mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
Anything Mieville writes by definition will be interesting and he has yet to deliver a bad book, although his last nominee "The Iron Council" was a bit too circumspect for my taste.  Here he goes to the opposite end of the spectrum, delivering a basically straightforward murder mystery novel, and keeps the mellifluous-meter down a notch and gives the characters terse, Mamet-esque dialog, resulting in a concise package that doesn't overstay its welcome or become self-indulgent.

The story is told by a detective named Borlu, who is handed a Jane Doe murder case that ends up being a lot more than he bargained for.  The setting is completely present day and within our timeline, with one notable exception:  Borlu lives and works in Beszel, a city that is also apparently a country, somewhere in the general eastern Europe area.  The conceit of the novel is that this city occupies the same physical space as another city/country, Ul Qhon, and the two co-exist through a state of mutual "unseeing". Somehow the citizens of one city are able to ignore the people and structures of the other.  Mieville offers no explanation for how this came to be, or any details as to how it works, but it would seem by the end to be a real phenemenon, not just two populations pretending to ignore each other.  Can people from opposing cities actually pass through each other? Mieville never says, you get several hints that they have to dodge around things they "unsee" from the other city, and it would seem that the general layout of the cities is similar, although the buildings aren't exactly the same or in the same place. 

The unlikelihood of this scenario makes for a somewhat complicated world to hold together, after all what's to prevent people from just letting go and seeing both cities together?  Mieville addresses this by adding an agency known as Breach, whose sole job is to police both populations from crossing into the other city by any means other than through a normal border patrol area.  Again, how this group came about, what their motivation is, is never really explained either, and in this case a little more back story might have been useful.  But they enforce the separation with an iron first, people who commit a breach are either messed up for life or just disappear, and the looming spectre of their immediate enforcement seems to be enough to keep everyone in line.

Borlu's mystery takes him through to Ul Qhom to work with an office on that side named Dhatt, who starts off wanting to help but soon finds himself in over his head and out of his league.  Borlu traces his murder victim back to a university where a small group of people are investigating the legendary existence of Orciny, a third city invisible to the others which actually controls everything and maybe also is the origin of Breach.  Mieville strings Borlu and the reader along through various red herrings, but does actually wrap up the side plots eventually, and while the solution to the murder gets him in to hot water with both cities and Breach, ultimately he discovers there is, as they say, both more and less to the entire escapade than he imagined.   I can expect a lot of people would be put off by the conceit of the two-city setting, or at least by Mieville's disinterest in explaining it, but if you take all that as given and focus on what is actually in the story, he's done an impressive job of creating a mystery that could only take place in this milieu, with a credible resolution and exactly the right tone throughout.   I was thoroughly impressed by this book and can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
posted by Mark at 12:10 PM