A Strategy for Ruination
January 17, 2018 1:08 PM   Subscribe

An interview with China Miéville in Boston Review.
posted by sapagan (45 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love that his first reference is to Cioran.
posted by gauche at 1:26 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Editor's Note: Writing about China Miéville in the Guardian, fantasy luminary Ursula K. Le Guin opined, “You can’t talk about Miéville without using the word ‘brilliant.’”

Jesus, that's high praise from a high source. I don't disagree but I feel for him trying to live up to that.
posted by Artw at 1:29 PM on January 17, 2018 [12 favorites]


Welp, I've put off reading Perdido Street Station for too long. And I just finished reading a series a few hours ago. I know what I'm immediately moving to the top of the list.
posted by Fizz at 1:33 PM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


The ending of Perdido Street Station made me very angry. He's clearly got a lot of talent, though, and I have several of his other books in the to be read pile.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:36 PM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


I thought Period Street Station was jam packed with interesting ideas, but agree the ending was a let down. The second book in that series is better, as is Kraken and the City and the City.
posted by cashlock at 1:47 PM on January 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


Perdido Street Station is a wonder, and peculiarly never really took its proper place in SF canon (IMO, likely bc of its ending). The Scar is great, but I never could get into Iron Council or The City and The City....
posted by tclark at 1:50 PM on January 17, 2018


Embassytown is where it's at, I find. I almost gave up on Miéville due to that P. Street Station ending, but everything else I've read has been top notch.
posted by Squid Voltaire at 1:56 PM on January 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


One day while I was reading Perdido Street Station, an enormous black moth landed on my patio wall and stayed there for hours. I figured out what species it was (I can't remember now), and in Mexican folklore said moth only lands on a house if someone within it is going to die imminently.

Basically I hate moths now, mostly because of China Mieville.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:59 PM on January 17, 2018 [22 favorites]


Embassytown is fantastic, and I also really enjoy his short stories (though half the time I don’t really know what’s going on).
posted by skycrashesdown at 2:01 PM on January 17, 2018


Shout out for YA book Un Lun Dun, which has some very fun subversions of the form.
posted by Artw at 2:12 PM on January 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Oh, and as far as I know The Scar features no plot-solving magic spiders and so is the best of the Baslag books.
posted by Artw at 2:13 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Honestly, Mieville really grows as a writer over his writing career - not that Perdido Street Station isn't interesting and influential, but it's also clumsy in a lot of ways from its language to its handling of gender and sexual assault. Unless you have a particular reason to start with PSS, I don't especially recommend it.

My personal favorite will always be the second Bas-Lag book, The Scar, but it has a lot of gurning and chitin, and the female protagonist feels kind of flat, like Mieville wanted to write a woman character who wasn't a stereotype but just subtracted all the stereotypes wrote the remainder. I think he's much more successful when he writes from a man's viewpoint and centers women characters as actors within the novel. (But srsly, The Scar is so good as commentary on various Things About Fantasy, and as a theory of how history happens. It is just so smart.)

But The Last Days of New Paris and This Census Taker totally blew me away - they both illustrate how much more Mieville can do as a writer than when he started out. And Railsea is like the happy fun version of The Scar - working out many of its concerns in a lighter mode.

Also, try The Crawl on for size.

I'm sad to see the usual academic gesture of emphasizing that things you don't find politically productive are "uninteresting", as if that's what's at stake. Like, if it's politically unproductive it's politically unproductive, but "boring" is a put-down. (One might find the first parts of Red Star simply full of quiet interest, for instance.)

One thing I notice: when he's on about certain things, Mieville's language is boring, speaking of stodgy. Like, this whole interview is kind of stodgy given that it's about catastrophe and salvagepunk. And I feel like I connect this to...well, it's funny to say that something is "uninteresting" as a way of putting it down, since if there's one thing I've noticed about Marxist political language and projects, it's the idea that maybe a little boredom is good for you, maybe if you aren't ready to use some big words and pay attention to the boring bits of history, you're not quite ready for the prime time of radical social change.

Like, there are a number of things that it is interesting to know but boring to learn, or interesting to think about but boring to read, and I feel that we live in an age which privileges the exciting-to-experience-yet-not-very-complicated-in-retrospect. So for instance, in some ways This Census Taker is incredibly boring. It's sort of repetitive, it has that Mievillian "I am setting something up like it's going to be a big turn in the plot but really nothing happens", it's organized around tension rather than event, you don't get a lot of answers anyway, the setting is weird but not baroque (like Bas-Lag is baroque, for instance). And yet it's somehow of intense interest. The City and the City is kind of boring too, when you think about it - I reread it recently and found that I remembered several exciting scenes with running and screaming which had totally not occurred.

