Review: The City and the City by China Mieville

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

Since the book is coming out in about a month (May 26th), I’ll go ahead and post my review, based on an Advance Reader’s Edition.

Liminality, interstitially, hybridity. Whatever you call it, it’s one of China Mieville’s biggest leitmotifs, and in The City and the City, it is that hybridity and liminality which provides the speculative question and driving narrative force of the novel. Beszel and Ul Qoma are doppelganger cities, existing in the same space in vaguely-defined eastern Europe, but they are not one city, but two. Crossing between the crosshatched cities is ontological 1984-style offense called Breach. Beszel keeps to Beszel, Ul Qoma to Ul Qoma. And in rare cases, when people or things cross between the two interlinked cities, Breach occurs, summoning Boogeymen to reinforce the urban apartheid.

Investigator Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad finds himself working the murder case of an anonymous woman, a Fulana Detail as they are called in the city of Beszel. As he digs into the case, the details of her life and her death tie Investigator Borlu into the intricate history and politics of the doppelganger cities.

Mieville’s experience as an academic and an economist student of international law come to the forefront in The City and the City, as the book follows Borlu through the world of academia, rendered with the petty politicking, insularity and competition that shows he’s lived it. In addition politics of national identity and an awareness of international economic, cultural, and political maneuvering elevate the novel above the mundanity of Yet Another Homicide Procedural.

Because The City and the City is in fact a crime procedural, drawing just as much on the literary tradition of Raymond Chandler as Phillip K. Dick or George Orwell. The hybridity of the novel extends to the level of genre as well. From a genre standpoint, it combines Urban Fantasy, Dystopian SF, and Noir Crime Procedurals. Just as his Bas-Lag works Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council served as the lightning rod pieces of the New Weird movement, combining Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, and Pulp aesthetics, The City and the City freely combines ideas and genre modes to produce its own mélange. It’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, but in a larger genre sense, belonging in the company of noir detectives. It’s a work of urban speculative fiction that has more in common with works like Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files than some of the work of his New Weird contemporaries K.J. Bishop or Jeff VanderMeer.

While Mieville’s work has been sometimes criticized for being unfocused, or overbearing in its use of language, The City and the City shows Mieville pushing himself in craft of language as well as in genre. The work still shows Mieville’s loving attention to culture, to the organic nature of cities and their lives, and world-building in general. However, the fact that Beszel and Ul Qoma exist in our world means that the strangeness exists in contrast to a more familiar baseline. Here, Mieville’s prose is more transparent and accessible, akin to in his YA Un Lun Dun, but clearly adult in its content and execution. The novel is paced more aggressively than many of his works, only occasionally lingering a beat too long on a cultural/historical/economic note before returning to the action.

The interconnected nature of the cities suffuses the entire world of The City and the City, it is stitched into the worldview of the inhabitants of both cities, a double-think that is not recent but the result of many years of history, dating back to centuries before as a result of the Cleavage, an event which either split the cities apart or brought them together, depending on which historian you asked, and if they were being watched at the time.

Since Beszel and Ul Qoma exist in the same space, anyone who lives in either city must learn an intricate process of seeing and unseeing. A person in Beszel must be able to see what goes on in their city, but they must also unsee what happens in Ul Qoma. A driver must unsee the Ul Qoman car coming right at her, but will still swerve to get out of its way. Unseeing is meant to be unconscious, keeping the other city in the peripherary, just aware enough to stay safe, while never fully acknowledging the other city, maintaining the metaphysical distinction between the cities. Children must learn to see and unsee as they grow up, learn to identify and distinguish an Ul Qoman design from a Besz one, unsee certain color shades reserved for one city and not the other, and more. Immigrants and visitors are subject to a several-week acculturation course, wherein the distinctions are ground into their head, and a respect and understanding for Breach instilled in them.

Breach is the big-brother-like mysterious entity/organization which polices the places in the city which are crosshatched, fully extant in both cities, where the boundaries are weaker – a careless person walking down a crosshatched street could walk in from Beszel and walk out Ul Qoma, committing Breach. People in the two cities are always self-editing, self-aware of their own perceptions, asking “Should I be seeing that person, or unseeing them?” The categorical doubt of perception, the internalization of the panopticon of Breach, shows Mieville’s critical theory background making itself known in the work itself, calling upon the dystopian mode of literature.

The City and the City is similar to Mieville’s other works in his inventive and generative combination of genres (the New Weird is alive and well, but always changing, always evolving), but distinct from Mieville’s other works in several other ways, most notable being the lack of a clear socialist bent and a lack of focus on the aesthetic of the grotesque.

