Recently in China Miéville Category

This was perhaps the most eagerly awaited novel by the SF/Fantasy community in 2009.

It was worth the wait.

China Miéville´s The City and The City may very well be his best novel since his classic Perdido Street Station.

The story does not take place in his Bas-Lag Universe, home of Perdido and also of The Scar and Iron Council, although the name of the fictitious city reminds us a little of it: Beszel, a Eastern Europe country not unlike Hungary, in fact, so similar in names and language that it could be almost a parallel one.

Aside from this "small" detail, this is a modern-day world, where people use computers, MySpace, cellphones, and well-known references abound (David Beckham and Star Wars are just a couple of them). This could very well be our world, for all that we know. But, as in any masterful work of literary imagination, can we say that the "real" world of The City... would be by any chance our world?

Miéville creates a very credible city and then some - this "some" is another city whose borders not so much touch as clash with Beszel: Ul Qoma. Both cities are separated by a grand, twisted building, strangely called Copula Hall. Like (and at the same time unlike) the old Berlin Wall, Copula Hall is the only legal way station between the cities.

Which can be a little disturbing to unaccustomed foreigners who can´t ignore the fact that both cities coexist in the same space.

Beszel and Ul Qoma are one and the same, intertwined. The denizens of one city must learn since childhood the hard and high art of unseeing buildings and people from the other, for not to incur in penalties from this and perhaps other world: as if all the laws forbidding contact between cities without proper permits weren´t enough, there is also another thing to be concerned at all times: the Breach.

Nobody knows exactly what the Breach is. But everyone knows very well what it does: it fixes things. It may return a stray person to his/her original city, for example. (It will probably do it to a foreigner person - even the Breach seems to want to avoid diplomatic incidents) Or it may take the person away. For good.

When Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel, finds the body of a cruelly murdered foreign girl in the outskirts of the city, it looks like she was a victim of an assault - but soon enough the evidences begin to point to conspiracies involving radical political groups and end up leading him to the other city: Ul Qoma.

As if all of this were not enough, Borlú must also deal with what lies (or what some people thinks that lies, which, when you deal with mad people and conspiracy theory types, sometimes can be the same thing) between the city and the city: a third city. Orciny. An entire territory which is an urban legend in itself. A myth ancient and at the same time invisible, even more unseeable than the inhabitants of Beszel to those of Ul Qoma and vice-versa - but it also may be the key to the murder of the girl. And Borlú becomes too much involved in this to turn back now. He must find Orciny at all costs, even if it doesn´t exist.

The details of the narrative are a must; Miéville specially crafted a bad English for the writings of Inspector Borlú, a very intelligent man who just happens to not know English enough to be a master of style, but who can translate quite well his thoughts. (Though it´s strange even for me, a non-native speaker; I wonder what kind of estrangement you, my Anglo reader, will feel then?)

As far as strangeness go, we don´t get to see anything as flamboyant as the Remades of the Bas-Lag Universe, for instance, but on the other hand, we learn of the existence of the insiles, exiles inside the cities, between them. And what about the topolgangers - doppelganger places, zones that are the same for the denizens of both cities, but that each see in a different mindset?

If Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (2666, The Savage Detectives) were alive, he would be a serious candidate to be the Julio Cortazar of the XXI Century. China Miéville is on the same league, but in a slightly different key: he may as well be a Borges for the XXI Century. The City & The City is not to be missed.

I just read about it in A Dribble of Ink: the next China Miéville novel is scheduled for publishing in May 2009, and its name will not be Kraken, as (I still don´t know why) everyone seemed to expect (Jacques tried to find out more about it with Miéville himself in this interview). I also took the liberty of reproducing the image of the cover:

Below, the synopsis (ok, it´s more an advertising piece than a synopsis, but who wants spoilers after all?) from Subterranean Press:

In such novels as King Rat, Perdido Street Station, and Iron Council, China Mieville established himself as one of the most original writers currently working in any genre. In his latest, The City & the City, Mieville has outdone himself, giving us a multi-layered urban fantasy of extraordinary complexity and depth.

The story begins when Tyador Borlu, senior detective in the Extreme Crime Squad of the city of Beszel, is called to the scene of a particularly vicious homicide. When the victim turns out to be a young female student with dubious political connections and a controversial history, the investigation spills over into the neighboring city of Ul Qoma. Once there, Borlu enters a labyrinth of violence and corruption that will alter the course of his career.

