Railsea doesn't wear any undue YA infamy, well, not until the concluding third. I found the exhumation of language much more compelling than this lost world of Moby Melville. It isn't much of a spoiler, but I did wish to add that Mocker Jack, the antagonist super mole of the novel isn't just a parody of the White Whale, but I found it to be a rumination on Derrida, the ever deferred inchoate answer to philosophy. I was surpised at how indifferent I remained.
    • 4/5

      Really enjoyed this upside down book :)
    • 1/5
      I gave it two genuine trys, I couldn't finish this one. I loved Perdido Street and the Scar so much, but this one was too Young Adulty and had too many made-up nonsense words. I am sure there is a lot to love about this book, but I couldn't connect with it. Maybe I will try again someday?
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. As usual he plays around with language and style which might make it a more of a challenge for young adults. Hard to describe where this book fits. Part science fiction, fantasy, steampunk. The best Mieville book in years.
    • 5/5
      Railsea is a hard book to describe - sort of Moby Dick meets Mad Max. I found it a rousing good time and excellent choice for audio.
    • 3/5
      Interesting, but not for me.
    • 3/5
      Good, just not great. I just didn't care about the plot all that much.
    • 4/5
      I find it's bizarre lrail-scape exhilarating.
    • 4/5
      Excellent as usual, imaginative with a more linear story than usual. Nods to the Strugatsky brothers "Roadside Picnic", Melvilles' "Moby Dick", and probably many others I didn't pick up on. Loved it.
    • 3/5
      4Q 3P (my VOYA code) I have always been a fan of neoclassics but I have only ever read books that have been based on Austen or Brontë novels. This book came at the recommendation of my partner who loves sci-fi. I very much enjoyed the gender swapped Captain Ahab character as well as all of the world building. Definitely a popular read for those sci-fi lovers and may be a good book to attract readers of classics to the sci-fi genre.
    • 3/5
      In a futuristic take on Melville's Moby Dick, the medes an her crew are on a train in the tangled railsea that comprises their world, hunting a great white land mammal. One young crewman decides to follow freiends he has met and looks for what is beyond the railsea.
    • 4/5
      I have to admit that I had a hard time getting into this book at first; in fact, I almost gave up on it. Not because the world was strange- all worlds Mieville builds are strange. It just didn’t click with me. But I’m glad I hung on, because around about the middle, things picked up and then I couldn’t put the book down. The world of Railsea is even weirder than most of Mieville’s worlds; except for in the cities, the ground cannot be walked upon. Spaces between cities are covered with train tracks that weave, cross, bend, intertwine, join and change gauge with abandon. Step off those tracks, and you risk attracting the attention of the giant, carnivorous, burrowing critters: beetles, worms, moles, tortoises, owls and others. As on the world of ‘Dune’, human footsteps draw danger. Even the trains are vulnerable to attack by these 1960s Japanese horror movie monsters. This is a world of ecological ruin, one where technology ranges from wind powered to steam to diesel to nuclear and where the cities seem to be some combo of Mad Max and Lankhmar. The book has multiple plotlines; in one, the captain of the Medes, a mole hunting train, is minus an arm and searches for the taker, a gigantic white mole; in another, the main character Sham Yes ap Soorap (“Call me Sham”) seeks to tell a pair of children about the fate of their parents; while the semi-orphaned children seek to complete their parents goal, all dovetailing into one wild, breathless finale. The characters are likable, although none are really deep; Sham is the most fully realized as more time is devoted to his story than the others. The book is hard to pigeonhole: part science fiction, part fantasy, part dystopian fiction, part satire; I think the best term might be ‘salvage punk’. Grittier, dirtier and wilder than steampunk, surviving in a harsh world by cobbling things together. If any of these things appeal to you, I highly recommend it to you. Just don’t give up on the first part; it gets amazingly better.
    • 3/5
      Surprisingly light for a Mieville story. Has some interesting ideas.
    • 5/5
      Crazy adventure of a boy through a fantasy world that also transposes the idea of whale hunting at sea to a extremely different setting (can't describe it here) which tries to push to the limits the mastery of China Mieville to make something believable in a transposed settings. The characters are very varied from archetypical ones to some that grow to some that fade-in and fade-out. The whole story is like a roller coaster ride in one of those wooden roller coasters - thrilling, interesting and somehow old school. There are various twists and bits that keep the story exciting but compared to other of his books has some discontinuities here and there. Overall a very nice lecture if you are into strange fantasy
    • 5/5
      I think that this book will become a classic Steam-punk book in time.

      Miéville has invented a world where the majority of life takes place on the Railsea, a huge swathe of criss-crossing railway lines with multiple lines intersecting, and with cities dotted throughout the plain. The landscape that the trains inhabit has a series of nasty animals that seek only to eat each other, and any human foolish enough to step on the soil. Sham is an assistant to the trains doctor on a mole hunting train, after Moldywarpes in the southern ocean. After hunting they come across a wrecked train and Sham makes a discovery in the wreckage. Lots of other people are interested in what he has discovered and he ends up being chased and kidnapped before reaching the end of the line. The captain of the train has a desire to catch the great white Moldywarpe that took her arm.

      Has echoes of Moby Dick about the book. Miéville has invented a complete and plausible culture and language in the alternative world, and the plot hangs together well.
    • 3/5
      This was pretty good very pleasant prose, interesting story and relatively fast-paced for his work. Unfortunately I just didn't like it quite as much as some of his earlier books.
    • 4/5
      Railsea is a YA book only in the way Moby-Dick is a YA book. Miéville borrows from Melville in setting an examination of obsession, revenge and the pursuit of life's purpose in the world of a thrilling adventure story.

      Set in the far future when the troposphere is poisonous, the human population of the world lives on islands and the sea is soil traversed by innumerable branching and switching and intersection railroad lines. Underneath the soil are hungry, fast, burrowing monsters, mountain-sized versions of worms and insects and rodents.

      On the rails are trains of every type: diesel-powered, sail-powered, even rhino-powered. The trains are either hunters, searching for food or other products of the railsea, or they are scavengers gathering up pieces of the lost technology they don't fully understand but can make use of.

      The story follows Sham, an apprentice doctor on a moletrain, commanded by Captain Naphi in her revenge hunt for the biggest beast of all, the giant southern mole named Mocker-Jack. But there are other hunts going on, too and as expected they all come crashing together at the satisfying and darkly funny end.
    • 5/5
      I loved everything about this book so profoundly that I hardly know where to begin. So, bullet style:

      The scenario: a world where most of the earth is covered by a confusion of rails, off which you must not venture or you'll be devoured by tunneling, burrowing creatures, while overhead there's breathable air and then a layer of poisonous upsky, in which fly monstrous creatures from other worlds.

      The characters: protagonist Sham, a none-too-enthusiastic doctor's apprentice aboard a moling train (moling trains are like whaling ships); Captain Naphi, a female Ahab in pursuit of her "philosophy," the great white mole Mocker Jack; the mysterious siblings Shroak, the salvor Sirocco, plus pirates, the ferronavy of Manihiki, rail angels, Daybe the daybat--oh. So many marvelous characters.

      The plot: a wrecked train, found incidentally by the moling train Medes, on which Sham serves, turns out to have clues to a route to the end of the known world, a place, so legend says, of great sorrow--or perhaps endless wealth. Such knowledge endangers all who possess it and drives Sham's decisions and his adventures.

      The language: Oh, the language. I had to establish a special blog just to put quotes from this magnificent book. The humor: In small ways and big ones, the story elicits smiles (as when, for example, Captain Naphi asks someone to get to the point: "Do please," said Captain Naphi, "expedite this journey relevance-ward"--that's a phrase I'll have to adopt myself, I think.)

