China Miéville

Step through the looking-glass and where do you go? Inherently, every text exposes the reader to other worlds. However, the fantastic, like no other mode, not only exposes, but explores, explains, and employs other worlds (and how we enter them) to question what is real and unreal, possible and impossible.

Música que é tantas vezes destruída na selva e recordou o house doce e alguns clubes mudos em Ibiza, é aqui transformado em um instrumento musical, que proclamou a destruição de qualquer ser humano neste mundo. (Miéville 1998) Cyberpunk incendiar ficção em intensidade, que consiste de fluxo de caixa mutilado, technocompresado, a voz de diversos jargões e colocado tanto no futuro próximo para se conectar: selvada da comercialização hipertrófica, a morte de calor sócio-política, hibridismo cultural, feminização, sistemas programáveis, hipercrime, conectividade neural através de uma interface, inteligência artificial e espaço, o comércio com a memória, os transplantes de personalidade, modificações corporais, vírus soft-e wetware, processos dinâmicos não-lineares, engenharia molecular, drogas, armas, esquizofrenia. (Land 2007) O romance de China Miéville King Rat (1998) gira os mitos de fundação de o flautista de Hamelin. Diz a lenda particularizei seu jogo percepção auditiva de espécies individuais e estabeleceu a necessidade de distinção ou-ou (matar crianças ou exterminacao dos ratos), enquanto particularizei como seu lugar de enunciação, quando escreveu lugar Hamelin ou foi falado pela boca de seus pais quando eles essas crianças estão cantando uma canção de ninar. Assobiando de Mieville esta o êxtase apocalíptica da música, onde a intensificação máxima de elec-engenharia acelera até (Land 2007) "iminente extinção da humanidade torna-se acessível como um piso clube de dança." Universalizada univocalidade tal unanimidade que através Duns Scotus e Deleuze no plano de imanência se conectar com antiderrapante sinal de igual, carrapato, que é Deus, que é o banco, onde "uma só voz afirmou gritando para ser" ecoa através de técnicas de amostragem modernos. A ativação de faixas de áudio multitrilhado multiplicado melodias a tal ponto que o flautista de Hamelin não é mais apenas a lenda de partículas e sua execução propriamente dita, mas vestindo a coroa de toda a criação. (Beep torna-se inadmissível na sua totalidade.) DAT e os últimos tiros assobiando pelo DJ gira ao mesmo tempo, levar a meia-ratinho meia-hominídeo que um traço indivíduo não afetam, a lógica descritiva por alguns momentos não funciona mais. Há uma queda na cara, o que é mais do que isso. O rosto é singular-onde este é um ponto singular do excesso, uma rara e encadernação-plano de prazo para o tipo mais refinado, que é mais forte do que os outros sistemas de marcação. Ou "sem rosto esta nada." O rosto é a primeira e mais importante materialidade. Cristo pregado na cruz e sinal sonoro, que beep sob ele. Como Spinoza diz: Facius totius universi. (A face do mundo inteiro.) A face do sofrimento monitora duplicado aleijado artaudiano. No auge da luta, quando o Alarme apenas a poucos passos de distância de vitória total dentro de melodias contrapontísticos ocorrer dissonância, que para o momento suspenso de flautista e univocalidade e pulverizado até que seja meia-ratinho meia-hominídeo na corrida final não está superada, e desaparece de volta em sua particularidade: em Hamelin. Pode também: na não-espaço. Com a agricultura veio há mais padrões de assentamento permanente e mais estruturas de poder formal, bem como a crescente consolidação dos perímetros da cidade e círculos concêntricos em torno do não-espaço

THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS by China Miéville awakens our sense of wonder with the explosion of imagery, of erudition, and of poetry that the book contains. The novella embodies what it describes: the surrealist Resistance to the Nazi occupation of Paris has led to the creation of a surrealist bomb, whose explosion produces an "S-Blast" that has liberated a myriad of "manifestations", impossible entities freed from surrealist painting and sculptures to wreak havoc on the Nazi occupying forces. It is at once a masterfully told story and an inspiring manifesto, an ode to the liberating power of poetic fantasy, and to the creations, and the lives, of those who are steeped in it. The poetry, the beauty, the freedom, and the adventure all recall the excitement one feels in reading Deleuze and Guattari's works and their "schizoanalytic" liberation of the unconscious. Michel Foucault in his preface to their book ANTI-OEDIPUS declared that it could be characterised as an "introduction to the non-fascist life". This non-fascist formula of resistance and (self-)creation comes to life again in the pages of Miéville's THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS. This paper argues that Miéville's weird fantasy can be seen as a work of noetic estrangement, altering not only our cognitive premises but also our imaginative syntheses. Its weird ontology participates in a more general movement of overturning and immanentising Platonism in favour of an ontology of pluralist abundance.

