Five SFF books set in the City of Light

E.J. Swift is a speculative fiction writer based in London. Her new novel is Paris Adrift.

One of her five best SFF books set in Paris, as shared at Tor.com:

The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville

Miéville’s alternative history The Last Days of New Paris delivers the ultimate psychedelic feast. 1941 in occupied-Paris: an S-bomb detonates, resulting in surrealist arts materializing as physical entities which become known to the Parisians as manifs. Fast forward to 1950, the war has not yet ended and a quarantined Paris has become a battleground between the Nazis, the Resistance, the supernatural forces of manifs and demons, and various intelligence agencies—with agents on both sides seeking to manipulate and weaponise the manifs. The strength of the novella lies in its fantastical descriptions and Miéville’s trademark prose, such as the description of the Vélo on the opening pages: “a torso, jutted from the bicycle itself, its moving prow, a figurehead where handlebars should be. She was extruded from the metal. She pushed her arms backward and they curled at the ends like coral.” This is 170 pages of hallucinogenic, at times chilling, and at times unexpectedly moving madness.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue