I read five or six books in the month of June. It's very hot in Tucson this time of year, and even at night it's hard to muster up the energy to do anything more physical than breathing, so it's easy to get lost in a book. As I read The City & The City, I realized that it held some similarities to The City at the End of Time, beyond the fact that both titles started with the same two words. Since I love to do compare and contrast reviews, I thought I'd take the time to tell the CT readership why I loved one book and hated the other.

Perhaps hate is a bit strong of a word, but The City at the End of Time was really a tedious read. I have to admit, I've never read Greg Bear before, he's a little too hard-science for this faeries-and-dragons kind of girl. My husband thought I would enjoy this particular book, however, as it was less full of science facts and was drawing comparisons to the works of Gaiman and Mieville.

And the thing is, if it had been written by Gaiman or Mieville, or even someone who desperately wanted to be one of them, I might have enjoyed it. But while the setting and tone are perhaps reminiscent of some of the works of those two authors, the voice is completely different. Lacking Gaiman's magicalness and the nearly-purple prose of Mieville's Bas-Lag Trilogy, the narrative here is almost dry. At times it tries to be better, but only succeeds to annoy, like a puppy that tries to fetch your slippers but drops them halfway across the house, covered in slobber (whoops, another failed attempt to sound like a real critic!).

I was warned ahead of time that the characters felt a little underdeveloped, but I was assured there was a good reason and all would make sense in the end. Well you know what? Screw that. If your story calls for the characters to be boring, bereft of background or motivation or personality, you need to rethink writing your novel. There's something wrong when the villain gets more backstory than the supposed heroes, and thus ends up being the most sympathetic character, because the reader can actually identify with him, because the reader actually knows something about him and he's not some boring cardboard character cut-out.

The characters wouldn't be so much of a problem if the plot was engrossing and moved along at a decent clip, but it wasn't and it didn't. Bear takes forever establishing the characters, the situations they're in, the setting, and the fact that oh yeah, time is running out. Literally. There is no time left. And that's bad.

You would think that a story about the universe seriously running out of time would have a certain sense of urgency to it, but there's this startling lack of real conflict that makes the whole thing rather... boring. The end of the universe should never be boring. Not when we're told that humanity - or what it's evolved into - has already dodged most if not all of the ends of the world/universe that today's top physicists write fascinating books about. It's as if, prior to the start, humanity has jumped the shark and honestly, it's all down hill from here.

Not only is time running out, but the universe is being consumed by some embodiment of Chaos called Typhon, but even that's pretty boring. When the characters finally face it, it's some sort of surreal dreamscape stuff, with dangerous enemies in it, but the characters almost always completely avoid the danger by just... walking the other way, or something sensible but not very dynamic, which makes for a very anticlimactic, overly long, and did I mention boring adventure?

When the end finally came, it also disappointed me. There was one deep, profound, touching moment that would have really moved me, except for the fact that one of the characters I was supposed to be feeling for had spent the entire rest of the novel being an even worse person than the villain, so it was impossible to sympathize with him.

Aside from the characters and the long boring stretches, my biggest complaint with The City at the End of Time is that it doesn't seem to know if it wants to be serious, hard science fiction, or a dark fantasy. Who knows, maybe Bear wanted to stay true to his hard science roots, but since dark urban fantasy is what really sells (with or without vampire sex), he tried to merge the two together and failed catastrophically. The book is full of lots of interesting fact-based physics stuff (only some of which I understood), but then there's all of this unexplained stuff that feels like pure fantasy. How does it work? Why does it happen? What does it have to do with anything? Does all of it have a real scientific explanation that I would have understood if I spent all my time staying on the cutting-edge of physics? I'm pretty sure it would not.

But let's move on to how much I loved The City & The City. I can't remember if I reviewed Mieville's Bas-Lag Trilogy (Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council) for CT. I'm pretty sure I did, but in case I didn't, or in case you didn't read those reviews or can't remember what I said, allow me to sum it up: I loved them, even though I didn't like a single character in any of the three books (an exaggeration, but a small one). The City & The City is absolutely nothing like those books, but I love it anyway.