I am curious as to why he'd use the phrase "strategy of tension". I assume he means that one always pushes even if one can't bring about an actual revolution, but I associate the phrase with, like, Italy and the far right, false flags, framing people, etc.
posted by Frowner at 2:16 PM on January 17, 2018 [14 favorites]


UN LUN DUN

UN LUN DUN

UN LUN DUN

UN LUN DUN
posted by maryr at 2:21 PM on January 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


I also enjoyed The City and The City.
posted by maryr at 2:23 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Or like, I think what I'm getting at about boredom is that boredom isn't necessarily bad, that we are trained to think that being bored, like being hungry, is always something we need to fix and never something we need to sink into, like there can't be anything good or educational about being bored.

LEM's novel Eden is totally dull, for instance (a largely non-dramatic slow-paced encounter with some extremely non-human aliens, followed by the named-only-by-function characters safely leaving the planet after they solve the sorta-mystery, about which they can't do much anyway...there are no beautiful landscapes, interesting relationships, lyrical dialogue, exciting sex or swashbuckling, etc, to hold your interest; we don't get much insight into the human characters and the alien characters stay pretty alien. It's a boring book! But it's also a weird and interesting book that makes you think about what you expect a book to do and how you expect your attention to be held.

And I tend to feel that the if you will stodginess of many Marxist debates and projects is similar. Or Capital - not that there aren't dramatic bits, but there are way more non-dramatic bits.
posted by Frowner at 2:26 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Kraken felt way too much like someone's failed Unknown Armies campaign for me to get fully into it, but I enjoyed The City and the City a great deal and I adored Embassytown.

I keep trying to get my partner interested in Mieville, but she is a committed leftist and he is a committed leftist and so of course the group with whom she associates and the group with whom he associates have a Judean People's Front / People's Front of Judea thing going on and so I have to enjoy his writing in silence.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 2:33 PM on January 17, 2018 [12 favorites]


I was first introduced to China Mieville at 14, when my aunt gifted me Un Lun Dun, and it was an awful, awful experience for me. Because I adored it, and I wanted to read more of his work, but that was the only YA novel he had published at the time. And I just did not have the cognitive capacity or literary experience to comprehend his adult work. I damn well tried: I started Kraken, The City and the City, and Perdido Street Station. But I wasn't able to get more than a chapter or two in any of them. I was so sad and frustrated because I KNEW I would like it, I just could not process it.

So I gave up for a while, read Kraken my freshman year of college, and then 3 Moments of an Explosion and The City and the City a couple years ago, and just finally finished Perdido Street Station in May of last year. I feel like once I finished Perdido Street Station I became a True Adult. Graduating college, moving into my own apartment, getting a job... none of those compare to finally finishing all of the China Mieville books I started as a teenager.

I think he's much more successful when he writes from a man's viewpoint and centers women characters as actors within the novel.

I have had this thought as well! I don't know if I've read enough by him yet to truly speak to this, but I distinctly remember having the thought that his female characters were always much better realized when they weren't the central point of view. And I think that's because of how often his viewpoint characters are... really just windows into the world; Kraken and The City and the City in particular had very bland male main characters that mostly served to showcase the world. But that kinda... works, for Mieville, in a way that it doesn't for many fantasy/sci-fi/surrealist authors. And I think the reason it works is because his worlds are often SO MUCH and SO ABSURD that you really need to have a toned down main character or it would just be overwhelming (which perhaps explains Deeba--I feel like she was a well realized female character, but also the world is not quite So Much--even though there's lots of absurd stuff happening, there's not super complex subtle sociopolitical stuff going on as well).

Anyway all that to say is China Mieville is the only man I know who can write a boring male protagonist and I won't complain about it.
posted by brook horse at 2:41 PM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Also, I feel the need to share my partner's summary of The City and the City when I tried to explain the premise to them: "So, it's just one city, and they're all assholes."
posted by brook horse at 2:43 PM on January 17, 2018 [17 favorites]


Is Railsea YA? Anyway, Railsea is utterly nuts. And great.
posted by Artw at 2:43 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


He's got some Shel Slverstein level jacket photos.
posted by Artw at 2:44 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


I picked up This Census Taker from the library after the previous Mefi post on The Last Days of New Paris. And yeah, not a lot happens in it but at the same time I must have re-read that sucker 3 times because A) it was really well written, B) it was short enough to do so fairly easily and C) I wanted to read it with various fan theories in my mind.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:05 PM on January 17, 2018


But The Last Days of New Paris and This Census Taker totally blew me away - they both illustrate how much more Mieville can do as a writer than when he started out. And Railsea is like the happy fun version of The Scar - working out many of its concerns in a lighter mode.