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies. China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009) presents the city as a massively ramified ecosystem that comprises humans, other species, and objects, and is also embedded in larger systems like capitalism and environmental catastrophe. Cities are so deeply textured, and so continually scattered by the circulations of their component parts, that we cannot perceive them as a whole; the borders we use to define them are ultimately arbitrary. I argue that this perceptual disorientation, or aesthetic crisis, embodies the politics of the novel. Miéville depicts the continuous crises of urban existence—chemical spills, refugees seeking asylum, even a weed growing in the wrong place—as so many possibilities for metonymically grasping the larger ontological and political reality. Crisis does not entail a specific political (or artistic) response, however, since it can traumatize into complacency and xenophobia just as easily as expand one’s commitments. The same kind of aesthetic crisis is provoked by the novel itself, because it frustrates expectations and eludes a clear genre, and readers can respond in analogous ways: with the urge to impose allegorical meaning and genre borders, or with a more refined perceptual sense. Thus, the form of the novel cleverly reflects its content and, in both cases, we are pushed to renew our sense of wonder at the strange alterity that inheres in the familiar and proximal.

With this thesis I aim to problematize posthuman theory on its own terms. Rather than utilising the ideas set forth within theories on the posthuman, I assess the posthuman on the terms and conditions that the theory sets itself in an environment that sustains these terms and conditions. As posthumanism is a productive theory that challenges the cultural reality that “we” find ourselves in, what is needed is an investigation into the workings of posthumanism itself and into how it pursues the critique that it offers.

I predominantly use the definition of posthumanism provided by three of its most foundational texts. N. Katherine Hayles’, Donna Haraway’s, and Ira Livingston and Judith Halberstam’s texts sketch the posthuman as a figure that challenges cultural boundaries and demarcations of difference as a source of (dis)identification, and that attempts to overcome these demarcations. The challenge the posthuman poses to these boundaries calls for a re-evaluation of the human as a discrete and clearly demarcated entity.

To assess this challenge, I approach the posthuman in science fiction environments, so as to put the theory into practice. Science fiction, being a fertile ground for unbridled potential, as it is not “limited” in the sense that it must adhere to a perceived reality, offers the perfect environment in which to approach posthumanism. As such, I discuss the theme of merging characters in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Pat Cadigan’s Synners as a revelation of a posthuman teleology that, by its very existence, problematizes the definition of posthumanism because it exposes the posthuman as contingent on the demarcations that it sets out to transcend, and thus as sustaining the environment that it seeks to challenge.

Additionally, China Miéville’s The City & The City shows an intricate relationship with borders and cultural demarcations that is comparable to the one posthumanism holds. Through a reading of the role of Breach in this novel as upholding the border that exists between the two cities, what becomes apparent is a similarity to the manner in which posthumanism sustains the boundaries it transcends, which subscribes their existence and validity, as a condition of its own existence. Furthermore, the narrative of “becoming” Breach reveals that becoming posthuman inherently implies a narrative contingent on a temporal schism, which creates an inevitable time-based demarcation, contradicting posthumanism’s aim of transcending such a demarcation.

These readings expose that within posthumanism itself there exist three sites of inherent, paradoxal, friction. Given its definition as overcoming demarcations, posthumanism is shown to be contingent on demarcations to overcome. Furthermore, because the posthuman is defined as transcending boundaries, at the moment it transcends a boundary, the posthuman must, in order to remain posthuman, also sustain the boundary it transcends, because that boundary, and the transcension thereof, is what defines the posthuman. Finally, the narrative of becoming posthuman is shown to create boundaries where they were not before, simply by becoming posthuman and thus instating a moment that divides what precedes this moment from what follows, creating a temporal division.

This paper argues that the portal-quest fantasies written by Neil Gaiman and China Miéville — contemporary figures in the field interested in navigating its creative scope and established tropes — reorient this sub-genre towards a radical reconceptualisation of the portal and its uses via a self-aware methodology of iteration, satire, and suspicion. Taking up Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) and American Gods (2001) and Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) and King Rat (1998), it explores the form’s predilection for closed narrative loops, while offering a counter narrative that interrogates the status quo via critical figures like Farah Mendlesohn, China Miéville, Mikhail Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, and John Cawelti. Significantly, this paper suggests that, via self-conscious world-building, portal fantasies allow reader and writer the opportunity to inhabit those spaces between textual, ideological, generic, metaphorical, irrational, fantastic worlds.

