Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (2000): China Mieville's second novel takes us to the strange world of Bas-Lag and the strange, sprawling city of New Crobuzon. One could see Mieville as having gone back to the time before the genre divisions established by the commercial demands of publishing were in force, back to the early 20th century, when science fiction and science fantasy and dark fantasy were non-existent distinctions.
New Crobuzon, vast and London-like and filled with humans and a wide variety of other sentient species, is one of those places where both magic and science work. It's a crowded, vibrant place that combines elements of Dickensian London and steampunk. It's also a partial dystopia thanks to its ruthless ruling class. There's freedom in New Crobuzon right up until the point one makes trouble for the government. The secret police are everywhere, quashing unionization and making deals with organized crime.
Mieville has a density of imagination that crams Perdido Street Station with memorable characters, species, and events. The plot is pure entertainment, the outlines familiar: a plucky group of misfits must battle a terrible enemy. Mieville's attention to detail makes that familiar plot hum, though, and his wild imaginings make it sing. His socialist concerns also make for some scenes unusual to fantasy and science fiction -- celebrations of the working class, a protagonist who's an overweight intellectual, and a fascinating off-beat coda that both defies and rewards expectations.
Is there a tradition Mieville works within? To some extent, yes. A world of both science fiction and fantasy is the world of the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, among many others. Mieville's dense, often eclectic diction in concert with this mashed-up world of science and magic and the grotesque recalls the works of Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, Tim Powers, Michael Shea, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock.
But this is all Mieville's world, in the same way that The Lord of the Rings is both high fantasy and its own Tolkien genre, all its own. That's how it works with great writers: they're a genre of one. The characters are compelling, flawed, and occasionally heart-breaking. There are asides and references that suggest the vastness of the world Mieville has imagined. There are terrifically exciting sections, including a climax that goes on for about a hundred pages without losing either momentum or invention. There's sorrow as keen as anything, genre or otherwise. There's an awesome super-Spider and a terrified ambassador from Hell.
And there's a pack of truly terrible, superbly imagined monsters, set upon New Crobuzon in a manner which recalls so, so many real-world governmental perversities involving drugs, guns, organized crime, and a corrupt political system. This is neither a world with a Chosen One nor a rightful king. And the heavy lifting, with all its costs, will be done by beings excluded from the heights of society. Some of them may even otherwise be terrible, terrible people.
There are flaws, of course, piffling for the most part. My one larger complaint involves Mieville's need to keep throwing in new species and new sub-plots, a need which results in a bit of clutter in the middle section. A relatively lengthy bit pitting one truly odd species against the monsters of the novel is the apotheosis of this problem -- it advances the plot not one whit, and seems to be there because Mieville really, really wanted to introduce this cool, malevolent species and then pit it against the far more malevolent monsters.
In all, this is a great novel, regardless of genre. There's a keenness to it, even an anger at The Way Things Are Here, that nonetheless never becomes didactic, never detracts from the singularity of Mieville's fully realized, vibrant, awful Secondary World. Highly recommended.
Looking for Jake and Other Stories (2005) by China Mieville, containing the following stories:
"Foundation" (2003); "The Ball Room" (2005); "Reports of Certain Events in London" (2004); "Familiar" (2002); "Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia" (2005); "Details" (2002); "Go Between" (2005); "Different Skies" (1999); "An End to Hunger" (2000); "'Tis the Season" (2004); "Jack" (2005); "On the Way to the Front" (2005); and "The Tain" (2002).
The lessons we're supposed to learn from many of these stories are so up-front, so undigested into narrative form, that Mieville sometimes seems to be earnestly auditioning for a socialist Twilight Zone TV series. "The Monsters are Due in Buckingham Palace."
Mieville is a fine writer. At novel length, the message becomes part of the narrative, for the most part, and effectively so, at least in the four novels I've read. So, too, the post-modernist tic of foregrounding the artificiality of the story throughout the telling of that story, which can be an annoyance in the longer works, but a minor one.