I personally really also very much enjoyed Iron Council.

I just finished New Paris yesterday and am nearly through Census Taker. So far I have a greater appreciation for New Paris than the current one but I am still enjoying it. I especially appreciate how New Paris can be seen as both a riff on and nod to Delany's Dhalgren as well as a matured reworking of Miéville's Bas-Lag material.

October is next.
posted by mwhybark at 3:49 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


October’s the one where he just gets completely implausible.
posted by Artw at 3:52 PM on January 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


Look, everybody. Clearly, the only sensible plan is to read all of Miéville and decide for yourself which you prefer.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:53 PM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


October’s the one where he just gets completely implausible.

I will cut you, Comrade.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:54 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Frowner, I love it when you talk about books.

My favourite Miéville is The City and the City because it encapsulates things that are true and interesting but difficult to discuss. Anyone who is at all thoughtful has considered the idea that adjacent people may inhabit different worlds. We usually treat this as metaphor, but Miéville reifies it, which is far more interesting and helps us think about the ways in which it's true. Like, there are places I have been where I would be effectively invisible when presenting as a relatively-wealthy tourist, but would suddenly become a participant when presenting otherwise.

Another thing he describes that's true-but-difficult-to-discuss is the way things are summoned into existence. I had an FPP a while back on a language which is studied academically but which never actually existed - it was basically the creation of someone who thought he was laying down the "classical" version of a language. Or consider the New World, as my author did, which was effectively summoned into existence by European colonisers – before that it was merely a place where people lived. It's even true of physical artefacts, although not to the extent of the ones in the book: we often don't know what they were in the hands of whoever made them, but we impute meaning and significance to them and that becomes part of our culture.

The bits of the book I like least are the action sequences, which might almost be stripped without harming the story. Like similar sequences in some of Miéville's other works they make it collapse in a shrieking mess when the reader most needs some time of contemplation. But the ideas are superb, and if his fault is simply having too much it puts him head and shoulders above most fantasists.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:02 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


I'll put in some nice words for his King Rat-- it's inclusivist horror.

Our protagonist discovers he's Prince of the Rats and instead of the story being about recoiling in horror about not being exactly human any more, he becomes pals with the other animal archetypes.

Warning: there are some pretty gross scenes.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:37 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


TIL: China is actually a male person. I'm now wondering if my (really unusual) inability to engage with the text of Perdido Station is actually a result of some dissonance between the narrative voice I was subconsciously expecting and the voice actually present.

Huh. I'll have to message my male friend who was sure Harper Lee was a man, and tell him we're both members of the same club now.
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 5:13 PM on January 17, 2018


A TV series of The City & the City will be out this year and I'm pretty excited, because for reasons I can't go into without spoiling the book I think it could work incredibly well and naturally as a filmed story. I'm really eager to see if they have the same ideas as I do.

I adored Perdido Street Station and The Scar and then got a little huffy that he moved on to other sort of books, but good for him that he did. I bounced off of Iron Council did love The City & the City and Embassytown. I'm looking forward to checking out the recent novellas.
posted by dfan at 5:21 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


He’s an interesting commentator who I like to hear from but I can’t stand his books for some reason. I read PSS and Embassytown.

I’m not completely sure what my problem is. I think they just feel really programmatic to me, kinda paint by numbers. A little didactic? Like, the passage from the author’s cool idea to the execution is a little bit too transparent. The novels feel like they’ve been schemed up but not really written.
posted by grobstein at 5:44 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think it was Iron Council that I could not catch any handle on, seemed to be a sequel with too much assumed context or something, pretty rare to give up on a book but then Perdio and City&City made more sense (in an odd way) so am considering a more deliberate reading order.

So, question, is there a marxist subtext to his books? And is Perdio a fantasy or set in a far future on a planet far away?
posted by sammyo at 5:59 PM on January 17, 2018


Iron Council is, very much, the Baslag book for after the other Baslag books.
posted by Artw at 6:10 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Embassytown is one of the best SF books I have ever read, and I really enjoyed The City & The City (the fact Le Guin thinks so highly of Mieville tickles my fancy, because I imagined his Beszel/Ul Qoma sharing a border with her Orsinia when I read The City& The City). I'm glad I came back to him after being disappointed with Perdido Street Station.
posted by KingEdRa at 7:03 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


I actually thought China Mieville was an asian woman until I got halfway through Perdido Street Station and googled the author.

