At the boundaries of fiction genres, things get interesting. It’s not so much that blurring the lines is inherently interesting, but rather that writers whose work isn’t readily categorizable often create such adventurous prose. It’s there you’ll find authors making unexpected choices, authors imagining worlds whose resemblance to ours is beside the point. For some lovers of work dubbed “literary,” such stuff demands a reconfiguring of prejudices; the handy (and unfair) equating of “literary” with “high quality” isn’t always useful in the borderlands.
Many writers who might, in the past, have been herded into the genre sections—places where many readers fear to tread, places full of goblins, alien princesses, or weepy Southern belles—no longer settle for second-class status. Sure, the whittlers of by-the-numbers romance novels, Westerns and space operas will be with us always. But those who love the trappings of genre, yet who possess writing chops beyond merely moving plots forward, keep showing up on the shelves beside writers of more traditional stylings. We’ve not reached a kumbayah moment in which the dread connotations of being a genre writer no longer matter—alien princesses and oil-sheened, manly chests still sell books—but tentative forays to the other side of the tracks seem to have become more common.
Where the protocols of science fiction and fantasy meet the literary, you’ll find China Mieville, an English writer whose created worlds are so packed with novel ideas they become exhilarating, almost exhausting reads. Mieville is an unusual figure in the science fiction universe in that he simultaneously inhabits a far different one—his Ph.D. dissertation examined Marxism and international law, and he remains active in that scholarly realm.
At a recent reading at UMass-Amherst, Mieville offered a perfect summation of his aesthetic. In answer to an audience member who’d asked if Mieville’s experiences as a role-playing gamer influenced his work, Mieville offered an exclamation and a laugh, then said, “Are you kidding me? My whole life has been an effort to triangulate between Dungeons and Dragons and Thomas Pynchon.”
His first novel, King Rat (1998), is a gritty romp through the sewers and back alleys of London (the city in which he’s long resided) as seen through the mostly human inheritor of the rat kingdom, who battles a modern, drum ‘n’ bass-fuelled Pied Piper. Later works like Perdido Street Station and The Scar are set on a planet where humans live alongside such unusual creatures as humanoid insects and multi-dimensional leviathans.
The City and The City arrived in 2009, and is Mieville’s highly original take on the police procedural, set in an unusual dual city on the eastern edge of Europe. In it, Mieville seems to have honed his prose to a sharp edge, employing language more consistently lyrical, even poetic. Fans often invoke H.P. Lovecraft for comparison, but with The City and The City, Mieville seems to have found a comfortable orbit nearer the evocative worlds of writers like Bruno Schulz or Franz Kafka.
In 2010, Kraken hit the shelves. It’s another visit to an unhinged London, this one dominated by an unusual cephalopod and his cult. Mieville has said in interviews that he intends to visit every genre and offer his distinctive version of it, a statement he addressed in a recent interview, in which he also discussed his writing process and his politics.
Valley Advocate: You’ve been quoted as saying you intend to do a book in every genre.
China Mieville: Well, that was one of those things I said that felt really good coming out of the mouth—it had a nice kind of swagger to it. And the trouble with the Internet is it never lets you forget anything that you ever say.
It was not as formal an intent as it sounded when I said it, but there is a truth to it, because I’m very interested in genres, and I’m very interested in generic protocols. Certainly several of the books I’ve written have been, quite self-conciously, attempts to work within a generic tradition.
City and The City‘s a crime novel—that one most obviously and most faithfully, as well as being on some form a novel of the fantastic, but at a slight more of a remove. Iron Council I conceived of very much as a Western. … It’s obviously more mediated than City and The City, but it still felt that way and I tried to show fidelity to various of those protocols and so on. …
I do like the idea of picking them up and taking them apart like an engine and seeing how they work, and then trying to write something that relates to that tradition, either through fidelity or through argument or through riffing or whatever, but self-conciously relating to it and relating to it respectfully, even if it’s arguing with it.
Having said something in the moment, I think it is to some extent becoming true, but it’s not like a checklist that I need to kind of rush through. Of course, having said that, the question that I now get asked quite often is, “What about pornography?” And I don’t think I would. I’m very nervous about writing sex, at least if it’s not anonymous.
Your novels are remarkably full of ideas. How does that play into your writing process?
For me, ideas have never been the thing that stalls me. I don’t mean to sound arrogant about that—I’m not even saying necessarily that these are good ideas. They may be ridiculous and stupid ideas—that’s up to the reader. But that’s not the axis on which I have difficulty, and I am convinced that the vast majority of us have many many more ideas than we think we do, all the time. … Sit down and talk to a 5-year-old for 20 minutes, and you will have a barrage of ideas, just crazy ideas—what happens is that at a later stage, we get trained into filtering out a lot of our own ideas. And I think for some of us the issue is not that we have more ideas than anyone else, it’s that either we have less of a filter, or we’ve learned to ignore our filter, that little voice that says, “Oh, you’re being silly.” We don’t hear it or we don’t care about it or whatever.
Then the way you relate to that depends. So, for example, The City and The City was a project that was intended to be quite austere in certain ways, much more so than most of my other books, quite controlled and contained. And so for that reason, there is one big idea in that book. The other extreme for that would be Kraken, which is an extremely undisciplined book—hopefully amiably so. …
A lot of the time it interests me that things you didn’t necessarily think of as your big kind of money shot [laughs] people come back to again and again. There’s a scene in Perdido Street Station where they they have an interview with the ambassador of hell. And it was a fun scene to write. I enjoyed it, and I liked the idea of hell having an ambassador, but I didn’t think, “That’s a killer, killer scene.” But it obviously really chimed, and for a lot of people, that idea was something that they came back to again and again. You’re not really in control of the reception of these things.
