Why I love China Mieville

[wingsmith]

Originally published at Tom Pollock. Please leave any comments there.

If you’re any­thing like me, (and by the end of this post you may be throughly grate­ful that you’re not) you might have have found your­self in nice, relax­ing post-work shower, thinking:

“I know I like China Mieville, but what is it about his work that I like?”

Now, there is much to admire that has stemmed from that shiny head, but I’ve got it pinned down to one thing he does par-excellence, which appeal to me as a reader personally.

Sur­re­al­ism. Real, Surrealisam.




Nat­u­rally, I love how beau­ti­fully, enrap­tur­ingly weird his books are, but the rea­son they work so well, is they aren’t just weird. They make sense.

The streets of New Crobu­zon are filled not just with magic, but with a thorny, ornery logic. A logic of docks and gang­sters and cap­i­tal and cor­rup­tion and cause and effect. The cac­tus­men are linked to the Giant Frog peo­ple through strands of his­tory and eco­nom­ics. They owe each other money. They envy each other’s achieve­ments and admire each other’s art.

These mun­dane motives famil­iar­ize us with these crea­tures, even as we are (shiv­er­ingly) alien­ated by their more exotic skin-deep features.

The bru­tal logic of the sliced-and-spliced remade is one of pun­ish­ment. The logic of the Scarab-headed women is of ghet­toiza­tion and cul­tural compromise.We instinc­tively get these log­ics. They are famil­iar and make sense. They ground the world. The glo­ri­ous, bonkers fecun­dity of Mieville’s worlds are embed­ded in net­works of mean­ing that convince.

It doesn’t stop in Bas-Lag either. The pecu­liarly entan­gled cities of Bezel and Ul Qoma dis­play the same net­worked weirdness.




The lan­guage (‘Unsee’, ‘Breach’, ‘Orciny’) may be unfa­mil­iar, but the gram­mar, the way in which these con­cepts relate to one another is famil­iar: This is allowed. This isn’t. If you do this, they will come for you. No-one else sees this, so why should I? The cities are immersed in a logic of bureau­cracy and group­think that we recognize.

And what’s more, by access­ing our under­stand­ing of these con­cepts, the story can cast them in a new light, show us truths we’d never con­sid­ered. It can make us see for exam­ple, that the way we fall in line with major­ity, the way that can blind us to the world around us, can be as much a vital com­po­nent of a func­tion­ing state appa­ra­tus as police and road maintenance.

China Mieville doesn’t just use mon­sters to show us truths. He uses the truths we already know to show us mon­sters, and to make them feel real.

Well. That’s why I love it. How about you?