I am getting annoyed with it, I am nearly 75% through and while there have been some moments, it seems he takes us one step into understanding what’s happening and two steps back. It is certainly deliberate, Mieville has an idea he is working with and he is skilled, but what I like is a story, and characters I can engage with. The characters become somewhat more engaging but the story remains imo unnecessarily obscure. I am a completionist so I will finish it, but I can’t argue with any of you who put it down. It is reminding me of a lot of books that try to describe the indescribable, which is usually when they deal with magical effects, and here the context is what has usually been seen as on the magical side but it’s being addressed in as scientific a way as possible (which is not very). It’s deliberately unclear, because I think Mieville thinks what he is talking about is impossible to put into words, and he is deliberately demonstrating that, if that make sense, it’s not that he can’t write about things that are hard to describe, it’s that he is refusing to do that here to make a point.  But it makes for very tedious reading.