Just had my eyeballs trace over the word shapes on the pages of China Mieville's 2009 novelletic publication, "The City and the City."
Bit of a weird premise: There's a city divided into two halves, a vaguely Slavic/Eastern Orthodox one and vaguely Turkic/Muslim one. Only, through some ancient pact or other (never made clear) the two halves have integrated into their societies the custom of completely and utterly ignoring the other half, effectively pretending it doesn't exist. This is then the background for a murder mystery in which the killer has apparently done the unthinkable and crossed the boundaries between the two halves.
I think the idea is neat, an interesting take on the things we ignore in our daily lives (poverty/street people, etc.) but setting it in an otherwise mundane, ordinary modern world increasingly stretches credulity. Why would the rest of the world allow these evident lunatics to live like this? The murder mystery didn't use the idea very effectively either, I thought, without much of a villain and wrapping the mystery up far too quickly.
So, all right if you like thought experiments, but not so great if you were looking for a good scifi/fantasy thriller or mystery.
