Iron Council

Dust jacket and full-color interior illustrations by Edward Miller.

About the Book:

First published in 2004, Iron Council was the third and final volume in China Mieville’s acclaimed Bas-Lag sequence, after Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Like its predecessors, it was published to immediate acclaim, and went on to win both the Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Awards for Best SF Novel of the Year. As with so much of Mieville’s work, it’s not hard to understand why.

Iron Council is a novel of war and revolution unlike any you have ever read. Set in and around the urban melting pot of New Crobuzon, it is a vividly imagined masterwork filled with action, ideas, and an extraordinary cast of characters, both human and other. As the novel begins, New Crobuzon is engaged in a long-running war with the rival city of Tesh. When the city’s leaders decide to build a railroad across the surrounding desert, an act designed as a tactic in that ongoing war, the narrative takes an unexpected turn. Revolutionary forces, faced with the endemic corruption of New Crobuzon’s Parliament, take over the railroad and hijack the train that will come to be known as Iron Council. That “perpetual train” will become the seat of a mobile revolution aimed at eliminating a power structure that has dominated new Crobuzon for much too long.

Exotic, compelling, and constantly surprising, Iron Council is an overtly political novel that offers powerful visions and unique perceptions on virtually every page. Without sacrificing any of the genre’s traditional pleasures, Mieville has created a hybrid of fantasy and revolutionary politics that is hard to set aside and difficult, perhaps impossible, to forget. 

Finally, as a bonus for Mieville’s many fans, this very special edition concludes with “Jack,” the only short story set in the Bas-Lag universe. The tale of a renegade “remade” who brings a measure of hope to the poorer denizens of New Crobuzon, “Jack” is Mieville at his incomparable best, and sheds essential new light on the nature of life in one of modern fantasy’s most memorable and imaginative locales.

Limited: 500 signed numbered hardcover copies

Lettered: 26 signed, specially bound copies, housed in a custom traycase