On the Look-Out for a New Urban Uncanny

Abstract

In May 013 I was approached by an online magazine whose mission is the reportig of anything that defines our urban living experience and challenges our notions of what it means to be a city dweller. My proposal to them was that I would write an article series on the influence of science fiction and real life in the city. How do authors of sf imagine the city of the future? How much of what sf imaginary produces can really be made possible? I undertook to write three essays on the realistic aspects: design prospects of arcologies, changing building materials that can be grown, and future modes of transportation. For the final article in the series, I wanted to extend my scope to visions in the science fiction and fantasy community that were extreme, going beyond the cyberpunk high-rise with neon lights. Coming up with an author's name that best represented contemporary urban sf&f for me wasn't that hard. China Mieville's fiction is full of cities and all aspects of urban life. To my mind, Mieville was the ideal conversation partner to talk about extreme visions of cities, the future, and our interaction with both. This is the extended and (almost) unedited version of that conversation. The original article series can be found at www.betterymagazine.com.Lars Schmeink: Most of your novels are decidedly set in urban environments and in many cases, it feels like the cities themselves are not just the backdrop of where the story takes place. It almost seems, like the cities become characters in your fiction. Is that a valid assessment?China Mieville: This is one of those things that people point out to me, but that is not really a conscious choice, in the sense that I say: Now to make the city a So in some ways, that makes me rather bad at answering this particular question. Why is the city a character? All I can do is post-facto theorize, but I suppose it is because I am a city creature. I have lived in cities pretty much all my life. I find them endlessly kind of fecund and inspiring. That sounds a bit cliche but it is true. I think I am interested in them, because they do intrude. To a certain cast of mind, which many of us have, many of us who live in a big city, our surroundings intrude on our lives. For example, if you live in London, it isn't that you get on with the business of living and the backdrop happens to be this place called London. It is that you are living in London. Living in London is a thing. Similarly with-I am sure-a lot of other big cities. So it intrudes into your life, it has an agency in a very direct way. And obviously when that translates into fiction, it means that this intrusion can manifest in the city becoming a character. I think that is a short-hand for having a sort of intrusive agency, which I think is how we experience cities. So it would seem to me the most paradoxically realistic way of depicting a large city whether or not it is one that really exists.LS: Let me pick an example out of your fiction. In Un-Lun-Dun this intruding agency is not one but really two different sets of the city. You reveal the city to have an underbelly, a darker and unknown side. Would you say that every city is always two-sided?CM: Yes, this is probably the case. But it is not just cities either. It is just mostly cities that I am interested in. All cities have a kind of less formal side to them. Call it an underside, call it an underbelly, call it an alternativewhatever: One of the things that is interesting when you are looking at a really old city, is that it has these less regimented and less planned aspects of the city. Because what we are really talking about here are those things which are not planned. Those irregular aspects have obviously had many centuries to breathe and to grow, so they are very clear in old cities full of history. So when you wander around Paris, Berlin, New York, London or Havana or wherever, you can see the official stuff. But when you look for it, there is also the obvious unofficial stuff, which is kind of growing like weeds. …