ISSN 1758-6488
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Writers Talk with China Miéville Interview |
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There’s a kind of Puritanism of modernism in Mike’s work for me.
It’s necessary and brilliant for the field and fiction in general even if you don’t agree with every word. It’s like William Burroughs, you can’t imagine fiction without him.
Amen. You were talking about the frozen ending of Angel. In Iron Council, the revolutionary train is bearing down on New Crobuzon and gets frozen in time, and stays outside the city poised, as a kind of monument to revolution?
No, it’s a quantum moment of indecision. Objectively Iron Council may have more flaws than, say, The City and The City, but I think it means the most to me partly because it’s the book in which, having previously been quite careful not to push politics into my work, in Iron Council I wanted to write overtly about the kind of politics that interest me. I wanted quite unashamedly to write an adventure story about radical politics. It’s part of my Pascalian wager that there are things you can do with the fantastic in terms of examining and considering aspects of modernity that you cannot do with mimetic fiction, or certainly can’t do as well. There’s a moment in which Adorno says that Kafka is the only writer capable of writing about 20th century.
Iron Council pictures the conundrum that interests a writer like me for whom revolutionary change is part of a real political horizon, but for whom that revolution is uniquely unrepresentable. If you take revolution seriously as a moment of total change, it follows that it is, concretely, beyond our conceptual horizon.
It’s the left wing version of the Singularity! (Vernor Vinge’s term for a moment of change in technology so overwhelming that we will be unable to imagine the consequences.)
I thought fantastic tools could examine that and that’s Iron Council. The love story is very important to me as well. I think it’s my most sentimental book, and I don’t say that as criticism.
I’m not sure I’m convinced that the fantastic can do things that mimetic fiction can’t. High modernism may not be mimetic entirely, but I wouldn’t count a lot of it as fantastical. We were talking about John Brunner earlier, but Stand on Zanzibar adopts the techniques of John Dos Passos to explore a future rather than modernity.
Well modernity is itself unrepresentable, a contradictory totality, you’re only going to represent one facet, not the contradictions, always omitting, or even lying. But I was talking specifically about revolution. Revolution is more specific, which is that for a radical writer, if you take revolution seriously, it will result in something radically new, including ourselves and if the result is so different and we are so different that we can’t think of it now.
OK, it’s like trying to imagine aliens. They end up being either cuttlefish or American Indians.
You can’t solve, but you can examine the problematic...
And your best book?
Objectively speaking, probably The City and The City, but it’s Iron Council that I’m proudest of.