This paper offers an analysis of the effect of the supernatural within the genre of the fictional document, how the artist (usually a writer, or filmmaker) reconciles the incorporation of the fantastic into a seemingly realistic medium and any resultant narrative disruption therein, and how the genre has
evolved during contemporary technological history to intricately simulate and also provide commentary on the various forms of media imitated.

This paper will argue that the fictional document is a prescient genre – often taking the form of official documents, video diaries, documentaries, or websites (sometimes devoid of context) - and how its shape as an objective 'artefact' differs from its more literary predecessors such as the frame story, the
discovered manuscript, and the epistolary, by foregrounding its authentic form first and then 'presenting' the supernatural through the form's befitting stylistic conventions and limitations.

By focussing in-depth on four specific texts (two works of literature: Robert Aickman's Pages From a Young Girl's Journal (1975) and China Miéville's Reports of Certain Events Around London (2005), and two two motions pictures: REC (2007) and Troll Hunter (2010)) this paper will present how the significance of supernatural phenomena, used metaphorically, can be utilised in multiple ways to alter and sometimes obscure any received narrative, causing the often pedestrian familiarity of the document's form to become uncanny and alienating. Such occurrences provide commentary not only on contemporary media-fixated concerns arising from taking mass information for granted (and any subsequent misunderstanding arising), but also the risks of desire for knowledge and clarification,
especially within the synthetic hyperreality of digital media, and the effect of assumptions and preconceptions in the pursuit of such understanding.

""UEA Thesis (2011)

In this thesis I draw upon recent formulations of fantasy theory, from Rosemary Jackson’s psychoanalytic analysis to the socio-historical approaches of José Monleon and Mark Bould, and the poetics of fantasy literature of Farah Mendlesohn, to illuminate the interlocking political debates about fantasy fiction which are important to literary theory: whether fantasy is a minor sub-set of literature or the basis of all fiction; whether fantasy functions primarily as a satirical or utopian idiom, or as sheer escapism; and whether fantasy is a liberating expression of the imagination or a limiting and commodified form. ""

The full thesis can be downloaded via the UEA Digital Repository: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/19302.

This is an extract from Chapter 1 of Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity: Pratchett, Pullman Mieville and Stories of the Eye (Rodopi, 2014).

"The books are true while reality is lying..." Championing the popular Fantasy genre on the same terms as its readers, Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity casts a critical eye over the substance and methods of political critique in the Fantasy novels of Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman and China Miéville. Ranging across subjects as diverse as exquisite fundamentalism and revolutionary trains, encountering pervert-priests, dwarf hermaphrodites and sex-scarred lovers and pondering the homicidal tendencies of fairy tales and opera, Rayment develops a theoretically wide-ranging and illuminating account of how the novels of these writers do and do not sustain politically insightful critique of the real world, while bringing intellectual and ethical concerns to bear on the popular Fantasy form.

Course on the development of contemporary genre from the Gothic to Science Fiction and Fantasy, concluding with the appearance of the New Weird and the post-New Weird moment. 

This course will begin from the premise of Brian Aldiss' seminal critical works Billion Year Spree and Trillion Year Spree that we can trace a direct line of descent from the Gothic fictions of the eighteenth century into the Science Fiction and Fantasy of the twentieth by beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It will encourage students to engage with the stylistic and conceptual content of the Gothic through extracts from key Gothic texts, and move forward to show how this informs the development of what become the tap-root texts of the Science Fiction and Fantasy canons. The texts under consideration will take us from the early 1800s to the contemporary moment, to undertake contextual exploration of historical genres and examine what they mean to us today. They will also help us to understand how contemporary writers employ diverse of the stylistic and conceptual elements of the forms Gothic, Science Fiction and Fantasy to new political and aesthetic ends in the contemporary world, through humour, irony and the transformation of earlier formulations of the fantastic such as the Weird.

