China Mieville Research Articles

Labour and the Wage: A Critical Perspective

Over the past two decades, an emerging generation of Marxist writers has revisited old ideas about class, production and the legal form, in order to shed new light on our understanding of international (China Mieville, Robert Knox) and corporate law (Grietje Baars). That generation has lacked a counterpart in the field of labour law. They have one now, in the figure of Zoe Adams, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, whose book challenges deep-held notions of the sanctity of the employment contract, and provides intellectual ballast to those resisting new forms of managerial power. Adams begins Labour and the Wage at a level of some abstraction, by insisting on the role of law as a force that constitutes social relationships. Such categories as ‘employer’ or ‘worker’ are not empty shells waiting for academic lawyers or judges to fill them with content. They are the embodiment of past practices. They...

Invasive Humans and Posthumanist Horror in Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain

Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo’s work is often aligned with “weird fiction,” a genre that combines speculative fantasy with horror and includes the work of Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville, among others. Her fiction tends to explore nonhuman lives and environmentalist issues, and Birdbrain (2008) is no exception. Indeed, this novel can also be usefully categorized as “cli-fi” since climate change catalyzes and intensifies the particularly posthuman questions raised in the text. Birdbrain tells the story of Heidi and Jyrki, a young Finnish couple on a long backpacking trip through Australia and New Zealand. Their relationship is relatively new and uncertain, even at the beginning of the hike, and the events of the novel test their bond. The novel is fragmented in style, composed of narrative sections that alternate between Heidi, Jyrki, passages from other texts, and unlabeled sections of narration. The novel’s plot and characters trouble the binaries of wilderness and civilization, human and nonhuman, and, in doing so, posit the relationship between humans and invasive species as not merely one of metaphor but one of ecological fact.

Who Owns the City? China Miéville’s The City and The City as an Urban Gothic Dystopia

The paper considers China Mieville’s novel The City and The City from the point of view of geography of space suggesting that the capital is the dominating force that shapes urban reality. The novel builds on the traditional Victorian Gothic ideas of the city as a place of dual existence and exploits the topoi of the noir, but instead of focusing on the individual and the issues of psychological doubling and existential plights of a detective, it is more concerned with the modes of production and the way that capitalism continuously re-invents itself by its use of space without making itself known. The plot elements and aesthetics of film noir add to the mystery of murder, of the twin cities’ identity, and highlight the false consciousness of the masses which enables the ideology’s effectiveness.

Seeing in the suburbs

In China Mieville's acclaimed science-fiction novel The City & the City two different cities exist side by side, in the same physical space, but with residents of each primed not to see or acknowledge the residents, spaces and components of the other. 'Subtly, almost casually, Mieville constructs a metaphor for modern life in which our habits of unseeing allow us to ignore that which does not directly affect our familiar lives' (Moorcock 2009). Recognising the diverse ways in which this fictional idea could capture the social spaces of many contemporary cities, we reflect in this piece on one aspect of the notion of seeing and not seeing particular impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, from two similar urban localities in two different cities in two different countries: South Africa and the UK. The reflections are embedded within the historical and structural conditions of each national context as well as their distinct responses to the pandemic.

Bringing Infrastructural Criticism to Speculative Fiction: China Miéville’s “Covehithe”

This article unites infrastructural criticism, speculative fiction, and ecocriticism. Bruce Robbins, Patricia Yeager, and other scholars have been building the field of infrastructural criticism over the past ten years, but this work has largely focused on infrastructure within realist fiction. Because speculative fiction often emphasizes infrastructural objects and systems as the techno-scientific developments that differentiate their imagined worlds from ours, these narratives offer highly productive cases for rigorous analysis of those parts of the world that enable water, petro-culture, electricity, and telco flows and connections. This article presents through sustained close reading an ecological and ideological critique of the infrastructures at work in China Mieville’s short story “Covehithe” followed by consideration of how to develop this short story as a test case for a method of applying infrastructural criticism to other speculative fictions.

Unnatural London: the Metaphor and the Marvelous in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station

This paper explores allegorical and unnatural elements in China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station, starting with a parallel between the fictional city New Crobuzon and London. Fantasy literature examines human nature by means of myth and archetype and science fiction exploits the same aspects, although emphasizing technological possibilities. Horror is said to explore human nature plunging into our deepest fears. We encounter the three elements profusely in the narrative, making it a dense fictional exercise. In postclassical narratology, unnatural narratives are understood as mimetical exercises questioning verisimilitude in the level of the story and of discourse. When considered unnatural, narratives have a broader scope, sometimes even transcending this mimetical limitation. Fantastical and marvelous elements generally strike us as bizarre and question the standards that govern the real world around us. Although Fantasy worlds do also mirror the world we live in, they allow us the opportunity to confront the model when physically or logically impossible characters or scenes enhance the reader’s imagination. Elements of the fantastic and the marvelous relate to metaphor as a figure of speech and can help us explore characters’ archetypical functions, relating these allegorical symbols to the polis. In Miéville’s narrative, such characters will be paralleled to inhabitants of London in different temporal and spatial contexts, enhancing how the novel metaphorically represents the city as an elaborate narrative strategy.

Hidden in full view: the organization of public secrecy in Miéville’s The City and the City

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore China Mieville’s novel The City and the City as a literary experiment for analyzing the dynamics of public secrecy. We explore public secrets as an intrinsic part of organizational life and as a framework for paying attention to the politics of organizing. First, we focus on the novel’s invention and use of the verb ‘unseeing’ to bring out the embodied and sensuous aspects of public secrecy as part of organizational processes. Second we unfold how, although the content of public secrets may turn out to be less spectacular than expected, it is exactly their mundaneness which is key to their political importance. This is important because in an increasingly disorganized and uncertain world, secrecy proliferates and the visibility of secrecy is often a strategic move to justify certain hidden actions.

"Miasto i miasto" Chiny Miéville’a. Pomiędzy konwencjami, pomiędzy intertekstami

In my article, I will analyze The City and the City by China Mieville and argue that it contains an original interplay of various literary and aesthetic conventions. This novel by Mieville is actually a sort of a junction of different genres, traditions, and literary contexts, which above all addresses the problem of a transition between epistemology and ontology. In fact, the question whether the novel is organized by an epistemological dominant or an ontological one remains open. Consequently, even the reader’s position is unclear (or undecided) while s/he is forced to re-define his or her “horizon of expectations” again and again.

Unrealism: Critical Reflections in Popular Genre

Unrealism addresses the way unrealistic genres of writing like science fiction, horror, romance, and fantasy can display a capacity to reflect on and interrogate generic conventions. Unrealism describes a process that unsettles the literary hierarchies in which genre fiction is subordinated, undermining the privilege allotted realistic modes of fiction and extending its disturbance into the social and political frameworks in which distinctions of fiction and reality are maintained. Theorizing the significance of the prefix un by means of the political critique of democracy Jacques Ranciere offers and, in terms of subjectivity, through a reexamination of psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and the uncanny, the article analyzes the impact of formal, generic, and social instances of unrealism in writings by M. John Harrison, J. G. Ballard, China Mieville, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

O Acesso à Narrativa: uma leitura de 'Embassytown', de China Miéville

A partir do romance The City & the City, China Miéville tem reformulado o gênero que popularizou, o New Weird. Para ilustrar essa reformulação, propomos uma análise de um outro seu romance, Embassytown, no qual é apresentada uma associação perturbadora entre linguagem, imaginação e narrativa, que apura o conceito de aproximação entre literatura e política que Miéville tem perseguido na sua obra. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n45a1095.

Gothic London: On the Capital of Urban Fantasy in Neil Gaiman, China Miéville and Peter Ackroyd

There are good reasons to call London the capital of urban fantasy. Like no other city it embodies an intertwinedness of enlightenment and modernity with notions of the occult, the mythical and the magical. The idea of an urban underworld that somehow is the dark mirror of the city is central for the depiction of a fantastic London. I will look into three examples of urban fantasy: Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere (1996), China Mieville’s story Reports of Certain Events in London (2004), and Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985) that portray London as a liminal space and a gothic heterotopia.

Facets of Eleanor

‘Facets of Eleanor’ belongs to an increasingly popular and prevalent sub-genre of fantasy, the New Weird (or New Fabulist), that blurs the lines between the fantastic, genre fantasy, mythology, fairy tale, science fiction, and horror. Epitomised by the work of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Jeff VanderMeer (among others), it ‘demonstrate[s] the contemporary urge to pluralize our critical perspectives, questioning the possibilities of an objective vision and a universal language’ (Klapcsik 2009: 193), geared towards destabilising hegemonic ideological and narrative practices.Stemming from research exploring fantasy’s progressive potential, this creative practice encapsulates the desire to defamilarise the familiar through perspectival shifts and a liminal hesitation consistent with the fantastic element underpinning fairy tale. Fundamentally, it addresses Mieville’s hypothesis that Weird Fiction’s ‘focus is on awe, and its undermining of the quotidian’ (2009: 510) within an Australian context. Combining fiction and criticism, ‘Facets of Eleanor’ emphasises this theoretical focus, suggesting that its scope reaches past reality and into the narratives that mediate its perception. ‘Facets of Eleanor’ not only opens up a space to conceptualise a modern, Australian ‘flavoured’ fairy tale, but does so while foregrounding the historical, social, and discursive forces embedded in the form. Significantly, it sits within the author’s academic and creative oeuvre, acting as both a conduit and foil between the disciplines, at once filling gaps and poking holes.

ReadingThe City and the Cityas an international lawyer: reflections on territoriality, jurisdiction and transnationality

China Mieville’s The City and the City—ostensibly a police procedural—is set in two sovereign city states, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which share the same physical space. From this premise follow several conceits: that the two cities are separated by their respective citizens’ elaborate practice of non-interaction (‘unseeing’ residents and buildings in the ‘other’ city); that there is a specific crime, ‘breach’, dealing with illicit interactions across this pervasive border; that the two cities manage certain shared resources through an ‘Oversight Committee’; and that there is a shadowy extra-legal agency called Breach which polices the boundary between the two cities. The novel presents a vision of jurisdiction (or sovereignty) which is detached from territory (as an exclusionary construct) but which remains embedded in place (as something constructed by social practice). In the novel, two different streets, two different places as experienced by citizens, may occupy the same space. This highlights jurisdiction as something produced by social and legal practices rather than flowing from a priori concepts of territorial sovereignty. The City and the City thus provides fertile terrain for the

Weird Weather: Nonhuman Narration and Unmoored Feelings in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

78 Victorians Journal Weird Weather: Nonhuraan Narration and Clnmoored feelings in Charlotte ©ront£’s Villpttp by Czra ©an Feldman Over the last forty years or so, criticism of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) addressed numerous problems in the novel, including its narrative omissions and unreliabilities, its lack of closure, its multiple constructions of the reading audience, its attention to different kinds of plot, and its participation in both realist and Gothic traditions.1 Much of this criticism arrays the novel’s complexities in defense of the literary and social-critical worth of Bronte’s oeuvre, with the laudable aim of establishing that oeuvre in the canon of British literature and ensuring that it is read and studied. With Villette squarely in critics’ sights, it is now possible to return to the novel from quite different perspectives. Elisha Cohn, for example, recently drew attention to the aesthetic practices represented in Villette and Lucy Snowe’s habits of agitation and repose. Cohn notes her frequent retreats from analysis into slumber and reads them as intervening in a nineteenth-century discussion about how aesthetic contemplation ought to register in the body and mind. My own focus on her withdrawals emphasizes their meta-diegetic qualities: as Cohn also notes, the character withdraws from plot and narration as well as from wakefulness. This withdrawal has echoes in the later narration of “weird” stories, a genre characterized by its combination of supernatural actors (ghosts, strange gods, and the like) with an emphasis on the unsayable, the indescribable, and even the unimaginable. Kate Marshall’s discussion of new weird and old weird narrative techniques in “The Old Weird” is particularly helpful in making sense of Villette's narrative irregularities. Marshall’s work tunes in to the links between contemporary weird texts, like Cormac 1 See Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Buried Life ofLucy Snowe”; Jacobus’s “The Buried Letter”; and Silver’s “The Reflecting Reader in Villette.” Each differently addresses Lucy Snowe’s erratic narrative habits. Victorians Journal 79 McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), and China Mieville’s Railsea (2012), and what she calls “the gothic residues of nineteenth-century American literature” (631). In whatever era, “the weird” balances realism and experimentalism, exemplified by the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, whose narrators so often strive to maintain a banality of realist (even technical) description against the bizarreness and horror of the tales they are constrained to relate. Villette also has something like a gothic residue, seen in its famous ghostly nun (or “NUN”). This figure turns out to be explained, intradiegetically, in terms of human actions and ordinary clothes. However, that explanation does not prevent a formal cross­ contamination between the nun and the narrator. In moments ofnarrative (rather than personal) crisis, Lucy Snowe can be broken down, just as she dismantles the nun. The proximity and the similarity in structure between the narrator and the ghostly nun— two features of Villette that might have been more definitively distinguished from one another—allow the novel to query the ontological and ethical statuses of nonhuman beings. Narrative theory that engages with speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialisms—as Marshall’s does—promises to help rearticulate and reevaluate Vidette's narrative peculiarities so that they count towards, rather than against, the novel’s success as an aesthetic project. Rather than treating Villette's narrative difficulties as a set ofproblems that must be smoothed over, I return to them with the goal of elucidating their ontological implications for Lucy Snowe and examining the ethical demands that they issue from a nonhuman perspective. According to Marshall’s analysis, “[T]he indifferent and the cosmic [are] two of the key perspectival forms central to the arguments linking the new weird to the Weird Tales writers and their nineteenth century proclivities” (642). These forms recur in Villette, most explicitly when Lucy Snowe avows her own indifference to a scene that she recounts. This indifference is even confirmed at times by other characters, as when Ginevra Fanshawe (herself the possessor of a “halfhonest , half-insolent unreserve”) remarks on Snowe’s “strange composure” (Bronte 340, 341). The name “Lucy Snowe” also encourages the image of unruffled equanimity. And...

