Ranking Author China Miéville’s Best Books (A Bibliography Countdown)
“What are China Miéville’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Miéville’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!
We took all of the books written by China Miéville and looked at his Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.
The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page. We will update the article if/when a new book by China Miéville is released. Although it probably won’t be immediate so the scores on each site have time to settle and aren’t overly influenced by the early, usually much more opinionated, users.
Happy Scrolling!
The Top Book’s Of China Miéville
20 ) This Census-Taker
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 19
- Amazon: 19
- LibraryThing: 20
“n a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries—and fails—to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape.
When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over.
But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?”
19 ) King Rat
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 18
- Amazon: 15
- LibraryThing: 18
“Something is stirring in London’s dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul Garamond’s father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.
But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into Saul’s prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat, who reveals Saul’s royal heritage, a heritage that opens a new world to Saul, the world below London’s streets–a heritage that also drags Saul into King Rat’s plan for revenge against his ancient enemy,. With drum ‘n’ bass pounding the backstreets, Saul must confront the forces that would use him, the forces that would destroy him, and the forces that shape his own bizarre identity.”
18 ) Kraken
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 15
- Amazon: 19
- LibraryThing: 16
“With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.
In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.
“
17 ) Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 14
- Amazon: 17
- LibraryThing: 15
“London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse’s bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?
Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves—Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of literature’s most original voices.”
16 ) The Last Days of New Paris
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 17
- Amazon: 15
- LibraryThing: 13
“1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.
1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.”
15 ) Dial H
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 15
- Amazon: 8
- LibraryThing: 17
“Dial 4-3-7-6 to call on…Boy Chimney! Iron Snail! Human Virus! Shamanticore! Captain Lachrymose!
Overweight, unemployed slacker Nelson Jent is not a hero. But with the twist of a dial, he can become one. A broken-down payphone down a forgotten alley holds the power to transform anyone with the right number into a host of different superheroes. And Nelson knows the number: 4-3-7-6. The number that spells HERO. “
14 ) Iron Council
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 12
- Amazon: 13
- LibraryThing: 14
“It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.
In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.
In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . .”
13 ) Pathfinder Chronicles: Guide to the River Kingdoms
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 13
- Amazon: 2
- LibraryThing: 19
Thieves, brigands, deposed princes, and the truly desperate inhabitants of the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting flock to the River Kingdoms, a motley collection of tiny enclaves whose rulers command only so far as their brute strength and mercenary armies can carve out for them. This comprehensive guidebook presents the first-ever extensive overview of this treacherous land, where any man can become a king so long as he keeps his hand on his sword and his back free of daggers. More than a dozen rogue kingdoms come alive with lavish illustrations and detailed maps in this first look at the setting for the Pathfinder Adventure Path: Kingmaker!
12 ) Looking for Jake
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 10
- Amazon: 10
- LibraryThing: 12
What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant young writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales–one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon. Among the fourteen superb fictions are
11 ) The Worst Breakfast
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 20
- Amazon: 3
- LibraryThing: 8
Two sisters sit down one morning and begin describing all of the really gross things that were in the worst breakfast they ever had, until all they can picture is a table piled sky-high with the weirdest, yuckiest, slimiest, slickest, stinkiest breakfast possible. And then they have the best breakfast… almost.
10 ) The Tain
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 5
- Amazon: 17
- LibraryThing: 8
9 ) Embassytown
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 8
- Amazon: 13
- LibraryThing: 7
In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak. Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language. When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties: to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speakâbut which speaks through her, whether she likes it or not.
7 ) Un Lun Dun
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 9
- Amazon: 3
- LibraryThing: 10
“What is Un Lun Dun?
It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too–including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.”
7 ) October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 4
- Amazon: 7
- LibraryThing: 11
“On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history.
In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?”
6 ) The City & the City
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 6
- Amazon: 10
- LibraryThing: 5
When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.
4 ) Perdido Street Station
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 3
- Amazon: 10
- LibraryThing: 3
“Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda’s request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.”
4 ) Railsea
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 7
- Amazon: 3
- LibraryThing: 6
On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death & the other’s glory. Spectacular as it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than the endless rails of the railsea—even if his captain thinks only of hunting the ivory-colored mole that took her arm years ago. But when they come across a wrecked train, Sham finds something—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—that leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters & salvage-scrabblers. & it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.
3 ) Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 2
- Amazon: 8
- LibraryThing: 4
Mieville critically examines existing theories of international law and offers a compelling alternative Marxist view.
2 ) Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 11
- Amazon: 1
- LibraryThing: 1
Science fiction and socialism have always had a close relationship. Many science fiction novelists and filmmakers have used the genre to examine explicit or implicit Marxist concerns. Red Planets is an accessible and lively account, which makes an ideal introduction to anyone interested in the politics of science fiction.
1 ) The Scar
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 1
- Amazon: 3
- LibraryThing: 2
“Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage—and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.
For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.”
China Miéville’s Best Books
China Miéville Review Website Bibliography Rankings
| Book | Goodreads | Amazon | LibraryThing | Overal Rank |
| The Scar | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction | 11 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law | 2 | 8 | 4 | 3 |
| Perdido Street Station | 3 | 10 | 3 | 4 |
| Railsea | 7 | 3 | 6 | 4 |
| The City & the City | 6 | 10 | 5 | 6 |
| Un Lun Dun | 9 | 3 | 10 | 7 |
| October: The Story of the Russian Revolution | 4 | 7 | 11 | 7 |
| Embassytown | 8 | 13 | 7 | 9 |
| The Tain | 5 | 17 | 8 | 10 |
| The Worst Breakfast | 20 | 3 | 8 | 11 |
| Looking for Jake | 10 | 10 | 12 | 12 |
| Pathfinder Chronicles: Guide to the River Kingdoms | 13 | 2 | 19 | 13 |
| Iron Council | 12 | 13 | 14 | 14 |
| Dial H | 15 | 8 | 17 | 15 |
| The Last Days of New Paris | 17 | 15 | 13 | 16 |
| Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories | 14 | 17 | 15 | 17 |
| Kraken | 15 | 19 | 16 | 18 |
| King Rat | 18 | 15 | 18 | 19 |
| This Census-Taker | 19 | 19 | 20 | 20 |