Of the stories here, though, Mieville abandons both overt message and foregrounded artificiality only rarely. "Details," his much-reprinted story from an H.P. Lovecraft-themed anthology, is a brilliant piece of contemporary Cthulhu Mythos-making. Its settings and characters are grounded in the normative and the mundane; its implications are cosmic and disturbing. I also quite like "The Ball Room," which subtly weaves questions about racial identity and immigration and corporate ethics into a sharp, smart horror story.
Of the other stories, "Jack" works best if you've had some experience with the world of New Corbuzan, that epic-steampunk city of three of Mieville's novels. "The Tain" and "Looking for Jake" are both (intentionally) attenuated, elliptical tales of existential invasion by mysterious forces from Outside. London falls, and not the one in Ontario, Canada.
The rest are either funny and slight, grim and slight, or bleakly funny and slight. They almost remind me more of some of the more didactic short fiction of frequent Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont than anyone else -- Beaumont of "The Howling Man," punching you in the face with allegory, inexplicably made more subtle for Serling's TV version of the story. Uneven but recommended.
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (1952): Sometimes one forgets how much social critique there was in the works of quintessentially American, quintessentially Golden-Age-of-Science-Fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov. Asimov never attempted anything resembling complex literary style and his characterizations could often be rudimentary. It really didn't matter unless one or both of those things are deal-breakers for a reader: the ideas were the thing, sometimes developed, sometimes simply spun off on the way to another idea.
The Caves of Steel is a remarkably seminal version of what we'd now call a genre mash-up -- the mystery novel and the science-fiction novel. On a crowded and somewhat dystopian Earth of about 1100 years into the future, someone murders a roboticist visiting Earth from one of the long-self-emancipated colony worlds.
This murder is bad for a number of reasons, not least of which being that the colony worlds are far, far, far more technologically and militarily advanced than Earth. Many -- both Terran and sympathetic Spacer -- fear retaliatory invasion, even though 'Spacers' as they're called by Terrans really hate spending time on Earth or among Earth humans, whom they seem to regard as being diseased and unclean.
So the New York City police commissioner puts Elijah 'Lije' Bailey, C-5 level detective in the New York City Police Department (though New York City now occupies pretty much all of New York State and New Jersey as well) on the case. But he'll have to work with a Spacer detective. That detective is R. Daneel Olivaw. The 'R.' stands for 'Robot.'
Relatively primitive robots are being forced into the Earth work-force by the Spacers through pressure on the Earth's government, ostensibly to make the lives of Terrans better. Earth people tend to hate robots because they take people's jobs. But the Spacers have also refined robots over the centuries, relying on them as important parts of their relatively unpopulated worlds, making them in a wide variety of shapes and sizes -- including Olivaw's type, which can pass for human unless subjected to quite a bit of specialized scrutiny.
The commissioner trusts Bailey's tact and his detective skills. Bailey may dislike both Spacers and robots, but he's got an open mind -- for a Terran. So off go Bailey and Olivaw, to solve a crime with no apparent physical evidence. The mystery is pretty solid. Bailey makes some mistakes along the way, and we're treated to more than one pretty good explanation of what turns out to be faulty reasoning.
Was Asimov 'right' in his predictions? Well, probably not -- the assumptions made for why robots cannot kill human beings seem pretty ludicrous in the light of the last 60 years of computer evolution. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are an integral part of his long-lived robotic universe (by the time The Caves of Steel came out in 1953, Asimov had been writing about his Three Laws robots for more than a decade, and he'd keep writing about them until his death in 1992). They don't seem plausible now, at least in the sense that robots in Asimov's universe simply can't be programmed without the laws for reasons explained in the novel.
Asimov's hive-like, overpopulated Earth does seem a lot more plausible, especially after another 1100 years of resource usage. Asimov's future Earth lives on the constant edge of complete collapse due to resource exhaustion and an increasingly over-strained infrastructure. Earth has also undergone a sort of acculturated agoraphobia: human beings are afraid to go outside of the domed-in cities. So afraid that to Bailey, it seems reasonable to exclude the idea that a person could have walked across open land as part of the murder plot.