      The postmodern style and references: could have been annoying if they were the focus of the book, but they're not: they're woven in so perfectly that they are merely, and completely, a delight.

      Honestly, there needs to be a way to unlock a secret sixth star for books one really, really REALLY loves--and then I'd give this one that sixth star.
    • 5/5
      Last year I discovered a very, very strange film and fell completely in love with it. Richard Lester's film adaptation of Spike Milligan's and John Antrobus' post-apocalyptic farce The Bed-Sitting Room is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen, and I'm a David Lynch/Peter Greenaway/Spike Jonze fan.

      The film, like so many I take to my heart, tanked at the box office, but it had a few fans nonetheless.

      I am 100% not surprised that China Mieville is one of them.

      Railsea is a book I've had sitting on my ereader for many, many months. Mieville is one of my very favorite writers; I love his daring, his baroque and slightly deranged prose style, and most of all, his imagination. He is therefore an author on the very short list of "writers whose books I automatically buy sight unseen just because of who wrote them" as they come out (also on the list: Tim Powers, Michael Chabon, Alastair Reynolds... China's in mighty interesting company, there). He's only disappointed me once, so far (Kraken). But this time, this time I hesitated. Because the first thing I heard about it (beyond that it had to do with trains, duh) was that it was China Mieville's take on Herman Melville's (hee) Moby-Dick. Which I did not love, you guys, not one little bit.

      But sooner or later, my love for China Mieville was gonna win out over my hate for his pseudo-namesake (or at least, for his big bloated hipster-before-there-were-hipsters-that-makes-it-even-more-hipster opus). And here we are.

      What, you may be asking, has any of this to do with The Bed Sitting Room? Well, just hold on a moment, I'll get to that.* Because first, a sketch of the world China has taken us to, which is, as ever, fascinating. For one thing, it is covered in railroad tracks. Covered. There's never just one set.** And where there is not track, there is either "hard ground" where Mad Max-esque towns and other facilities, built largely out of materials salvaged from the ruins of the world you and I know, are set (and regarded as continents or islands), or regular ground, which is the domain of a host of monstrous soil dwellers -- giant earthworms with girths comparable to human arms, burrowing owls the size of rocs (they can carry off train cars when they bother to fly), antlions as big as a person (or bigger), huge swarms of naked mole rats, and moles ranging from the size we know in garden and farm to those of sperm whales. And like whales, these giant moles are hunted by humans, who chase them down in great mole-trains from which they dispatch jolly-carts (like jolly boats from an ocean whaler) full of harpooneers and other specialists in killing and butchering the giant mole when one surfaces.

      And yes, there is an albino giant, called Mocker-Jack. And yes, Mocker-Jack has an obsessed captain hunting it, one Ms. Abacat Naphi (anagram for Captain Ahab***), who sports a crazy semi-cybernetic arm made of metal and mole-bone ivory.

      But this is not just a retelling of Moby-Dick with moles and trains****, though yes, we have an Ishmael-esque point of view character, Sham Yes ap Soorpan (but thank god, he's not a mole-ing fanboy who oppresses us chapter after chapter with his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the profession; indeed, he's rather reluctant to be a moler; he'd rather be a salvager, an Indiana Jones fantasy of finding treasure in the train wrecks out on the railsea). There is a lot more going on. Because this is some kind of post-apocalypse, though it's hard to determine in what way our civilization devolved and deranged itself into this one.

      Which brings me to The Bed Sitting Room. To which there are at least two in-your-ribs references and lots of more subtle ones. I was already thinking vaguely of this film as I read, but treating the experience as one of those idiosyncratic brain-twitches I sometimes get when I make a connection that probably doesn't really exist. But then, wait, ho! Two of these characters are the children of a mother named Ethel Shroake (in TBS, Shroake is the charwoman to the Queen of England and, upon surviving the "nuclear misunderstanding" that touches off the film/play, is regarded as the closest thing the shattered realm has left to royalty), and they live in a compound dominated by a great archway made of washing machines, a visual echo of the archway under which we meet Ethel Shroak in TBS. I died, you guys.