If you're looking for that aforementioned nearly-purple prose, you'll be sadly disappointed. That's the first difference that stands out. Our first-person narrator speaks in a rather simple way, with the occasional downright awkward wording - I think an attempt to capture the feeling of being translated from the narrator's fictitious European language.

It's hard to know what to say about this book, because the greatest enjoyment for me was watching it unfold, with no idea of what I was getting in to (I've developed this habit of not reading the back of a book that I know I want, so I don't get any misinformation or spoilers). The setting and the story were both fascinating. The only thing that kept me from staying up all night reading it was the irritating need to get up at a specific time the next day.

What I can tell you is that this is a crime novel shelved in the fantasy section. It's a tale of a detective trying to solve a murder. An unusual murder, because run-of-the-mill murders make for boring crime novels. It is not a book about a magical quest, the end of the world, or a young man coming of age while becoming the greatest swordsman in the land.

Like all good crime novels, it's compulsively readable. You keep turning the pages, and chapters keep flying by, as you're hooked in by each new clue, false lead, and dodgy informant. It has all the best elements of a good mystery, with just enough hint of the fantastic to leave you always wondering whether it's truly a mundane murder, or whether there's something more arcane behind it all.

But wait... didn't I say that there were similarities between the two novels? There are!

Both books take place in two cities. The City at the End of Time takes place in the titular far-future city, and current-day Seattle. The City & The City tells you right in its title that there are two cities. In both books, the action is pretty much set in and directly around these two locales. It makes for a very tight and focused setting, which I appreciate.

More importantly, and less superficially, both books have significant rules that they have to establish, so the reader knows what's going on. This is actually pretty constant in almost all science fiction and fantasy. In one way or another, or sometimes in many ways, the setting in these genres is always different from the world we live in. The reader needs to know how it's different. Even in the middle of a series, the author will often give small reminders of the nature of the world, in case they've been forgotten between books, or some unwitting reader has jumped in without reading the previous volumes.

Back when I was in a writing class heavily geared towards literary fiction, our teacher read a quote from a critic who said something along the lines that what he hated about "genre fiction" was the world-building. He hated having to be told about the world and its rules. I guess he found it tedious. While I strongly disagree with this critic (and chafed against the anti-genre bias in the class for an entire semester), I can understand some of where he's coming from. Some books do an awful job of establishing the setting, going on these long info-dumps about the history of the world, the nature of magic, and the long-standing conflict between the elves and the orcs. This can make the reader impatient to get to the story.

Both of these city-centric books take the opposite approach, dumping the reader into the story to learn the rules along the way. This is usually how I like things. Unfortunately, Bear takes it too far, and it's not until the reader is deep into the story that we start to get some explanation of the far-future city and its situation and the people who live in it. Until then, all sorts of alien terms are tossed around and the reader is expected to figure out what they mean, which quickly starts to get annoying. I felt almost like the author was showing off. "Look! Look how different things are! They don't call parents 'parents'! This guy has a flower finger! What's a flower finger? You won't find out until 300 pages into the book, but don't worry, it's not important."

There are moments early in The City & The City where I was similarly frustrated. Here we go again, I thought. Time to learn another city's rules, and the author isn't going to spell them out for me. Of course not. I've got to work for it. But Mieville smartly drops facts throughout the story, so that I was able to piece together the puzzle of what's going on. At first, much like with the central murder mystery, I had several theories, but as clues emerged, I was able to discard theories until the truth emerged. And of course, it helps that there's a murder mystery going on, so I'm certainly not bored along the way.

I'd like to expound more on the subject of rules, so I'll hopefully be covering it in my Playing God column - though there's a chance that I won't have time to submit it this month and you'll have to wait for the August issue.

In summation: The City at the End of Time is probably only appropriate for Bear completists and anyone who is interested enough in seeing theoretical physics taken to really weird extremes to overlook the hollow characters and slow pacing. The City & The City is a good brisk "Summer Read" suitable for lovers of urban fantasy (the vampire-sex-free variety) or crime novels, and would probably be a good way to entice readers of one genre over to the other.