My reaction to Railsea was "ah, so this is Miéville when he writes YA." (And no, I haven't read Un Lun Dun.) The protagonists were weirdly lifeless for me, although I liked it well enough. Rather unmemorable, though. & I suppose I'm just not that easy to please :) But I'll forever buy his books unseen because he's not afraid to put himself out there and chance failure, and I find he fails very very often, but when he succeeds, oh. (<3 Embassytown <3)
(Which is sort of why I sooort of understand why people accuse him of insufferable pomposity/density but otoh I'm puzzled by that criticism -- it's like, I always feel like they just don't get the joke, in a way? Like, the language is its own protagonist! And sometimes it's too unstable and teeters and totters and collapses under its own weight, and then I can see all the scaffolding and I roll my eyes a bit [oh, his love of German vocab], but mostly it isn't,and it doesn't, if you extend that extra level of linguistic disbelief, in a way.)
ETA: it occurs to me you could say that about pretty much any author with aspiraitons of style (some of which I loathe), so to differentiate a bit -- like, I always feel like Miéville has that duality of being tongue in cheek and at the same time being completely serious pat down? And I don't feel that meta-level of, idk, self-awareness from many other authors. If that makes sense.
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(Which is sort of why I sooort of understand why people accuse him of insufferable pomposity/density but otoh I'm puzzled by that criticism -- it's like, I always feel like they just don't get the joke, in a way? Like, the language is its own protagonist! And sometimes it's too unstable and teeters and totters and collapses under its own weight, and then I can see all the scaffolding and I roll my eyes a bit [oh, his love of German vocab], but mostly it isn't,and it doesn't, if you extend that extra level of linguistic disbelief, in a way.)
ETA: it occurs to me you could say that about pretty much any author with aspiraitons of style (some of which I loathe), so to differentiate a bit -- like, I always feel like Miéville has that duality of being tongue in cheek and at the same time being completely serious pat down? And I don't feel that meta-level of, idk, self-awareness from many other authors. If that makes sense.