Surrealism Made Manifest 
 The photo on the cover shows a view of the Eiffel Tower with the lower part obscured by mist. A picturesque scene--but no, in China Mieville's alternate-reality novella, the lower part of the tower really is not there; the pinnacle floats on its own in mid-air: 
 Jags of ruin, a fallen outline. Framed against the flat bright sky to the north-east, the Eiffel Tower looms. The tower's steepling top half dangles where it has always been, where the Pont d'Iena meets the Quai Branly, above ordered gardens, but halfway to earth the metal ends. There's nothing tethering it to the ground. It hangs, truncated. A flock of the brave remaining birds of Paris swoop below the stumps of its struts, forty storeys up. The half-tower points with a long shadow. 
 Other Surrealist images are not so benign. The year is 1950. The Nazis have won the war, at least in Paris, and have locked the city down. But their control is not absolute. Various resistance groups operate in the arrondissements, and strange beings haunt the streets, such as a centaur figure that is half-woman, half-bicycle, or a huge furry eyeball, or an "exquisite corpse" several storeys tall, comprised of disparate parts, sculptural, mechanical, or human. These are known as "manifs," a term that Mieville does not explain at first. But the reader eventually realizes that they are manifestations of imaginary figures created by Surrealist artists in the thirties, and let loose upon the world when a device known as the "S-blast" exploded one afternoon in the Cafe Deux Magots. Interpolated chapters set on the Cote d'Azur in 1941 tell how the device became charged with such awesome power. 
 Fantasy is not normally my thing, but two things kept me reading. One, as always, is Mieville's mastery of the English language, such as his description of the Eiffel Tower above. The other is the fact the Mieville knows his stuff. The names of the artists and writers he mentions are all real, though many of them were new to me despite my training as an art historian. He includes a 24-page appendix on the origin of each manif. He brings in fairly obscure references that will nonetheless be known to readers of the literature of the Occupation. Indeed, the density of his references, the detail of his knowledge of Paris, and his ability to see the sinister even in the most ordinary streets remind me very much of early Patrick Modiano, the Occupation laureate par excellence--and that, from me, is praise. 
 Did I enjoy it? Not especially, but only because I am unmoored by the genre. But was I fascinated? Yes indeed--and fans of the fantastic will be even more so.