Asking the Wrong Questions

My latest Political History of the Future column takes the opportunity of the BBC having released a miniseries adaptation of it to discuss China Miéville's The City & The City , a novel about two cities that exist side-by-side but have erected a convoluted mechanism of psychological self-deception to "unsee" one another.  When I reread my 2009 review of the book, I was struck by how much it emphasized Miéville's poking at core fantasy tropes over what feels now like a blatantly political premise.  But as both that review and the miniseries have reminded me, that imbalance exists in the book itself. despite a surface feeling of relevance, the premise of The City & The City doesn’t map to any real-world political situation. Unseeing isn’t a way of ignoring an inconvenient or ugly reality, but a hefty psychic burden that the citizens of the two cities undertake out of ingrained habit and fear of retaliation. And despite multiple attempts to read it as such by...

So China Miéville has written a science fiction novel, and it is... well, it is many things, but perhaps we'll start with "Old School."  Miéville is the author who took the top off fantasy ten years ago, and his next to last novel, The City & The City, was so sui generis that it won awards for both science fiction (the British Science Fiction Award, the Clarke) and fantasy (the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award for best fantasy novel), despite containing no non-realist elements whatsoever.  But Miéville's latest novel, Embassytown , though in many ways as dazzlingly original as anything he's written, is positively retro.  It's a planetary romance, a far future SF story about a time when humans have spread through the galaxy with the help of vaguely explained FTL technology, a story of contact with winged, eye-stalked aliens.  It is, in short, that increasingly rare, increasingly unfashionable artifact, a core SF story, and its tropes are pure Golden Ag...

After a couple of dry months, reading-wise, I've gotten back on the horse in a big way and with some very fine books.  Here are my thoughts. Kraken by China Miéville - It's taken me a while to get to this book, and having finally read it the question foremost in my mind is: why?  It's strange enough that Miéville is going back to the template of a Londoner who discovers that there's a magical underworld to the city, is forced into that world, and becomes proffiicient at navigating it and affecting it--a barrel whose bottom he had already rather thoroughly scraped with King Rat and Un Lun Dun , both of which were themselves heavily derivative of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere , and which, in the intervening years, so many other writers have dipped their spoons into.  But to write this sort of story as the follow-up to the breathtakingly original The City and The City , a book that seemed to herald a new stage in Miéville's already genre-changing career, is just baf...

For China Miéville to name a novel The City & The City seems almost redundant, a meta-statement on his entire career. There is perhaps no other fantasy author who is as closely associated with cities as Miéville, and responsibility for the burgeoning popularity of urban landscapes in traditional fantasy (not to be confused with the urban fantasy subgenre) may very well be laid squarely at his feet. Cities, in Miéville's novels, have an existence that transcends their geography, inhabitants, and institutions. Their discovery, understanding, salvation or destruction is often at the crux of his plots. In his novels and stories, one encounters shadow cities, accessible only to a select, initiated few ( King Rat , Un Lun Dun ), cities disconnected from geography ( The Scar , Iron Council ), cities as living organisms, to whom humans are as barnacles on a whale's back ("Reports of Certain Events in London"), and, of course, the sprawling, dying metropolis of New Crobuz...

The last Harry Potter book is nearly upon us, which is as good a time as any to contemplate the twin publishing phenomena spawned by the series's success--adults reading books marketed for children, and authors of adult novels crossing over into children's fiction. The A.S. Byatts of the world would have us believe that the former is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse, or at the very least an indication that the adult in question has something wrong with them, but the issue is probably a little more complicated. There must be something that children's books do and adult books don't for so many adult readers to gravitate to the former (perhaps the answer is as simple as there being so few adult novels with adolescent protagonists--of the top of my head I can only come up with Donna Tartt's The Little Friend ). With that question in mind, it's interesting to examine the ways in which authors of adult fiction tailor their themes and narrative voices in ...

Yet another attempt to convince myself that AtWQ is primarily a book-blog. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson I had been curious about this book even before it got a controversial nod from the Lit-Blog Co-op, but that selection helped push me over the edge. Atkinson's 'literary mystery' revolves around sad-sack Cambridge PI Jackson Brodie, retained to solve three unsolvable mysteries: the 30-year-old disappearance of a little girl from her own back yard, the senseless murder of a teenager, and the current whereabouts of the runaway daughter of an axe-murderess. Frankly, I think the folks at the LBC could have done better--there's no question that Case Histories is well-written and engaging, but ultimately it is an underperforming little book, and for all its aspirations to the contrary, not great literature. In fact, there's something almost desperately snobbish about the novel, a sensation that creeps through Atkinson's admittedly lovely and lucid prose--'L...