Complicity in Dystopia: Failures of Witnessing in China Miéville’s The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

This article examines failures of witnessing in China Mieville’s The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go . It begins by outlining models of witnessing posited by psychoanalyst Dori Laub noting that his conception of witnessing relies upon an ‘imperative to tell’ and on the assumption of good faith between teller and listener. The article argues that, in Mieville’s and Ishiguro’s fictions, this imperative is absent, and the resulting failures of witnessing on the part of the protagonists create their complicity in the dystopian systems represented. The failures to bear witness to the atrocities committed by the regimes in these novels stem from failures to see and acknowledge the visible evidence of atrocity, due to its normalization. The protagonists also fail to construct the narratives that would attest to these atrocities, preferring to perpetuate comforting rumours and forms of unreliable knowledge, often as the result of a desire for empathy with the group of which they are a part. The article concludes that this empathy becomes a troubling virtue: the act of reading itself, in that it involves a degree of identification with the narrator, may cause us to repeat the same failures of the witnessing as the protagonists.

Reversals and Paradoxes

China Mieville’s Embassytown explores the nature of language through the warped mirror of an alien Language (capitalized). Human language and Ariekei’s Language share a number of properties but the latter does not allow its speakers to express anything contrary to fact. Nor does it allow for “real” thinking, which only emerges when the Ariekei transform from Language-speakers to language-speakers. Being an asemantic, asymbolic, non-signifying, and non-metaphorical system of communication, Language is claimed here to be an example of “anti-language” (in a redefined sense), a perversion of the very essence of natural human language. In an analogous, redefined non-evaluative sense, the Ariekei are “anti-humans,” a species lacking the very nature of humanness: free thought.

On the Look-Out for a New Urban Uncanny

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. …

Thriving in the Gap

This paper focuses on the use of sight as a means of resistance to an all-seeing authority, and the use of vision as a way of remaking one's system of signifying and one's ideology. Through the application of Foucault's theory about sight, power and the Panopticon, and through the application of picture theory, I will examine China Mieville's use of seeing as ideology making in The City & The City where citizenship, the social imaginary, signification, and ideology all depend on characters who unsee. Just as there are gaps in vision, so are there other interstitial places for characters to inhabit where full vision, and full meaning making, are possible.

Pigoons, Rakunks and Crakers: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Genetically Engineered Animals in a (Latourian) Hybrid World

In literature, hybrid creatures are often used by authors to evoke images that raise suspicion, apprehension and unease about science, biotechnology, government and human nature. In HG Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), for example, the narrator and protagonist, Edward Prendick, is shipwrecked on an island populated by Doctor Moreau's human-like hybrid creatures. These creatures - including M'ling (a hybrid mix of bear, dog and ox), Hyena-Swine (a hybrid of hyena and pig) and Fox-Bear Witch (a female hybrid of fox and bear) - are mobilised by Wells to raise questions about the limits of science, as well as what it means to be human. More recently, a disparate group of hybrid people and animals known as 'The Remade' inhabit China Mieville's fictional world of Bas-Lag. The Remade, who are largely criminals whose bodies have been radically altered, range from characters with their lower bodies replaced with engines to others who have had bird, fish or other animal body parts attached to them. The weird and grotesque Remade hybrids imaginatively and vividly support Mieville's tropes that include alienation and power.1 Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is also full of hybrids.

Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime and Democratic Education

Abstract This article examines the shared crisis in art and education through the lens of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory. Using China Mieville’s novel The City and the City as a literary model for understanding the relation between these two practices, the author argues that democratic education is, first and foremost, a reconfiguring of the distribution of the sensible. Through a critical analysis of lifelong learning, relational pedagogy, and stultifying pedagogy, the article concludes with a theory of democratic education that finds its inspiration in not only Rancière’s theory but also in Mieville’s novel.