The City & the City is a brilliantly conceived, masterfully executed novel whose intricate plot encompasses myth and legend, political and cultural divisions, corporate greed, and the arcane forces that move behind the scenes of a beautifully realized urban landscape. Effortlessly blurring the boundaries between mystery, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, it is the most impressive, fully developed work to date by a writer of vast ambition and seemingly limitless gifts.

Thanks to Aidan Moher for the info and the image.

Award-winning author China Miéville, considered by many the father of New Weird with his Baslag novels, is one of the best speculative fiction authors around. Post-Weird Thoughts had the pleasure to interview him and talk about internet, politics in fiction and his possible next novel. Or not. Thanks to Miéville for his patience and support. Enjoy!

PWT - I can't help but ask you first why you're not online? Contrary to many authors you don't have a website, or a blog, not even a Facebook account. Why's that?

CHINA - I don't have one for two main reasons: one is that I don't know what I would *DO* with it. If I was going to blog regularly, that might be different, but I don't think I would, so what would be the benefit? Anyone who wants to know anything about me can find out pretty much instantly online anyway. And the other thing is that I don't have the stomach for all the online discussions, flamewars, debates, chatting, etc. I have nothing against any of them, and know that many people find them invaluable and fascinating, but for me, i) I find the spiraling down into vicious flamewars really tiring, and ii) I find the way they operate as a time sink for me really stressful. Once or twice I've had people get *angry* with me for not having a website, on the grounds, I think, that I 'owe' it to readers, which I just don't get at all. I would have thought the very last thing the world needs is another half-arsed, pointless, uninteresting website, so I thought I would spare the universe it. The day I have something to put up that's worthwhile, I'll do so.

PWT - It seems there's been much interest in the New Weird worldwide, although the first wave has passed for almost a decade. What do you think of New Weird today?

CHINA - I thought the term New Weird was an excellent term - in any debate over literary movements or moments half the battle is having a kewl name, and I thought New Weird was superb. In addition to that I thought it genuinely pointed at something distinct that was happening. I thought lots of the arguments around it were ridiculous, ill-tempered, and point-missing. However, I also thought that it quite quickly reached the point where it ran the risk of becoming self-parody and/or merely a marketing term. At that point, I decided not to talk about it any more. Which is *absolutely not* the same as repudiating it. I repudiate nothing. I just felt like I was becoming a bore about it. So I stopped. As long as people think it's interesting or useful, more power them.

PWT - What about the New Weird antho? Did you like it? Do you think it has more importance than other anthos?

CHINA - More importance than others? Certainly not. Some anthos are very important, some less so, and if you're in the middle of one, you're uniquely badly placed to actually judge it's importance, so I'm the last person you should ask about that. Did I like it? Sure. It did a decent job of pointing at a moment. As I say, though, I'm a bad person to ask.

PWT - Speaking of the antho, you've got a short one in it called Jack. It was an interesting examination of the cultural hero and how the character can be used by those in power. Was that your intention when you came up with the idea of the character Jack? And what can you tell us about Jack Half-a-Prayer that isn't in the books?

CHINA - I won't say anything about stuff that's not in the books, because it's only in the books that it becomes interesting, in my opinion. As to the story, certainly it was in part about that. I was also aware - SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! - that I'd not really ever done a story about New Crobuzon from the point of view of someone in power, and wanted to try that. And I wanted to take seriously and respectfully but critically the notion of some sort of relationship between power and resistance of a certain type.

PWT - What about New Crobuzon? How did it come up and what did you want to say with the setting?

CHINA - I just wanted a setting that I could use as a ragbag, into which I could throw anything and everything I thought up, but still trying to conceive of it rigorously, legitimately, 'realistically' in its own terms. So New Crobuzon is the result of many years of accreted ideas, images, monsters, architecture. It wasn't planned, it coagulated out of a mess in my head. That was always its telos.

PWT - And what can you tell us about your writing process? How do you come up with ideas? Do you outline your novels? Do you research much?

