The City & The City

I haven't read any China Miéville yet, since the usual comments about his work suggested a tiresome inflation of weirdness for weirdness' sake. But Paul DiFilippo's review of "The City & The City" makes it sound like an interesting book:

Besźel is overlaid in enigmatic, never-fully-explicated fashion by a sister-state, Ul Qoma, which possesses a distinctly different cultural and political setup. At some point millennia ago, the two states were one. But then came the inexplicable Cleavage, a climacteric both physical and mental. Ever since, the citizens of each "overlapping magisterium" (to contort Stephen Jay Gould's famous phrase about the separation of science and religion) are prohibited from interacting on a daily basis, even in the slightest fashion. From earliest youth, individuals in Besźel are taught to "unsee" any parallel structures and events and people in Ul Qoma. The citizens of Ul Qoma do likewise. Any accidental or deliberate interaction between the two realms is deemed "breach," and is punished severely by the near-omnipotent agency of that same name.

The premise of two separate populations living in the same city without interacting, or even seeing each other, is reminiscent of Jack Vance's story "Ulan Dhor", from The Dying Earth.

(later) "Ulan Dhor" also resonates with some aspects of Jeff VanderMeer's "City of Saints and Madmen", as he himself has mentioned.