(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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