Have read PSS, Embassytown, and The Scar so far. Can really identify with some critiques of PSS laid out here. I was really angry about the ending and it took awhile to read something else by him, but thank goodness I did because Embassytown is amazing.

I'd thought the sort of crazed "I must read this book now, interfere and lose a limb" state was something that wasn't going to happen to me in adulthood but I can't put one of Mieville's books down. No matter how many times he uses the same weird-ass thesaurus words ("puissant," this means you!)
posted by sacchan at 7:32 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Mieville gives a great readings and interviews as well.

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
posted by JohnFromGR at 8:17 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


His books have an explicit Marxist text most of the time. And Bas-lag (Perdido Street Station & sequels) is full alternate world fantasy— not scifi, just steampunk (in the nonpejorative sense). Embassytown is scifi, The City and the City is New Weird, Un Lun Dun and Kraken are urban fantasy. I haven’t read the others.
posted by peppercorn at 10:36 PM on January 17, 2018


The only Mieville I've actually read is October, which is interesting enough as somebody with limited prior background on the history but some interest in left-wing politics. Stylistically he seems a bit hit-or-miss for me. When I reached that passage in the epilogue about Lenin's mummy "receiving obeisance from its catafalque" I have to say my eyes circumnavigated the orbital crevasse - and I gather he is known for that sort of thing. But I'm interested in his other work anyway.
posted by atoxyl at 1:13 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've read quite a bit of Miéville (though not all) and just recently finished October. I really enjoy his flamboyantly bombastic writing style, and that love of trains that somehow seems to come through all over the place - I mean, not just in Railsea and Iron Council, but October too.

So, like, this interview... it confused me! At first I thought "holy shit, he TALKS that way too?" and then I figured it must be a written interview, because surely nobody talks with that much punctuation (Victor Borge excepted), and then I decided to throw out the question here: anybody know whether this is a spoken interview transcribed or a written exchange from the beginning?
posted by inexorably_forward at 1:46 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


My understanding is that Miéville used the threat of litigation to scrub criticism of him by an ex from the internet. I wonder occasionally whether that will come back to bite him in this post-Weinstein moment.
posted by pharm at 2:23 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


For all its problems, and they are neither few nor shallow, I still adore Perdido Street Station, which remains the only work of fantasy I've ever been able to stomach. (I think it helps if the prospective reader of this book has an unreasonable degree of love for London, as terrain and texture.)

nthing everyone's praise for Frowner's exegesis. I wish you taught classes on literary theory, and that I could attend them.
posted by adamgreenfield at 2:50 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


My understanding is that Miéville used the threat of litigation to scrub criticism of him by an ex from the internet. I wonder occasionally whether that will come back to bite him in this post-Weinstein moment.

You guys, I found something....not very good. It is linked from this thread on reddit. Since there's all kinds of legal goings-on about it apparently, I simply suggest that you click through to the very short reddit thread and then the link. It has a nasty likely sound, I'm afraid, and although it is not graphic or specific it's also not something you're going to be able to unsee in re Mieville.

"Lovely," is exactly how everyone I know who's met him has described him to me.

You either do or do not, so to speak - I'd much rather that people I like not be horrible, but if it seems plausible that they are horrible, you can't hide from that.
posted by Frowner at 5:32 AM on January 18, 2018 [8 favorites]


That's a thing. That's really really shit. Definitely can't unsee that.

He had a whole thing in perdido about isaak learning Yagarek was a rapist and not looking past that, just cutting him off. What the fuck.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 6:59 AM on January 18, 2018


"I never told you I loved you. I was very careful about that. I said I adored you - but that's not love". Brutal.
posted by Damienmce at 7:41 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Am I the only the person that prefers Iron Concil to The Scar ?
posted by SageLeVoid at 8:58 AM on January 18, 2018


I find that an entirely believable account, probably because I've seen that exact same kind of predator in lefty circles repeatedly. This line in particular sure struck home:

"The fact that the perpetrators pretend, at the same time, to be feminists, in order to get close to and then harm the women whose destruction will give them the greatest kick, compounds the unspeakable nastiness of their misogyny."
posted by tavella at 10:02 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


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