Dhalgren
The genre's most famous avant-garde novel and an enduring proof that SF readers will follow real difficulty if the sentences earn it.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The City & the City about?
Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad investigates a murdered woman in Besźel — a crumbling Eastern European city occupying the same physical space as glossy Ul Qoma, its citizens trained from birth to 'unsee' the other city and its traffic, on pain of invoking Breach, the power that polices the separation. The victim crossed; the case must too. Miéville plays it as immaculate police procedural, withholding all fantastical explanation: the cities' division is enforced purely by habit, law and learned blindness, which is of course the point. The premise is impossible and the reader performs it personally somewhere around chapter three, unseeing whatever the plot files as elsewhere.
Why it matters
Hugo (tied), World Fantasy, Clarke and BSFA winner — a near-sweep — and the book that carried Miéville furthest into the literary mainstream; its 'unseeing' entered critical vocabulary as shorthand for trained urban blindness.
Read next
Fahrenheit 451
One of the most-taught novels in the English-speaking world and a perennially renewable warning.
The Hill of Dreams
A cult masterpiece of visionary fiction, championed by writers from Lovecraft to Javier Marías, and a key influence on the dreamlike strand of the weird.