Railsea by China Miéville - Book Review

Railsea - Book Review

Written by: China Miéville
Published by: Del Rey
ISBN: 978-0345524539

Take one part Moby-Dick, mix it with one part Kidnapped and one part Treasure Island, and sprinkle in just a bit of The Odyssey. Now blend these up nicely, dump them on a train, and try to push it under a PG-13 rating and you’ll have an idea of what Railsea is like. Miéville knows the rules but throws them all to the wind in his latest work and somehow still manages to pull off an amazing novel. From using an odd vocabulary and slang, to the use of an ampersand (&) in place of the word “and” throughout the book, to the strange story of how the world changed, Miéville never comes right out and fully explains these things but makes the reader learn on the go. He also presents something to young adults that is not about wizards or something that seems like a bad knock-off of The Running Man with bows and arrows, or some weak tale about boring vampires that are anything but scary.

Our hero, Shamus Yes ap Soorap (Sham for short), is exceptional only in the sense that there is nothing exceptional about him. He is a bumbling, awkward doctor’s assistant on the train, Medes. He longs to be a salvor (one who finds and deals with salvage from crashed trains) but is held back by his own inhibition. Like most of us, he hesitates when opportunity knocks and ends up playing catch up to the real action.


The Railsea itself was a fantastic idea: a world where the ground is poisoned and full of monsters, and where train tracks cover almost everywhere. Towns are built on rocks as islands. And trains set “sail” to salvage, pirate, transport, or in the case of the Medes mole (it hunts moldywarpes, giant burrowing moles). One subplot pays homage to Moby-Dick, one of my favorite novels. Captain Naphi of the Medes lost her arm to a giant moldywarpe, Mocker-Jack. A Cybernetic-steam punk type arm has replaced it. She has made Mocker-Jack her “philosophy.” And like Ahab, she is willing to do anything and risk everything to catch him. But unlike Ahab, Naphi isn’t just after the moldywarpe for revenge.

Sham, through bad luck, finds out a secret beyond the Railsea. His inventiveness when everything is pressed against him will make you want to stand up and cheer. What at first seemed like a terrible idea for a hero really changes about half way through. Though there are two subplots that are extremely interesting, the above mentioned and another that puts two salvor siblings on a mission to find heaven on earth, you want to get back to Sham.

This is the type of book that I wish were ten times as long. Miéville is brilliant in his pacing and the slow unwrapping of multiple mysteries. His first young-adult novel, Un Lun Dun (Macmillan, 2007), was weak in comparison to his previously published work. I actually avoided reading this for some time because of that reason. But he has found his footing and made a great bridge between his adult and young-adult books. Do I hope that he writes more books in the world of Railsea Yes, but this one is out there now and it is tremendously well written.

Reviewed by Adam Armstrong
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