Inside China Mieville’s shaven pate, strange machinery must clack away. Those environs must, if his fiction is a guide, be full of Hieronymous Bosch grotesqueries winding a letterpress, conspiring to craft worlds of narrative complexity and half-imaginable vistas.
Mieville’s material gets dubbed “weird fiction,” and it’s as good a moniker as any to encompass the remarkably wide range of speculative fiction the British author has produced since his 1998 debut novel, King Rat. His worlds in books like The Scar and Perdido Street Station are not standard-issue science fiction or fantasy locations, and, full though they are of unusual creatures (even, in one instance, scholarly mosquito people), they often feel viscerally real. He repeatedly undertakes literary expeditions to shadow visions and versions of London, and seems as intent on finding the heart of that singular metropolis as he does in fashioning his own versions of the genres he loves.
Mieville, who recently read from his work at UMass-Amherst, will be the subject of a longer feature in these pages in coming weeks. In speaking to him for that story, I brought up only one subject he didn’t have a lot to say about. It wasn’t that Mieville was being coy or sidestepping something major, but when it came to one of the least publicized of his efforts—his blog—he wanted primarily to let it speak for itself.
In part that’s because he believes, as is reflected in the Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotation that adorns said blog, that being a writer doesn’t mean one’s every utterance is worth floating upon the sea of public consumption (the beginning of it reads, “A principal rule for writers, and especially those who want to describe their own sensations, is not to believe that their doing so indicates they possess a special disposition of nature in this respect”). That reticence is also reinforced by Mi?ville’s apparent ambivalence about the very concept of “blog”—he doesn’t even particularly care for the term itself. That’s an easy opinion to agree with, especially since the Web has spawned not only “blog” but all manner of aesthetically disastrous terms. (It’s even coughed up a mish-mash of syllables simultaneously connoting business office, infomercial and prescription drug: “webinar.”)
What Mieville has created is a blog dubbed Rejectamentalist Manifesto, and, like a few rarefied cousins, it goes a long way toward necessitating some less awkward descriptor. Blogs are, by and large, predictable repositories of long-form opinion or short-form pointers to links. They come in lots of flavors, of course, but few mess with the conventions of clarity and timeliness or tinker with the now-established format.
With Rejectamentalist Manifesto, Mieville (apparently with a nod to Lichtenberg’s notebooks) plays with a different set of rules. It’s not that he’s found a way to revolutionize blogging—he’s approached it much as he does the idea of genre in his fiction, playing with the “protocols” (his term) in his own way. Some of Mieville’s postings are straightforward political statements, as you might expect from an author whose doctoral thesis concerned Marxism and international law. But a curious pattern emerges from others. Often, images full of ghostly textures and patches of sky receive captions more poetic than informational. In many postings, even the political gets approached in a slantwise manner that prods and challenges instead of explicating. In an era of bald-faced political bashing, that’s a notable accomplishment.
That sense of challenge, of pointing rather than explaining, is in the end what’s so valuable about Mieville’s blog, quiet effort though it has been. Many a writer takes to the Internet now on the orders of a publicist to share something, anything, with fans or would-be fans. It makes for crushingly dull reading as often as not, dry-as-toast renderings of the writerly life, which, except for the actual fiction, tends toward solitary tedium. Rejectamentalist Manifesto is something else entirely, a glimpse by small degrees into the odd manner of seeing that enables Mieville to craft wildly imaginative worlds.
Take this, for instance, from a post on the little-visited subject of tunneling, with a link to the story of a Londoner who’s been burrowing under his neighbor’s houses for several decades: “Yes, those transits. The caverns & frozen seas & so on (all the vasty Stygiana) are their collaborators, but/& it’s the powers of which they are adjunct that concern us. Tunnels; connections; interteloses. Veins to be operated. The passageways that end in holes.
“A militant hesitation? Don’t avoid but go to war by staying put in these shunts of void. Their use-value lies in their being-hurried-through-ness. They don’t want to be dwelt in.”
Follow that kind of externalization of interior monologue, and you find yourself somewhere interesting fast. Maybe even privy to the kinds of insights that produce fiction of a higher order.