perfidy

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

Why is fiction that's not set in the "real world" dismissed as "mere" genre fiction? (Minister Buckethead, please excuse the use of scare quotes. I mean them in this case to point up the silliness of calling the world that is described in any book as real, and the silliness of dismissing a book about crime as less worthy than other books merely because you are axiomatically predisposed to dub such a book 'crime fiction.' In the first case, the map is never the territory. In the second, Raymond @#!?%ing Chandler. Q.E.D.)

China Mieville, a Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics, seems to be obessed with being original. If not obsessed, it still is certainly a main goal. With PSS he has created a world and a city, New Crubozon, that manages not to recall any prior fantasy/sci-fi setting particularly strongly. Writing ostensibly in the niche genre of "steam-punk," which seeks to fuse Victorian-era technology with new-school Science Fiction style (a la Gibson/Sterling), he convincingly brings across the history of New Crubozon and the cultures of the various races that inhabit it, fusing magic and technology and good old storytelling into a fairly grand whole. Mievelle says, "Two untrue things are commonly claimed about fantasy. The first is that fantasy and science fiction are fundamentally different genres. The second is that fantasy is crap." This statement may as well stand as a manifesto for all three novels set in the world of New Crubozon.

There are some things Mieville does very well. He has an eye for the grotesque. His invention of the "Remade," people who through magic have been punished to fit the crime they have committed, is a shining example. (People whose lower bodies are steam-powered machines who must continually feed their boilers with coal lest they die. People whose hands have been replaced with tentacles.) New Crubozon is a grubby, filthy city that feels actually lived in by its fictional residents. Mieville also knows how to move a story along and juggle multiple lines. Although PSS is only his second novel, and he still has trouble with pacing from time to time, he is better at finding a balance than many better known authors. Mieville also has a gift for metaphor, making extended riffs on trash and detritus, body and self, and the relationship between New Crubozon's residents and the patchwork of the city itself (the villain Mr. Motley brings all these threads together into one).

However, his relative youth as an author works against him. From time to time it seems as if Mieville's not writing a novel, but a 700-page script treatment. How else to explain the scene when the police blow up the printing press for the dissident newspaper the Runagate Rampant along with the aging automation that cranks it? The action stops for several paragraphs as we follow the automaton's head through the air and back down to the cobblestones of the city. What surely sounded like a poignant postscript in Mieville's head reads like a Michael Bay film on the page. His nose for the original sometimes leads him into cliche.

The folks at Crooked Timber did a seminar on Mieville a few months ago that's worth a read (spoiler alert). Although I think I may soon get tired of Mieville's heavy, rich prose and don't expect I'll wait for his latest work like I do for Dan Simmons or Neal Stephenson, he has a unique voice and style and the intelligence and imagination to convincingly update the shopworn tropes of sci-fi and fantasy. Just don't call it genre fiction.