It's a lot of fun to see Asimov explore the sorts of social conventions that might arise after hundreds of years living in a quasi-communal mega-city. The gender conventions of public washroom behavior become important in a world where 95% of all people only have access to public washrooms (or 'Personals' as they're called in the novel). So, too, does importance attach to some of the games played by teenagers on the massive moving sidewalks that move people around New York (and every other mega-city). Bailey's memories sketch in the peculiar, over-populated homogeneity of the future Earth throughout the novel: one such memory involves a trip to the New York City zoo to see sparrows, cats, and dogs.
This Earth has been emptied out of almost everything that doesn't serve a purpose. The population's diet consists to a great extent of products made from a multitude of varieties of genetically engineered yeast. Petroleum has been exhausted. Uranium and other fissionable materials may soon be exhausted, as will coal. The powers that be discuss various forms of solar power, but no one has the will to build them. No one has the will to walk outside, much less the will to colonize new worlds or create and deploy new technologies.
There's a certain amount of serious thinking going on for a mystery novel -- about how civilizations fall, and about how their fall can be prevented. Both Earth and Spacer society need radical revision to survive. It's the robots that may be the key -- rational, cool-minded, and incapable of causing harm to humans. And Bailey and Olivaw would have more crime-solving to do. Highly recommended.
King Rat by China Mieville (1998): The prolific and gifted China Mieville's first novel is an urban fantasy that's about as subterranean and cloachal as they come. It's also a clever, subversive riff on that overused fantasy and science-fiction trope of The Chosen One and his Journey to Adventure.
Saul Garamond, a somewhat aimless 30-something living in London with his left-wing, widower father, wakes up to discover that his father has been murdered and that he's the prime suspect. The police lock him up. And then Something rescues him from lock-up and reveals his True Nature to him.
He's a rat.
In the universe of King Rat, the various animal species all have their avatars, avatars that can appear to be human but are ultimately (supernatural) animals. But Saul is a hybrid of rat and human, his lost mother a member of the Rat's ruling family. He's Prince Rat.
And so off Saul and King Rat go, with King Rat showing Saul a rat's eye view of London and Saul beginning to learn the powers and abilities he has as Prince Rat. Saul sometimes sees these abilities as super-powers, but they're not the sort of powers with which King Arthur or Luke Skywalker or Neo are blessed. Saul flourishes and gains strength by eating rotten food. He moves through the sewers and cracks of the city with ease. And being covered in muck and filth doesn't bother him -- indeed, he enjoys it.
King Rat has partial allies among the other animal kingdoms, though we meet only the bird and spider kings here. And all three have an Ancient Enemy who's come to London, and against whom they must unite or die. Saul is needed for the war, for reasons that are revealed about halfway through the text.
As a left-wing subversion of traditionally right-wing or conservative fantasy tropes, King Rat is a delight. It's a satisfying read with surprising shifts and turns, and an unusual protagonist in Saul Garamond. The Ancient Enemy's plan for world domination is off-beat but, given the Enemy's real identity, perfectly logical.
There are some problems -- Mieville's postmodern aversion to closure ends up looking a lot like a plan for a sequel, or at least a young writer's aversion to killing his darlings even when they need to be killed. But it's a grand, effluvium-covered adventure in any case. Recommended.
Dial H (Issues 0-15, JL 23.3): written by China Mieville; illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, Mateus Santolouco, and others (2012-2013): China Mieville's Dial H series for DC Comics would probably have lasted longer in the 1990's, when there was a certain commitment by DC to odd superhero books. In the second decade of the 21st century, it never really had a chance. But it was fun while it lasted, warts and all, as Mieville learned how to write comic books and the readers got to watch.
How odd was this series? Well, the two heroes are a 30-ish overweight man and a woman in her late 50's or early 60's. The villain is a Canadian. The Hero Dial, a concept from DC's Silver Age, works pretty much as it always did. You dial H-E-R-O and you become a different hero for a limited time every time you dial.
