Railsea by China
Mieville is a coming-of-age tale that takes its inspiration from Moby Dick and Treasure island and a whole universe of elements that he’s mixed
into a wildly imaginative story of a young man who has grown up in a world
bounded by railroads who discovers there’s something beyond and goes looking
for it to claim his destiny.
The hero of the book, a young man called Sham (Shamus Yes Ap
Soorap) has gone “to rail’ to hunt the moldywarpes, beasts who inhabit the
railsea and used for their fat and meat and fur. Apprenticed to the train’s
doctor, Sham is eager to hear the stories the railsailors tell and fascinated
by the train’s captain Abacat Naphi, a one-armed woman who lost her limb to a
wily white moldywarpe and has been searching for it ever since.
He is less enthusiastic about the rough games the sailors
entertain themselves with—games like beetle races and death matches with birds
and beasts. One day Sham snaps, stealing a little day bat from the “arena” so
it won’t end up killed. This action marks him out to the other crew members. The
captain marks him out for reasons of her own, and he’s soon embroiled in feeding
her obsession with developing one of his own.
As a proponent of “New Weird,” Mieville has always blended
myth and pop culture and literature in his works (most gracefully in Kraken) and in this novel, readers will
recognize Moby Dick, Dune (the modlywarpes explode out of the
dirt like the “worms” that make spice), a bit of Treasure Island and also Tales
of the Arabian Nights.
