A hard start, but ultimately worth it. Miéville's prose is more complex than most science fiction that I read, and there's a whole lot of new vocabulary and hinted-at history, tech, and details about the setting. Still, once you get past the initial stuff, we really dig into the novel concepts, and boy do they make the novel. I really enjoyed the explorations of the principle aliens' way of thinking, and what it implies for us. Specifically, how language is formed by and forms our thought patterns.

The book fell down on two points, in my opinion: the narrator is unsympathetic - I really didn't care about her, or most of her friends even. Also, the pacing was uneven, with the emotional climax coming in the middle of the book, then kind of drifting down toward the end. You'd think that the

Spoiler

zombie apocalypse

would be the most exciting part of the book, but by the time I got to it, I thought "we've already had the big intellectual payoff - wrap it up already". Still, there were a few nuggets all along.