This thesis investigates the limitations and capacities of genres of the fantastic in their ability to represent the “break” between agency and structure, specifically the transformation of the former into the latter on the scale of radical social and political change. The transformation of utopian impulse to utopian programme is traditionally understood to present a representational impossibility—a “break”—and to require a shift into a less rigorous fantastic or magical representational register. This thesis considers this apparent impossibility to be a product of an ontology of atomised individualism that informs texts from mainstream Hollywood blockbusters to more putatively radical works of literature. It argues that these representations of agency, conceptually limited to individual action, occlude the reality and possibility of communal political agency. This thesis takes contemporary neoliberalism’s transformation of social structures and subjectivities to be driving this specific limiting effect on the ability to imagine alternative patterns of social relations and on the scope and potential of the imagination as such. Beginning with the development of a new political theoretical approach to fantastic literature, this thesis seeks to identify, through a series of close readings, the mechanisms by which this ideological work is performed by sf and fantasy texts, and then seeks to identify alternative representational techniques and strategies that overcome these limitations, allowing the societal imagination to think communal political agency, and move beyond the imaginative confines of the neoliberal horizon. Culminating in the work of China Miéville, this thesis finds that the effort to represent the “break” requires techniques and tropes taken from various genres, in order to capture the becoming—the producing and being-produced—of the world, of social structures, of communities and of subjectivities. The resulting literature has the potential to recruit the reader into occupying a position of radical, critical subjectivity—one which not only understands the malleable, constructed nature of social reality, but understands their own part in its reproduction, and the potential they wield, along with others, to alter it.

Although Wolfgang Iser is one of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century, there is no authoritative study about his oeuvre. The present work remedies that problem by analysing Iser’s German and English writings in detail. Apart from being the first comprehensive account of his work, this study also modifies the established view of Iser’s theory. In contrast to the idea that his only contribution to literary studies is the reception theory of the 1970s, this account demonstrates the importance of Iser’s work on history and anthropology from the 1950s and 1990s. Instead of exclusively focusing on familiar terms such as ‘indeterminacy’, this analysis also discusses Iser’s view of modernity, fiction and culture. As this discussion shows, his writings develop a consistent theory of the novel and the way in which it allows its readers to articulate new views of reality. To situate this theory, Iser’s institutional and intellectual background is described as well, paying special attention to the Poetik und Hermeneutik-circle and thinkers like Blumenberg and Kermode. The continued relevance of his theory is demonstrated via comparisons with recent research on the novel and memory as well as examples from contemporary novelists like Juli Zeh and Hilary Mantel.

In 2009, Paul Kincaid noted that the New Weird was an ill-defined and mostly British Isles authored genre of fantasist literature inhabited by the likes of China Miéville and Hal Duncan. At the same time, Nalo Hopkinson delivered a critique of the lack of racial diversity in speculative fiction at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts. This question of diversity has been directly addressed by, among others, Miéville who has, in addition, professed his dislike of gardens. Yet
the weird ecologies on show in his Bas-Lag trilogy show a kind of new materialist gardening of human beasts that realises the dangers that heteronomy brings to such diversity, from the punishments of the Re-Made to the social collectives of pirates and political renegades. This discussion offers a reading of how physical and political environments and their affects fold in upon one another in Miéville’s first trilogy.

Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity: Pratchett, Pullman, Miéville and Stories of the Eye addresses the substance and methods of political critique in the Fantasy novels of Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman and China Miéville. It seeks to develop a theoretically wide-ranging and illuminating account of how the novels of these writers do and do not sustain politically insightful critique of the real world, while bringing philosophical concerns to bear on the popular Fantasy form.
The book falls into two parts. The first develops the framework for and elaborates on the novelsʼ politically challenging and constructive engagement with the real world of our experience. I argue that these authors use their fantastic but fictionally real constructs to make us see our social reality differently, to see, in particular, how problematic various kinds of language, norms and social practices are. This new vision is achieved by means of a number of transformative operations that the Fantasy texts can carry out as they map their fantastic realities onto real-world practices and conceptions. In the second half of the book, however, I argue that the whole-hearted embrace of imaginative possibility undermines this politically insightful work, as Fantasy literature also tends towards excessive elaboration and self-absorption, following an imperative to ʻBe imaginative!ʼ without bounds. To the extent that this imperative is embraced, the novels not only lose their critically insightful relation to social reality but can even manifest ethically repulsive and destructive desires and forms of attention. Drawing on the work of a number of thinkers, including Žižek, Foucault, Todorov, Barthes, Baudrillard, Butler, Lacan, Lyotard and Freud, I theorize that the Janus-like structure on which Fantasy relies to create insight is the very structure that facilitates its self-disruption in moments of blindness.
This is not only the first book-length, academic work that champions these popular (yet scandalously undervalued and unattended to) Fantasy authors, but also the first academic work that champions the popular Fantasy genre on the same terms as its readers. Unlike other theorizers of ʻFantasyʼ, who take a broad, diachronic approach, I respect the current, popular understanding of what constitutes the Fantasy genre. Taking a synchronic approach, my book is the first to theorize Fantasy in its contemporary guise, and the first to champion the possibilities that Fantasy, understood in these narrow, reader-led terms, has to offer. I strongly dispute the academic consensus that ʻFantasyʼ can only be recuperated through its re-invention as a broad label for any text that includes fantastic elements (a re-invention that allows its cynical appellation to canonical works) and regard it as highly patronizing that academics see it as a term that must be ʻsavedʼ from its popular definition.

