Articles with the Tag China Mieville
The City & The City — China Miéville
The City & The City
China Miéville
312 pages
published in 2009
Right. China Miéville is one my favourite writers, one of the few (together with Terry Pratchett, Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod) I’ll always buy in hardcover. I love the way in which he fuses science fiction and horror and fantasy together into what he himself has called New Weird, essentially a new genre that emphasises the grotesque and baroque sides of its parent genres. What I also admire in Miéville is that he keeps his imagination firmly grounded in a keen appreciation of political and economical realities, no doubt helped by his background as a proper socialist. That combination made Miéville’s creation of New Crobuzon one of the more fully realised cities in science fiction/fantasy. With Miéville there’s always the feeling that his heroes do have to work for a living, that the daily struggle for existence is just as important, if not more as whatever existentialist crisis they’re on the fringes of.
It’s this sense of realism that links The City & The City with Miéville’s earlier novels. Set on Earth in two fictional Eastern European cities with no fantastical or science fictional elements and written as a police procedural: The City & The City cannot be more different from its predecessors. Yet at the core of the novel are the same political and economical themes Miéville always write about. At its best the police procedural is a very political novel, just because policing itself is intensely political — just think about the decisions being made about which crimes to prosecute and which not, which investigations to support and which to starve of resources. There’s therefore a long tradition of writers using the police procedural as a vehicle for social criticsm and Miéville fits in well with this tradition. Of course Miéville being Miéville he does more than that but we’ll get to that.
Missing the point
I’ve got a fair bit of sympathy for people who get annoyed when their culture is misrepresented or appropriated by some science fiction or fantasy writer looking for some exotic colour, but I think Kosin Grigor’s critique of China Miéville’s The City and the City misses the point:
Since we’re hardly lacking in places where people really do practice the kind of mental gymnastics that’s exercised in Besźel/Ul Qoma, the learned knowing of “ours” and “theirs” and never transgressing – though of course not as drastically as to literally unsee The Other Place – it strikes me as gutless to spend so much energy on crafting an allegory (and inevitably leaving it full of holes and failures in this desperate effort of making it Distinct; hell, one of the characters even attended a workshop on policing (real) politically divided cities so that once again we could be assured we’re not reading a roman à clef on any of them) instead of going all the way and writing a fantasy Stolac or what have you, and labelling it clearly as such. Sure, it would piss people off something rotten whichever real divided city one chose to write an alternative history and present reality of, but it’s not like the book isn’t already insulting in its carefree ignorance of its building blocks.
Some of the objections it raises may very well be valid, but it misses the point of the novel. The City and the City is not meant to be a standin for anything, or function as a metaphor for some really existing Eastern or Central European countries. The setting is not quite meant to be realist, rather than evoke just enough of a feeling of realism to serve its central conceit, that of two cities geographically sharing the exact same space yet being separated through the inhabitants of each city deliberately unseeing the other one. The book would not work if it was based on a real situation. I’m sure Kosin Grigor is right to say Miéville made a mess of the language and names and it therefore doesn’t work for them, but again, this is a fictional city we’re talking about, not meant to be representive of anything actually existing. That the language therefore is reminiscent of, but doesn’t quite work like real Eastern/Central European languages is a feature, not a bug.
It’s one thing to be annoyed by this, which I can well understand, but that doesn’t mean that Miéville is guilty of culturefail, as Kosin puts it. Miéville’s cities are not some Ruritania, created to indulge in “Balkans” cliches, but rather use Eastern/Central Europe as an inspiration in the same way that his earlier creation of New Crobuzon.was inspired by London, but not meant to be London. Ultimately everything about Besźel and Ul Qoma is in service to the central idea of unseeing; their existence only needs to make enough sense to support this and to criticise it for not being real enough is missing the point; it was never meant to be.
The towering culmination of all animal life
O is for Octopus: the A-Z of China Miéville.
Free rice
Free rice is another of those charitable websites, where your jumping through hoops is rewarded by a tiny donation to a good cause. Usually this involves pushing buttons, but the people behind this site have been smart enough to make a proper game out of it. You’re asking to guess the meaning of an uncommon word and if you guess right, you get to donate ten whole grains of rice to the UN! The longer you get it right, the harder it gets of course. It’s a very addictive game to those of us who are fond of words and vocabulary anyway, playing on the innate geeky loving of learning and competitiveness.
Nevertheless, it still reminds me of China Miéville’s short story “An End to Hunger” with its sarcastic putdown of such sites. If the people behind it are so concerned with ending world hunger, surely there are more effective ways of doing so? Because this way, it’s only a p.r. gimmick, a way for the companies sponsoring the site and the people playing the game both to parade their own goodness.
Does that mean you shouldn’t play their game? Not as long as you know it is a game, a put-on.