The City and the City still manifests aspects of the New Weird, but in a different inflection. The novel is just one of the countless ways to approach and implement the ideas and conventions that have been connected by writers and critics. It crosses over with ideas that Mieville has considered in his shorter works, most notably his novella The Tain and the title story of his short-story collection, Looking for Jake. Familiar, contemporary cities made strange through inexplicable metaphysical change, a sense of searching and longing, the quest for understanding resisted by the city itself.

On the other hand, the book shies away from the explicit arguments for/discussions of socialism which are prevalent in his Bas-Lag works, most notably Iron Council. The protagonists’ critique of the governmental systems of Beszel and Ul Qoma are not on matters of economics, capitalism vs. socialism, but on the ideological insistence on a violently-maintained distinction between the cities, as well as the commonplace distaste for red-tape and bureaucracy (what you’d expect to see in any procedural crime work).

The aesthetic of the grotesque, so present and central in many of his works, another of the signature aspects of Mieville’s style, is mostly absent in The City and the City. There are no Remade, no slake-moths or impossible bodies, no Cacotopic Stains. The city crossover takes some of those ideas at a different angle, but it is never depicted in the loving and disgustingly provocative language that accompanies Mieville’s use of the grotesque.

The City and the City is much more akin to the kinds of speculative fictions that posit one novum, one distinction between the world of the story and our own, then explores the possibilities and results of that change. Rather than a wholly-foreign world like Bas-Lag or the weird Mirror-London of Un Lun Dun, The City and the City takes the Beszel/Ul Qoma duality and runs with it, using Investigator Borlu as its agent to dig into the connections and overlaps between the city as part of his investigation into his Fulana Detail.

Accessible to readers familiar with mystery but not fantasy, or vice a versa, The City and the City is a departure for Mieville, but a welcome one. He carries lessons learned from his earlier works and provides a tightly-paced novel which is easily read as a crime procedural, a work of metaphysical archaeology, political commentary, an urban fantasy, and more. Mieville fans who yearn for his socialist argumentation and inventive use of the aesthetic mode of the abject and the grotesque may not be as pleased, but Mieville’s lush use of language and detailed world-building maintain much of what we have grown to know and expect of Mieville. I hope that he continues his trend of branching out and expanding his range, applying his critical eye and skill to many combinations of genres for many different audiences.

The City and the City by China Mieville will be released on May 26th by Del Rey.

Review — Coraline (film)

Posted on February 14, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

Coraline is adapted from the Hugo-winning Neil Gaiman novella (illustrated by Dave McKean) and directed by Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. It is advertised as the first stop-motion film created for 3-D.

The voice acting is strong, meshing well with the character modeling chosen for the film version. The film makes a few changes from the novella, most notably in adding a companion character for Coraline, Wybie Lovat. Wybie provides some exposition that contextualizes the events at the house, and is part of the film adaptation’s efforts to flesh out the story into a shapen and scope that fits the medium and the time (111 minutes).

If you don’t know the novella, here’s a short synopsis:

Coraline Jones is an inquisitive, curious explorer of a nine year old girl. She and her family have moved into an apartment in an old house in the country, but is ignored by her parents, who are both writers. In the film, her parents are up against a deadline, which accounts for their distaction.

After exploring the house and the environs, she finds, inside the house, a door to nowhere. The door leads to a mirror of her apartment, but with her ‘Other Mother,’ who looks the same except for black buttons as her eyes. As Coraline’s visits to the world of the Other Mother continue, the wonderous turns to the delightfully creepy, as Selick and his team build on Gaiman’s surrealist vision to deliver a story that is tight, symbolicaly rich but never confusing.

To speak more about the voice talent — Dakota Fanning gives the right balance of youth, curiosity and spunk for Coraline, Teri Hatcher plays from distracted to warm to terrifying as the Mother/Other Mother, and John Hodgeman puts in a great supporting performance as the Father/Other Father.

Coraline is one of a sadly few film adaptations of novels/textual works where the adaptation both adds to the original work while doing justice to its source material. Selick’s film Coraline gives a visual/auditory experience which enriches the textual experience of Gaiman (and McKean, if you have the illustrations)’s novella. A viewer can easily appreciate the film version without having read the book, as did my sister.

The film is currently playing in 3-D for a limited time, and I highly recommend that everyone take the chance to see it in 3-D. Unlike “Chuck vs. The Third Dimension,” Coraline makes striking use of the 3-D technology, enhancing critical emotional moments and providing texture for the film. The 3-D provides a depth of field, makes the high-emotion moments ‘pop,’ and creates an overall more visceral experience.

MFA Poet turned SF writer’s ‘Apology’ for going genre.

Posted on January 24, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

i09 linked to an essay by Science Fiction writer Alan DeNiro (who has an MFA in poetry), titled “Why I Write Science Fiction: An Apology.”

The essay itself is hosted at Bookspot Central.

Read both of those? Great. Here’s some analysis of the essay and the i09 commentary.