I do enjoy that, and I tend to err on the side of shoving too much in, but I’m becoming slightly more disciplined as I get older, Kraken notwithstanding.
Your novels offer a very different take on science fiction. Are you intentionally fighting the conventions of genre?
Not consciously. I feel very grateful to genre. I come out of a generic tradition. To me, the generic tradition is not only nothing to be ashamed of, it’s something to be very proud of—proud of is almost a bit misleading. If anything, I would say it’s more a question of love. This is a genre I love, and I have nothing but affection and respect for it. And that doesn’t mean being blind to its failings. I mean, there’s plenty of things wrong with a lot of science fiction and fantasy. But if you love it, you either forgive it those failings, or you like it anyway. …
I am happy if people that don’t normally read SF read my stuff, and I don’t want to get pissy about it. I’m happy for that to be the case and I certainly don’t mean to seem sectarian, like the only literature worth having is SF, because that’s the inversion of the literary snobbery, is the SF reader who will only read genre and who has this term “mundane literature.” That just pisses me off.
For myself, I try and read various different kinds of fiction. But as a writer, I always feel myself to be relating in some way to the fantastic tradition and the genre tradition.
It’s an obvious point, but what is generally termed literary fiction in Britain and the States is a genre with its own protocols, its own rules. … So if someone’s saying I like lit-fic as a particular kind of fiction shelved in a particular place in the bookshop, I have no problem with that any more than someone who’s into detective fiction or romance or whatever. But the problem is that term elides into a notion of quality, so that this notion that lit-fic, that this is the telos of literature, this is the asymptote of quality—and that’s bullshit….
I don’t get my knickers in a twist about it. I don’t really care, but for me it would seem disingenuous to do anything other than celebrate my own generic roots because I feel so much a product of them. Whether the reader wants to think of it in those terms or not is kind of up to them.
You’ve run for office for the Socialist Alliance in England. How does our far less ideologically diverse political system look to you?
Well, your system looks fucked.
I don’t want to sound like a swaggery old European—there’s plenty fucked about our system, too, don’t get me wrong. Don’t even get me started, particularly right now. What we’ve got going on in Britain at the moment is kind of all-out social war being waged against the poorest elements of our society. Our system has its own inequities, but there are certain specificities to the American system that are peculiar to a European. When everyone was saying Obama’s a socialist and so on, of course like most people on the left, I was thinking, “I wish! Would that that were so.”
And what about our health care system?
I think your health care system is barbarism. Really, it’s unbelievable.
I do get very irritated—there’s one formulation that really annoys me—frustrates me, I should say. It’s that often when I talk to people, particularly American liberals, they say, “Our health care system is broken. It doesn’t work.”
I always say, “Dude, it works brilliantly. It works perfectly. But what you think it’s for is not what it’s for. It is designed to siphon large amounts of money into certain coffers, and it does it with fantastic, fantastic efficiency.”
I don’t think that’s just a rhetorical trick. I think it’s really important, because a lot of the liberal arguments for universal healthcare in some kind of really attenuated way in the States are predicated on this, I think completely mistaken, notion that if you can just prove the efficiency of your alternative system, if you can just prove that this makes more sense, you will have won the argument. Fuck that. Make sense to whom for what? … What you should be arguing for is a fundamental rethinking of its very purpose. …
Some of the inflated rhetoric that goes on does have a particularly American flavor to someone who comes from outside, and there are certainly aspects of the American political discourse which are quite frightening—a lot of the discourse around immigration, and we have plenty of homegrown racists, but a lot of the discourse around immigration in this country I find pretty chillingly fascist, really.
How does your political viewpoint relate to your fiction?
People are very interested in it, but I have to stress that for me, it’s just not something that I struggle with. It doesn’t come up, because I am someone who loves this kind of fiction and I’m also someone who has a certain political approach to the world. …
To me the fiction has a political texture, simply by virtue of the fact that the way I see the world is political, and therefore everything I see has a political texture, because that’s one of the ways I see the world. I wouldn’t say it’s an optional extra.
I think to me, to varying degrees, I think the books could not exist without my political opinions. But that doesn’t mean that they’re reducible to them, and it doesn’t mean that they’re necessary for the reader. Iron Council was written quite consciously as a political novel, the others less overtly so.
I can point you to certain references and certain riffs that I think are saturated with a particular political weltanschauung. But if you’re not interested in it—doesn’t hopefully matter, doesn’t stand in the way of the narrative and doesn’t stand in the way of the monsters, doesn’t stand in the way of the kind of—the cool shit. …
Sometimes what you can really admire in a book while disagreeing with its politics, and/or the politics of the writer, doesn’t mean not seeing the politics. For example, I think the books of Gene Wolfe are very political books, and he’s a quite traditional, right-wing Catholic. I think he’s an outstanding genius and I don’t think it’s just that he writes these cool, weird books and he has these politics. I think the politics are in the books. I love the books, and I don’t love them despite the politics—I disagree with the politics, but I find it fascinating, the texture it gives to the world.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a book that is, I think, structured by a kind of racism. It could not be the book it is without that racism. I love the book. I hate the racism. And I think you can have it both ways in the realm of fiction and art. There’s no contradiction there.