      Another delight to be had in Railsea is an ongoing game Mieville plays with the reader, a coy sort of teasing in which he pretends, in his little trainsplaining interludes between narrative chapters, to be giving us a look at the workings backstage, as it were. He pretends to show us his inner processes, his wrestling with the story, or stories, for he claims there is a story he wants to tell and a story that wants to be told, and they are not precisely the same story. Thus once the story breaks into three narrative possibilities (like a train coming to a switchyard where three tracks present themselves as options), we could follow Sham's adventures, or Naphi's, or the Shroakes', and our narrator appears to struggle with the tension between what he pretends to think his readers expect and what he knows is actually the most interesting bit going on. It's all very droll.

      The book is also illustrated by Mieville himself, with drawings of many of the monsters of the railsea appearing between sections of the story. The artwork is admirable and charming, even in e-ink, and leads me to wonder if there is anything this guy can't do. I'd hate him if I didn't love him so.

      *You who have read Railsea, you see what I did there?

      **No indeed. There are LOTS of sets, sometimes running in parallel, often criss-crossing and looping back and all over the place, like an ampersand (which is, Mieville explains in one of his trainsplaining interludes, is why this world never spells out the word "and" but always uses the ampersand, and why he has chosen to as well. Surprisingly, this is not annoying). Thus the switcher crews on any train are kept very busy indeed.

      ***I found at least one other anagram, the god called That Apt Omh, which unscrambles to, of course, Topham Hatt, of Thomas the Tank Engine fame. I suspect there are many, many more. But I suck at anagrams. You should be very impressed that I found these two.

      ****Indeed, the Moby-Dick plot takes a backseat most of the novel, except in that it seems to have informed a whole culture: the railsea is full of train-captains who are obsessively hunting monsters of various species, for various reasons. Each captain has created a metaphor-burdened narrative that is really just an elaborate excuse for taking on the role of obsessive hunter, which they call "having a philosophy." Thus various monsters are stand-ins for various high-falutin' concepts like doubt and remorse and, yes, vengeance, but really, everybody just wants to play Ahab. Which is hilarious.
    • 4/5
      much more enjoyable than I had anticipated, it's YA feel and Moby Dick influences had put me off, but overall a nicely imagined world, story and characters
    • 4/5
      Reading and enjoying this book almost makes me want to go ahead and finish reading Moby Dick. Almost. Fortunately, Mieville keeps this YA book short and sweet, and while the vocabulary might take some getting used to, there are no lengthy diversions into whaling lore to bog down the momentum of the plot.
    • 5/5
      Wow. Bit of a slow starter, mainly due to the sheer immensity of the imagination needing time to find expression, but after about thirty pages this just sank its harpoons into my mind and refused to let go.

      Moldywarpe, ferronaval, philosophy, blood rabbit & &. Even the description of that last is worthy of inclusion in literature, never mind the rest of the book.

      Simply wonderful in every way, the tale of Sham ap Soorap, the moletrain Medes and the orphaned Shroake siblings deserves a far wider audience than that the YA label can achieve. This book is handily as imaginative as Perdido Street Station, as politically aware as The Scar or Iron Council, and it is as accessible as The City & The City.

      One aspect which needs, nay deserves, highlighting in appreciation is the role of female characters. There is no gender-roling here, none of the weak damsels needing rescue, or strong men growing into protectors. There are just people, trying to get by in a hard and difficult world.

