I couldn’t agree more, I love Stand on Zanzibar, I thought I was the only one! For me, translation is a key issue for F&SF. Its English must almost always actually be in translation from something else, either future dialects of English or a compost of languages, or languages from the deep past or even made up ones. I found the naming in Perdido Street Station very rich to the point where I wondered what came first, the names and tone of voice or the visions of what they describe.

I had the phrase ‘Perdido Street Station’ for a long time. But then visions came next and more names for the city coagulated out of those visions. I go through old notes, get a clue from where a name came from that I’d forgotten. ‘Perdido’ was there before ‘New Crobuzon’ (The name of the city) which comes from a book called Voodoo in New Orleans and is I think the name of a family.
The sound of the names very important to me and I come up with them in two quite different ways. One way is the creation of names for places that come from an Iain-Sinclair-ish London. The place names are almost plausible as being real London names, very English. The second distinct source of names is actually existing, non-English words like ‘perdido’. So, does that mean Spanish is actually spoken in that world? Or is there another language that relates to the language spoken in New Crobuzon in a similar way that Spanish relates to English? The answer depends on my mood. There’s a danger in literalism. It becomes an uninteresting technical issue.

I loved the ending of Perdido Street Station. You keep playing with expectation. We expect Lin to escape the moth unharmed. When the wingless garuda climbs to the top of the building, we expect him to fling himself off in one last flight... instead you have him tear off all his feathers. There’s been some controversy over the ending, as if you deliberately planned things, but it reads much more like it was driven by the characters, as if what the garuda did took you by surprise, going back down the building as a man. The lovely long final description of the City is you and the three main characters saying goodbye to the City just as the garuda....

Just as the garuda is saying hello to it as a man, yes. You can’t disallow individual readers’ readings... but it’s tremendously nice when someone repeats what you hoped and intended.

I meant to talk to you about the influence of Mike Harrison.

M John Harrison a huge influence. Actually I think we’re very different but he is a hugely influential writer to me. His own particular agon against fantasy is more unremitting than my own. I think his punitive kind of anti-fantasy is less mitigated by a sort of pulp-friendly, geeky fanboyism than my own, though I respect and share many of those critiques. I also grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I think that’s visible in some of the fiction. Whereas the idea of translating Viriconium into a D and D model would be almost painfully funny.

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