From this basic set-up, Mieville took off running with an exploration of how the dials work and where they come from. And even though cancellation came without much warning, the powers that be gave Mieville enough time to supply a mostly satisfying, though somewhat open-ended, wrap-up to what I would have marketed as the War of the Dials. Because by the end of the series, there were a lot of different dials (this a commentary on DC's recent obsession with there being a power ring for ever colour of the spectrum and more in the Green Lantern books). Dial to be a Sidekick. Dial for world-shattering Doom. And so on. And it's an analog Dial in a digital age. Why?
Mieville's characterization of his oddball (for superhero comic books, that is) protagonists was sympathetic and engaging, as was the depiction of the supporting characters who appeared throughout the series. If there were problems, they lay partially in Mieville's inexperience at writing comic books: the first few issues are a bit too murky in their proceedings, the engaging weirdness obscured by, well, just plain narrative weirdness and a bit too much off-putting narration from some deeply weird H-E-R-O characters.
Another problem lay in the choice of the first artist for the series, Mateus Santolouco. He's a lovely draftsman, but his storytelling sense wasn't all that strong (or Mieville was giving him odd instructions that he couldn't overcome). Alberto Ponticelli cleaned things up a lot when he came on-board, but the series might have benefitted from a bit more traditional, Silver-Agey grid-structure art. One of the things that made Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol (the DC book most like Dial H) so enjoyable in the early 1990's was that penciller Richard Case was a fairly straightforward storyteller. In some cases, the weirdness needs to be delivered 'straight,' especially weirdness in the post-modern Silver-Age school of metafictionally recursive superhero comics.
By the last few issues, Mieville and Ponticelli were really pretty much all there. Issue 13, in which one of the characters interacts with an alternate universe composed entirely of chalk drawings on walls, was the best single issue of the series, and a classic of post-modern superhero comics in any decade. I'd say it's the best single issue of any superhero comic book published in DC's mainstream New 52 line since that line started in autumn of 2011. It's a hell of a high point. No wonder the book got cancelled. Recommended.
Kraken: An Anatomy by China Mieville (2010): A wild romp from a writer who seems to have an IQ of about 200, Kraken is the best contemporary fantasy novel published in years. Allusive and metatextual, it also manages a thrilling plot, interesting characters, and some of the weirdest conspiracy theories ever floated. And the Church of Kraken Almighty, the decadent Chaos Nazis, the Londonmancers, the Gunfarmers, the London Embassy of the Sea, and two terrifyingly unpleasant guns-for-hire, the seemingly unkillable Goss and Subby.
Billy Harrow, a biologist working at the Darwin Centre at the British Museum in London, England, takes a regularly scheduled tour group into the centre's largest public-display preservation room to see the Centre's crown jewel -- a 40-foot-long giant squid preserved in a giant bottle (this is really there in our world, by the way, if you're in England and want to see a giant squid).
But the squid isn't there, bottle or otherwise. And then a dead body shows up impossibly jammed inside a smaller bottle. And then all Hell breaks loose. Or Heaven. Or Judgment Day. All of it revolving around that lost squid. For squids are baby gods. To the Church of Kraken Almighty, anyway. And with faiths and religions and beliefs overlapping and struggling for supremacy, the God in a Bottle becomes the McGuffin everyone is chasing.
Soon Billy is caught up in a struggle to either cause the End of the World or prevent it, depending on what side one is on. For London is the city of both gods and cults, with magic bubbling away just beneath the surface, a fragile ceasefire now broken as various groups -- including a special police division meant to deal with magical doings -- start to stake their claims on Doomsday. And everyone agrees that Billy Harrow has some major part to play.
Oh, and the familiars are on strike for better pay and working conditions, led by their ancient Egyptian union leader Wati, the spirit of an emancipated ancient Egyptian tomb-statue created to serve the mummified dead in the afterlife. And Wati's one of the more normal characters.
Mieville balances comedy with horror and drama here, one of the more difficult feats a writer can pull off. The result vaguely resembles a Douglas Adams novel, only much smarter and with actual emotional depth among the weirdness.
The allusions and references and intertexts come quickly and in great profusion throughout, adding to one's appreciation of Mieville's giant and eccentric brain (a late Phil Collins reference really kills). The precognitive mystics all agree -- if things go the wrong way, the universe will not only cease to exist: it will cease to have ever existed. Highly recommended.