DeNiro’s MFA means that he has a serving of alphabet soup that serves as cultural capital in the ‘literary’ fiction world. But he’s also a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop (sister-workshop to the Clarion West Writers Workshop, of which I am a graduate), which grants him cultural capital in the speculative fiction world. DeNiro is a crossover writer, and by his own admission, writes in a mode that might be more accurately described as slipstream or interstitial. But he’s identifying as a science fiction writer, which means he’s on my radar.

Landscape as character — DeNiro talks about how in sf, landscape acts as a character unto itself. It does, sometimes literally as he says, but also figuratively. But setting/landscape is a character in any kind of fiction. Setting is, however, one of the major tools for commentary/speculation in fiction, often and sometimes expertly-used in science fiction/fantasy/horror/speculative fiction. The setting of Battlestar Galactica is clearly speculative, and much of the story’s drama comes out of the cultural, historical, and technological differences between that setting and our own world. But in another way, the stories of Battlestar are very familiar.

Literalization of the metaphor — The i09 article gives credit to DeNiro as follows:

[DeNiro] sets out a few building blocks of a new theory of appreciating science fiction. For example, he talks about the way in which science fiction turns the metaphorical into the real, and allows the author’s observations to become more vivid or heightened

The idea of SF as a literalization of the metaphor is not new to DeNiro. Samuel R. Delaney established years ago that SF allows for the literalization of the metaphorical, and thus, that critical tool is already established in the SF scholarship community. It is a valuable one, but not one new to DeNiro, though Delaney is already a member of the SF community embraced by the Academy.

DeNiro references Ursula LeGuin (another Literarily-accepted SF writer), who in an introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness said “I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing.” — SF does not need to predict the future when it can comment on the present. Not all SF is written to that intent, but the conventions and possibilities of the genre allow for writers to bring in any number of strange elements to contextualize a story, create a setting, and create a narrative environment that allows for a persuasive and entertaining commentary on the world we live in.

Suvin and Cognitive Estrangement

SF critic Darko Suvin spoke of science fiction as a genre of cognitive estrangement. The difference between our world and the world(s) of Battlestar would be part of the estrangement, but it is matched, tempered by the commonalities, identifiable by cognition.

This interplay between cognition and estrangement can be seen as a continuum, with Cognition/Similarity on one end and Estrangement/Difference on the other. A story could be plotted on this continuum, identifying the balance between elements/aspects of the setting/story that are similar to our own experience and those which produce estrangement as we reach across a cognitive gap to understand those differences.

Some SF shows are more familiar/close to our own setting, things like the comic DMZ, Y: The Last Man, or PD James’ Children of Men. Those kind of narratives make one extrapolation from our world and then examines the social/political/etc. results of a world with that change. The audience is only asked to swallow one new thing (or Novum), be it a new American civil war, the end of human fertility, or a virus that kills male mammals. The degree of estrangement is low, and readers can easily identify with the world (Much more Cognition than Estrangement)

On the other end are narratives where a great number of things are different, and readers cling to the elements that are the same as a way to understand that world. This would cover New Weird stories like China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, Jeff VenderMeer’s The City of Saints and Madmen, Post-Modern genre re-combinations like Astro City, etc. In these worlds, the reader is asked to believe a great many things to immerse themselves in the story, like a world with a handful of unknown non-human species, magical-technological transmogrification as a tool of punishment, dream-eating monsters, etc. (Much more Estrangement than Cognition) With High-Estrangement stories, the New Things (Nova) in the world create a mood and establish thematics, enter into a dialogue with established genre tropes, and more. High-Estrangement stories can provide a high barrier to entry for readers, often requiring a wide knowledge of genre tropes to fully understand what is going on in a story.

The genre label of science fiction or speculative fiction applies to stories from throughout this continuum. Stories with less Estrangement and more Cognition tend to be those more recognized by the Literary Establishment as Real Literature (Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union). This seems to be the kind of SF that DeNiro himself writes. DeNiro also acknowledges the fact that valorizing one sub-section of fiction over others is foolish, but for all that DeNiro admits having ‘gone genre’, he seems to be more in the slipstream/magic realism area.

More important to me is the fact that the title of the essay is still ‘An Apology,’ assuming that one must apologize for writing speculative fiction if one is to maintain Literary Cred. For all that SF has gained in recognition from the Academy, the acceptance seems to thus far extend mostly to the ‘more realistic’ High-Cognition, Low-Estrangement parts of SF.

I’m glad that writers are identifying the literary and ideological possibilities of SF, and pointing out that ‘realistic fiction’ is a oxymoron. Each genre of fiction has its own qualities, possibilities and limitations, just as do genres of music, graphic art, dance, and more. It is again telling though, that in this case DeNiro feels he must ‘apologise’ for it, though I agree with him in hoping that in a few decades or less, no one will have to apologise for choosing to write within any genre.