      In a word: outstanding.
    • 5/5
      Moby Dick meets Treasure Island on rails. Beatiful and cunning with a dash of Vonnegut-ish narration.
    • 4/5
      Good science fiction brings unique worlds to life. Great science fiction brings both unique worlds AND unique characters to life. In Railsea, China Mieville proves that he is a master of great science fiction. While it took a few pages for the story to take hold, Railsea made me forget all about Embassytown and harken back to everything I loved about The City & The City. It is not enough for Mieville to create places that are not just unique, but gritty and real. He also has the ability to unveil that world organically. There is no telling in his storytelling. Everything is pieced together as you read along as a kind of information treasure hunt - and a satisfying hunt it really was. The character of Sham is perfectly portrayed and the characters he is surrounded by have their own wonderful voices. But more than anything, it is the epic world they inhabit that is the main character and I was challenged the whole book to live in that visceral world that Mieville drew me into. I really enjoyed every page of Railsea because it is unlike anything Mieville - or anyone else - has written before. Well worth picking up a copy.
    • 3/5
      I think this is another of those books where if I had read it at a different age, I would have loved it.

      This is the story of Sham, a boy whose guardians place him as a cabin boy on a roving train. He slowly learns the ins and outs of life aboard the moler train and the railsea (analogous to our whaling ships and oceans, right down to the fantastical creatures lurking in the depths). On one of the wrecked trains they pass, he finds something that seems impossible, and that's what drives the rest of the story. Along the way, he meets up with pirates, explorers, hunters, subterrainers, friends, kidnappers, liars, and thieves.

      One part Moby-Dick, one part Huck Finn, and half a jigger of Robert Louis Stevenson, with a pinch of Narnia and set on a dry(?) planet in a galaxy far, far away, Railsea has some major pluses:
      --Exquisite and playful language
      --Outstanding world-building
      --No unrealistic precocious romance
      --Strong female characters

      In also has one major drawback: I just wasn't racing to read it. It took me more than a week to finish, when it should have taken a few days. I liked Sham, the trainfolk, the setting, etc., I just had trouble getting lost in the story. But I think if I had gotten hold of this one when I was, say, 11 or 12, I would have given it 5 stars.

      I will also add that I'll never look at antlion hills the same way ever again. :-)
    • 4/5
      The story is a blend of Moby Dick and the movie Water World. It's an exciting adventure book with many moments of tension and suspense. It takes a little while to get in to, but I got hooked within a hundred pages. My only complaints is the incredibly excessive use of commas. It occasionally read like the author had his thoughts interrupted by his own thoughts mid-sentence. Eventually I got use to it though, so it wasn't a big deal. He also loves the & symbol, which was annoying at first, but he explains why he uses it within the book.
    • 3/5
      I'm a huge Mieville fan but mostly because of his Bas-Lag novels. The others I usually enjoy but there's always something about them that doesn't grab me. This one was the same. I had no idea this was YA novel and there are parts that I definitely thought were written for an adult intellect but not too many. What I do like about this novel is that he "takes chances", steps outside the box. There's one chapter where the whole chapter is: "Is it time to get back to {specific characters} yet? No, not yet." or something very similar.The plot is out there and the world is wonderfully creative. I got confused early on whether the rails were underground or over water or both. So it was always hard for me to picture scenes and as usual with Mieville some of the dialogue totally lost me. Not sure this is a good one to do on audio because there are many made up words that might be easier to grok is you're looking at them on the page instead of hearing them read out loud.Either way definitely worth a read for the Mieville fan and anyone else into very strange tales that don't stick to the normal fantasy tropes.
    • 3/5
      In a futuristic take on Melville's Moby Dick, the medes an her crew are on a train in the tangled railsea that comprises their world, hunting a great white land mammal. One young crewman decides to follow freiends he has met and looks for what is beyond the railsea.
    • 3/5
      Good, just not great. I just didn't care about the plot all that much.
    • 3/5
      A good novel, but not great. I was far more interested in the captain's quest, and fascinated by the concept of captains who KNOW that the giant animals they chase are symbolic, than Sham's story. I sort of wanted that book in full rather than glimpses of it as part of a different story.