Course Description:

Science fiction studies boasts a long tradition of engaging with and contributing to contemporary literary theory. Fantasy studies, by contrast, has seen comparative neglect within the same range of theoretical approaches, despite the potentially broader remit of the fantastic itself. This course will introduce you to some of the major works of fantasy theory from the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st, as we interrogate this history of neglect and begin to pursue our own theorizations of the fantastic. Is fantasy really “under-theorized”? Do certain bodies of critical theory work with fantasy particularly well, or especially reward expansion of their own traditional scope to include more fantastic texts? What can fantasy studies learn from theory, and theory learn from fantasy studies? Fantasy novelists to be considered include Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Octavia Butler, China Miéville, and Nnedi Okorafor. We will also be reading the two most influential monographs theorizing genre fantasy itself, but, additionally, each student will deliver a class presentation on a chosen school or area of critical theory -- or perhaps major theorist -- that will speculate on some potential applications to fantasy studies.

Presented in part fulfilment for the degree of BA(Hons) English

We are firmly locked in the realms of catastrophe. Extrapolations of the future are composite, yet limited to despair. Are we unable to envision a future as anything other than dystopian? Or more pressingly, are we able to conceive a future at all? Conrad McCarthy’s narrator in the award-winning novel, The Road, poignantly states: ‘there is no later. This is later.’ (McCarthy, 2009:56) - A statement that abolishes the comfort of being overlooked as solely residing in the realms of fiction. A collectively bleak forecast on the future is prominent in various forms of major discourse; so much so that Maria Puente, writing a review for the movie Never Let Me Go (2010) in USA Today, opted for the captivating title: ‘According to Sci-Fi Movies, the Future Isn’t Looking So Good’ - despite this particular film not depicting the future, but discerning its inclusion of the calamitous themes contaminating contemporary speculative fiction. It is this mode of thought that has led to pre-eminent contemporary critic Fredric Jameson titling his 1982 journal entry in Science Fiction Studies, ‘Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?’

This thesis explores the role of hope and belief in the aesthetic of dystopian fiction. This new genre, dragged under the heels through the 19th century wave of its utopian sister, achieved prominence in the 20th century. A framework in how characters find and exhibit hope in the fictional worlds, and how readers and viewers may extract hope from fiction is provided. An understanding of the mechanics of dystopian fiction and its societal function is fundamental to appreciating its effectiveness. Looking past dystopia’s nihilistic and horrifying evocation as superficial, I am mainly focused on its potential for revealing the conditions of the present and the steps that must be taken to avoid despair. In other words, I want to extract elements of hope in dystopia, adhering to the Jamesonian dialectic. To finalise this section the essence of my thesis is outlined—what must be acknowledged is the monumental quality that hope has in the aesthetic overall. In all its forms, hope is the sine qua non of dystopia. If we are to extrapolate anything from the stubbornness of the utopian impulse, it is that mankind inherently pursues amelioration, comfort, and ultimately perfection, despite how futile and unattainable that may be. Leading science-fiction (hereafter SF) author and academic China Miéville insists, in his 2014 Nelson Institute Earth Day Conference speech, that “utopias are necessary” despite being “insufficient” and part of the deprecated ideologies that incorporate the “bad totality that organises us” (nelsoninstitute, 2014, 1:49-2:01). Therefore, as a pragmatic and truly dialectic approach that refutes the haunting unilateralism of conventional utopias, we are to turn to salvagepunk as the best mode of resistance to this epoch of catastrophe. Salvaging and re-purposing will allow us to recapture utopia under the colossal junk of capitalism’s throwaways and the residues of discarded utopias.