Review: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Posted on January 3, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

Young Reader fiction has the distinct advantage of trending towards short. This facilitates marathon-style reading, which is one of the great literary pleasures. The speed at which I breezed through the novel is also a testament to the book’s readability.

The Lightning Thief arrived in 2005, and is the first in an ongoing series (three books in the series are available already, with the fourth arriving in May of 2009.

The series’ hero is Perseus “Percy” Jackson, a 12-year old son of an Olympian God (the identity of said god is revealed in the book, but does constitute a notable spoiler) who joins other Half-God children at a camp/training ground for demigod children. His heroic companions (because that’s how heroes roll) are Grover Underwood (no relation), an earnest but clumsy satyr, and Annabeth Chase, brainiac daughter of Athena. Percy is impetuous (a good plot device, and explained as being part of his divine heritage), but he is also fiercely loyal to his mother, which provides much of the other motivation for Percy’s actions in the book.

Riordan shows a great faculty for bringing the Greek myths to life in new ways, re-casting the Furies, Medusa, Procrustes, and more into a contemporary context. He has a decent excuse for moving the pantheon to America, and provides the best sourcebooks/inspiration for White Wolf’s Scion that I’ve seen so far.

The whole book has the feel of Bronze Age, 21st century-style. Young readers coming to the book with only a vague background in classics will be able to learn the history through an accessible lens, as Riordan gives various mythological figures’ original stories to contrast their contemporary incarnations. Riordan’s re-interpretations are clever, if not brilliant, and there’s a great sense of fun to the whole book which goes hand-in-hand with Percy’s age and the old saying that the real Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve.

It’s a quick read, and if you’re a Classics Geek at all, it’s certainly worth your (short) time. I’m looking forward to the later books, but there’s a Mieville ARC on my counter that demands my attention.

Legend of the Seeker

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Michael R. Underwood

Disclaimer — I have not read any of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I have heard a variety of opinions from friends and colleagues about the series, and have not put them on my reading list as of yet. My reactions are almost entirely to the TV series independent of the books on which it is based.

There’s not much new action-adventure fantasy on TV right now, and even less of it syndicated. This is a lack which Sam Raimi and fellow Executive Producers Robert Tapert, Joshua Donen, Ned Nalle and Kenneth Biller realized and decided to capitalize upon. In adapting Terry Goodkind’s best-selling Sword of Truth series, Raimi and Co. have sought to re-capture Raimi’s cult success of Hercules: The Legendary Journies and Xena: Warrior Princess (among others like Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of All Trades).

First-run syndication has not been in the spotlight of late, such that Legend of the Seeker was notable to media critics as the series approached for the syndication as well as its media-tie-in nature. The series broadcasts on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, outside of the Weekday Primetime paradigm, but with TiVo and DVR, the specific broadcast time of weekly television is far less relevant to technologically empowered viewers. Ratings expectations are lower for syndicated shows, allowing for shows that might not survive in the current TV world.

And now to the show itself:

As mentioned above, I’ve not read Goodkind’s books. The TV series is very familiar from the beginning. A prophesied hero is found by a beautiful female magic-user, who join with a powerful but cranky old wizard to overthrow an evil tyrant. There’s not really anything fresh being done from the perspective of the fantasy genre as a dialogue. The show thusfar seems mostly bereft of the BDSM and Objectivist elements identified in the novel series. This goes a long way towards making The Legend of the Seeker more palatable to a mainstream audience, but perhaps also removes most of the originality and freshness which the novels had to offer as source material.

Now well into the first season, the show centers around Richard Cypher (played by Craig Horner), who has been identified as a True Seeker (the first in a thousand years), and his travels with Kahlan Amnell (Bridget Regan), a Confessor (capable of making people fall in love with her so as to do her bidding — there’s some BDSM, so it’s not all gone), and wizard Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander (Bruce Spence). They face evil-of-the-week in villages and towns across the Midlands, and Richard grows into his role as the Seeker, while developing a forbidden love for Confessor Kahlan. Slow-motion beats in combat are prominent in the series, as the fighting slows down for notable choreagraphies, then returns to normal pace, then slows again.

The series could be spoken of as pursuing the aesthetic of awesome over others, but it is also clearly trying to return to the well of The Lord of the Rings and other popular adventure fantasies over the history of the genre. Individual episodes like “Elixer” and “Identity” have provided interesting narrative hooks, like a town where people have become addicted to using magic to solve their problems, and the ever-present body-swap episode.

Legend of the Seeker is far from the level of Most Repeatable Programming along the lines of shows such as Lost or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but if you’re feeling a lack of fantasy adventure in your TV life, then Legend of the Seeker may be worth your time. Bring popcorn, and leave your high standards somewhere else.