(urth) Miéville
emily zilch
emily0 at comcast.net
Wed Dec 1 10:31:52 PST 2004
{ 20041130 | turin } "As for Mieville. This is simplistic but lt's
look at Perdido Street Station. Isaac is obviously Isaac Newton with
his unified field theory to replace religious cosmology, at the
beginning of the novel Isaac basically says religion is the opiate of
the masses or rather the last bastion of the weak when talking to the
water manipulating slug about his god, rationalism and science. His
lover has a scarab's head, Lin?, and represents an interracial or
intercultural forbidden relationship outisde of marriage of course.
The intellectuals, artists, and scientists are pitted against a fascist
government masquerading under philanthropist venture capitalists and
captains of industry who only want to develop certain technologies
which will allow them to maintain control. New Crobuzon is present day
New York and 19th century London, I think it depends on the situation.
I do not know what the remade are, and every government makes terrible
weapons, but maybe he thinks "real" socialists wouldn't. I know he has
a phd in socio-economics or something like that and wrote several
papers on Marx. I haven't read any good articles discussing his work
but I've read some articles he has written and one interview. I
haven't read The Scar yet, just a little bit of King Rat and PSS."
The Scar is an amazing work IMHO; I'm a big Miéville fan because he
really hits interesting topics, although like our URTH-writer few of
his characters are people you'd want to know. An example of his topics:
Isaac's lover is *really* alien; their relationship reminds me of the
ones from Chip Delaney's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand". The
setting of New Crobuzon is fascinating; the plot and the setting are
intertwined and almost incomprehensible to the reader in terms of
(again) alienness. "The Scar" has the same features: a plot seriously
shaped and about geography (the kingdom of the Ab-Dead! the ship
itself! the underwater world!). And the latest book is All About
Geography and how it makes the people in it.
Miéville tries not to write preachy works, but perhaps he rubs people
wrong as Wolfe sometimes does me because of his personal interests. If
there is One Book to Rule Them All for each author (as is being
discussed herein, also forgive the metaphor please), then for Miéville
it is a struggle of the individual against societal limits (class,
race, gender - but, interestingly enough, *not* religion) AND a kind of
sacredness of geography, whether manmade or natural. He doesn't
idealise either nature or manmade but sees both as potentially harsh
and ugly as well as beautiful and liberating.
Also, without spoiling things, the anti/hero of the latest book, "The
Iron Council", clearly shows that he thinks "real" socialists do Very
Bad Things. I don't think he labours under the misapprehension that any
one group has The Truth, although clearly some political views are more
favourable in his opinion, i.e. socialistic/communalistic movements
against monarchies and oligarchies such as happened in the nineteenth
century. I do think he remembers those times as when good things
happened because of anarchists, rebellions and socialistic movements;
he's not wrong, as that is how we got, say, the weekend off from
working. strikes and labour movements might not seem very "fantasy",
but frankly i welcome his works.
Someone on this list mentioned pamphleteering being, in England, that
annoying bought-into-communism-in-college thing. I guess I take a
different view of "Runagate Rampant" and similar publications, thinking
of the zine movement in the US and abroad as well as the rampant
private publishing rants that characterised the era of the American
Revolution and, before that, the time of great upheaval in
seventeenth-century England. I think of Smith and Locke, both of whom
were published as leaflets. Perhaps we don't have that kind of
leafletting here in the US; I certainly had no modern equivalent in my
head when I read about the paperings but rather thought of the early
modern era (1600s-1900s).
Anyway, I know this is a Wolfe forum, but I thought the opportunity to
discuss Miéville, who is one of my favourites, was too much to
overpass.
em0
http://waitingfordorothy.blogspot.com
*****************
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil genius.
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