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Iron Council
The world of the New Crobuzon city-state is loosely based on the European industrial revolution's "steam age", mixed together with an extraordinarily inventive range of fantastic features. People are "remade" into strange forms in punishment factories, there are all kinds of nonhuman sentients -- cactus people, insect-like kephri, and more -- and there are a diverse range of magics. The Mayor and Parliament rule through a brutal Militia, but revolutionary factions abound and a draining war with Tesh is fueling discontent.
Cutter leads a band of insurrectionists from the Caucus, looking for the golem creator Judah. They fight a series of battles as they travel across a war-torn landscape, seeking the semi-mythical Iron Council, a group of railway workers who rebelled and escaped into the wilderness. Meanwhile Ori is involved with the shifting revolutionary factions in New Crobuzon. He joins one of the more violent groups, which eventually launches a plot to assassinate the Mayor.
Much of the "colour" of Iron Council comes from politics, with allusions to historical groups and events, most obviously to various socialist and anarchist movements and to the Paris Commune. It attempts to harness the pathos and power of revolutionary myth and history, but the result is mostly poor pastiche, nowhere approaching the drama of real history. The historical links are weak, often mismatched with the peculiar features of New Crobuzon, and unable to carry the sentiment Mieville tries to invest them with. And there's not enough background for anyone to actually care about the New Crobuzon revolution in its own right: Iron Council has neither actual political philosophy nor social detail nor real people.
Another annoying feature of Iron Council is that everything is subservient to the special effects of the moment. At one point, for example, we read:
"With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there were smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran his hand over it and walked on.But though Ori and Jacobs continue to roam the city, the rain never features again -- it's just a completely ad hoc device to highlight the mysteriousness of the spiral symbols. This is a trivial example, but this kind of thing recurs at different levels throughout Iron Council: strange wondrous monsters are invented, new magics deployed, characters introduced and then disposed of, new words coined -- all to help enhance a single encounter, battle, scene, or piece of dialogue.It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did not smear."
Mieville's characterisation is weak. The three central characters manage to get less and less interesting as time goes by, to the point where the deaths of two of them are of no moment. The plot and Mieville's dazzling invention hold Iron Council together and kept me reading to the end, but the overall effect is, apart from a few novel ideas, unmemorable and unlikely to bear rereading. It was no doubt unwise of me to expect more, but the fuss about Mieville and the recommendations of friends had raised my hopes.
Note: I haven't read Mieville's earlier books set in the same world -- Perdido Street Station and The Scar -- but Iron Council is entirely self-contained.
You can purchase Iron Council from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
London, England -- GNAA's UK division has reported that five unnamed jews who abused LastMeasure links at their school in a total failure of a fashion were today taken away for interrogation by the government's National High Tech Crime Unit. The accused created shitty batch files in a rucas-esque attempt to flood the schools' computer systems with LastMeasure URL's.
After a filled computer class was exposed to LastMeasure for more than five minutes, a N.H.T.C.U. team raided the computer lab and abducted the culprits. One managed to escape the clutches of the government after being taken to a detention centre and fled to the GNAA UK headquarters in London. According to an interview with the escapee, they were taken away to an unknown location and locked in a cell. One by one, they were taken and tortured for hours on end with spiky anal dildos and analpears. Heading up the torture was none other then the notorious Kirk Johnson, also known by his nickname "The Goatse Man".
"It was absolutely horrible! My asshole is now ruined for life. The things they were doing to us were unhuman. All the while, we were forced to hear a looping MP3 of Mr Johnson repeating 'I am the Goatse Man, I stretch ass like no-one can' over and over. I will never be able to sleep soundly again. These people are monsters!"
We were then informed that the remaining prisoners were to be flown to Iraq for beheading, Kenneth Bigley style.
This news has shocked the GNAA community. Many were in disbelief that LastMeasure had any child porn what so ever. According to our inside nigger agent in the N.H.T.C.U. the image file "eww.jpg" was found to be of a "paedophilic" nature. dcom of the GNAA's UK branch was found saying "wtf, thats child porn? I masturbate to that picture evey day and I'm no paedophile!" We believe this to be an unjust attack against the GNAA's premiere software product, and yet another attempt by the Zionists rooted deep within the British Government to destroy the world's greatest trolling organisation.
We will not waive on our stance that LastMeasure is 100% legal. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the Internets, we shall fight on 4chan and on Slashdot, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength with our next-generation trolling applications, we shall defend LastMeasure, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on IRC, we shall fight on the telephone conferences, we shall fight in the schools and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.
About LastMeasure:
A primitive version of LastMeasure was concieved by Penisbird of the GNAA after playing with an AIM utility named AIM Invader. It offered Penisbird a myriad of ways to crash AIM clients. By far the most powerful crash was the "last measure" crash, which would inundate an AIM client with file transfer requests, buddy list sends, messages full of smileys and colors, until the AIM client crashed due to lack of RAM.
The LastMeasure site originally consisted of Penisbird, Goatse, Tubgirl, Lemonparty, and Shitfaced Lady. But has expanded to include many other of the internets treasured icons. And with the addition of StatsMeasure, the clipboard data of thousands of unwitting victims has now been exposed for the world to see.
For more information about LastMeasure, visit the official website, LastMeasure.com
LastMeasure is licensed under the BSD Version 2 License.
About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?
If you ans