Miéville maps out new territory in fantastic fiction

The field of science fiction and fantasy is blessed with an extraordinary pool, an abundance, of talent. Fine new writers like Ted Chiang, K. J. Bishop, and Richard K. Morgan parachute in regularly, joining the ranks of such as Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, and Neal Barrett Jr. Then every so often there comes along a new writer -- someone like Theodore Sturgeon, or Alfred Bester, say, in the field's adolescence -- who just plain rocks us all back on our heels.

China Mieville started out that way in 2001 with ''Perdido Street Station." He'd published a previous novel, ''King Rat," but it was ''Perdido Street Station" that put him over the barricade. It had everything: high fantasy enjambed with gritty realism, a tender love story (never mind that it was with an insect-woman) elbow to elbow at the bar with gothic horror, strange-smelling stews of medieval and modern technology, tremendous social scope with, at the same time, a fascination with the individuals to whom history actually happens, those trampled flat by it. Something not quite science fiction, not quite fantasy, with generous rations of horror, high adventure, and intrigue, something chock-full of ideas and brimming over, sentence by sentence, page by page, with intelligence.

Here from ''Perdido Street Station," for instance, is one of the citizens of the city-state of New Crobuzon:

''Isaac quietly greeted the old man by the door, Joshua, whose Remaking had been very small and very cruel. A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound."

Here, a passage from 2002's ''The Scar," which is among much else a take on colonialism:

''And then Bellis had thought of Nova Esperium. . . . Halfway across the world, a little blister of civilization in unknown lands. A home from home, New Crobuzon's colony. Rougher, surely, and harder and less cosseted -- Nova Esperium was too young for many kindnesses -- but a culture modeled on her city's own. . . . But the vessels that undertook the long, dangerous journey from Iron Bay across the Swollen Ocean carried with them Nova Esperium's workforce. Which meant a hold full of prisoners: peons, indentured laborers, and Remade."

Mieville followed up with a third New Crobuzon novel, ''Iron Council" (2004), the story of a workers' revolution against a powerful central government whose resources are also draining into an ongoing war abroad.

And now we have ''Looking for Jake" (Del Rey, paperback, $13.95), a collection of stories only one of which takes place in New Crobuzon, all of which take place in that very strange land that is Mieville's. Like the novels, the stories are many-layered, multivoiced, and intricately textured, possessed of an often stunning imaginative force. And like ''King Rat" and ''Perdido Street Station," many of these stories are paeans to London, though a London transfigured, a London half dissolved and -- possibly -- in the process of re-forming.

''The river was clogged with wrecks. Besides the mouldering barges that had always been there jutted the bows of police boats, and the decks and barrels of sunken gunships. Inverted tugs like rusting islands. The Thames flowed slowly around these impediments."

That is from ''The Tain," the tale of a London besieged by creatures who have erupted from every reflective surface.

And this is from the collection's title story:

''The last time I picked up the receiver something whispered to me down the wires, asked me a question in a reverential tone, in a language I did not understand, all sibilants and dentals. I put the phone down carefully and have not lifted it since."

Beautifully evocative language, social conscience, a clear sense of history, romantic longing, intelligence, despair. A profound reverence for the past of fantastic fiction. And that's where Mieville begins.

Art does not progress but forever circles back upon itself, asking the old questions in new ways, reinventing itself and its vessels, shoring foundations, adding a new floor or room to the house. Mieville's work circles back to much of what attracts us as readers to fantastic fiction, to what has always attracted us, and makes it new.

These are books you vanish into, books you sink into, watching mundane life go over the tub's side even as you cry out ''Eureka!" This is a man putting everything he is -- everything he has learned, everything he feels, everything he knows not to be true and everything he hopes can be -- into his books.

This is, very possibly, greatness.

James Sallis's novel ''Cripple Creek" is due from Walker in the spring, as is a paperback of this year's ''Drive," from Harcourt.