CHINA - I outline very carefully, in a lot of detail, print out the outlines and refer to them throughout the writing process. I get very stressed indeed by the idea of writing without knowing what's going to happen. Of course things change in the writing, but with a plan in place, they change within parameters and the change cascades all the way down and you can follow through what'll happen. I research a reasonable amount, but I'm painfully aware that excess research can be i) a stalling mechanism to put off the actual writing, and ii) a way of making for a clunky book. So I tend to research but only at the level of, say, a children's encyclopedia, because it's a very rare book that needs more detail than that for whatever it's talking about. I have no idea where I get ideas from. I think ideas are easy, and I think most people have way more ideas than they think they do.

PWT - You've said many times that your political views do not play a major role in your fiction. "They're there if one looks, but one can also enjoy the monsters". How do you separate your beliefs from your fiction as not to make them pamphletary. And more, do you think one can separate the author from his beliefs?

CHINA - I wouldn't say that they don't play a major role, exactly: I'd say that the fiction is not reducible to the politics, and has to be its own end. That doesn't mean that it could exist without my politics. But the point is that without my politics, I wouldn't be me, so it becomes a rather recursive and, to my mind, not very helpful question: where do the politics end and 'me' or the fiction begin. In answer to the question how do I 'separate' my beliefs from my fiction, I simply don't. It's simply not an issue for me. When I want to tell a story, that's what I'm doing. I don't have to make an *effort* to keep the politics out, because what I am wanting to do is tell a story - into which, inevitably, some politics will come, because I'm interested in that, but which will certainly not be *about* the politics, because if I wanted to write about the politics, I'd write about the politics. I'm aware that that's probably not a very helpful answer, and I'm sorry about that. The thing is, I get asked this question and I have no idea how to answer. It simply never feels like an 'effort' or something I have to 'do' to 'separate', that' just not how it feels in my head. I don't think you can separate an author from her or his beliefs, nor should you. However, their fiction is neither reducible to those beliefs, nor extant in isolation from them. I don't mean to sound defensive, if I do - my apologies. I just am very aware that I don't give a satisfactory answer to this. That's because in my head it's not a question, so I'm always a bit bewildered and fumbling about how to respond, I guess.

PWT - You mix genres a lot. Scifi, fantasy, horror, etc. What do you think of genre as a whole? Is it that different from mainstream? And do you feel any pressure about being labeled fantasy, scifi, horror or, ultimately, New Weird?

CHINA - I don't much care how other people label me. If asked, I tend to say I write 'science fiction' to people that don't know much about genre, and 'weird fiction' to those who do. I'm not one of those people who says that they think all literary pigeonholes/genres are limiting and pointless. (To be honest, I'm never convinced that people who say they think that really do, though I'm sure they mean it when they say it.) In my opinion there *is* a meaningful aesthetic / ideological distinction of some kind between 'realistic' 'mainstream' fiction and 'fantastic' fiction broadly conceived - fiction with a non-realist setting. I think that the fantastic aesthetic does have a specificity. For me, I'd draw the boundaries quite wide - I'd say that SF and Fantasy and supernatural horror are variants of a fundamental fantastic, rather than opposed categories, but I do think that they are distinct from 'realism'.

PWT - Your last book, Un Lun Dun, was your first attempt in the young adult field. Why the change? And what do you think of today's YA in general? Can you give us any opinion on Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Eragon, etc?

CHINA - I think that now is an outstanding time for YA fiction. There's an amazing amount of incredibly inventive, well-written work out there. The writers I've been particularly admiring recently are David Almond, Philip Reeve, Philip Pullman, Garth Nix and others who join earlier greats for me like Joan Aiken, Norton Juster and Lewis Carroll. I haven't read Eragon or Artemis Fowl, so can't comment on them. I read a couple of the Harry Potter books, and they weren't particularly up my street.

PWT - I've heard you've been working on a new novel called Kraken. What can you tell us about it? Is it in New Crobuzon or something different? Any details on the story or when it will be released?

CHINA - This is what happens in a world of rumor. I never talk about work in progress, and then the next thing you know some hint gets released, some misunderstanding generalizes, some whisper fractals, and then Amazon is trying to sell a non-existent book. My position is as follows: Kraken may or may not exist. If it does, it may or may not be called Kraken. Whether it exists and whatever it's called, it may or may not be out next year or the one after or another time. Sorry to be a pain!