The entire system of International law exists primarily for the aims of world peace and security. But what do we mean by the concept of peace; what international society do we aim to sustain? Scholars have written extensively on the laws of war and use of force. However, the UN has never defined peace. Most commonly, peace is seen to be the absence of war; understood negatively and ambiguously. Thus, under International Law, war and the use of force are legalised under certain conditions, regulated through laws. Therefore, is violence legitimated by international law and if so, in which spaces does it permit such violence? 

Drawing on Critical Legal Studies the research theorises the notion of violence within the legal framework, specifically the demarcation of peace and war, to investigate why the story is told as such? Following, the research explores Mieville’s analysis of the commodity-form, the violence embedded within the Rule of Law. Thus, it draws on Clausewitz, Foucault and Kennedy to suggest that law is the continuation of war by other means. Through an analysis of post-conflict studies, it examines the peace agenda as liberalisation of fiscal policies- the imposition of liberal economics and liberal ideology- thus suggests the perversion of peace under international law.

Set in a post-apocalyptic land devoid of life and littered with refuse, China Miéville’s Railsea (2012) provides a dystopian image of late capitalism’s eradication of the future. By portraying a world at the tail end of economic disaster in which a resuscitated economy leads to catastrophe, it provides a critique of late capitalism’s dependence upon continual accumulation. However, rather than simply envisioning this disaster, Miéville’s novel simultaneously explores the possibilities of thinking outside of constant growth. Drawing upon Evan Calder Williams’s recent discussion of salvagepunk, this article explores Railsea as a salvage of the past that picks through the garbage, hoping to find something useful within. Rather than using leftover waste to regenerate the social order before the apocalypse, Miéville’s novel taps into the utopian possibilities of repurposing and recreating the world anew out of the wreckage that remains.

There are good reasons to call London the capital of urban fantasy. Like no other city it embodies an intertwinedness of enlightenment and modernity with notions of the occult, the mythical and the magical. The idea of an urban underworld that somehow is the dark mirror of the city is central for the depiction of a fantastic London. I will look into three examples of urban fantasy: Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere (1996), China Miéville's story «Reports of Certain Events in London» (2004), and Peter Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor (1985) that portray London as a liminal space and a gothic heterotopia.

Fantasy is reputedly an escapist literature for juvenile or immature audiences, set in an ill-defined era between prehistory and fake medievalism, endlessly repeating generic stories about mythical heroes, beasts, elves, dwarves and wizards. This has never been quite true, and fantasy has always addressed serious issues, albeit in metaphorical and symbolic garb. Over the last decades the innovative subgenre of urban fantasy has discarded the stereotypical markers of time and space, heroes and villains, and replaced the traditional versions of the perilous realm by the very real and recognizable cityscapes of the modern metropolis. Drawing on earlier literary explorations of the city as the location of the fantastic and inexplicable, the texts discussed in this paper merge elements of various genres, e.g. fantasy, magic realism and steampunk to create counter-world visions of London that appear simultaneously weird and familiar, appalling and fascinating, unbelievable and eminently political.

This article explores the nexus of the legal and the literary in the works of China Miéville. Miéville’s acclaim and popularity among the genre fiction communities often overlooks his political commitment to a Marxist view of law. At the same time, literary criticism of Miéville’s fiction tends to flatten this Marxist politik by ignoring its historical indebtedness to Pashukanian and Trotskyist lines of thought in Miéville’s critical and creative works. This article responds to both of these vectors by asserting that there is a significant and hitherto unexplored difference in the frame of possibilities to imagine law in the Weird speculative fictions that Miéville composes.

A classic ‘artivist’ example in times of conflict is the 1993 performance organised by architect Lebbeus Woods in Sarajevo. On the war-ravaged steps of the Olympic museum and in full view of the Serbian snipers, two actors read and distributed forty copies of Princeton’s Pamphlet Architecture, a bilingual issue authored by Woods and titled ‘War and Architecture’. Drawing from his previous projects for Berlin and Zagreb, the American architect accused the entire political spectrum of being responsible for the murderous status-quo. The solution he envisioned was empowering the inhabitants into forming a new collective actor, through a very particular architectural project: building anti-ideological ‘parasites’ directly on top of the spatial scars of the city. Woods’ eloquent drawings also generated a critical back-lash, which included being accused of having ‘certain fascist impulses’ (Leach, 1999). This article proposes a novel re-interpretation of the War and Architecture project. It links Woods’s discourse with China Miéville’s notion of salvage, as the contraction of ‘salvation’ and ‘garbage’. This kinship is further analysed in relation to the theories of Donna Haraway on the subject of ‘Chthulucene’. From this contemporary perspective, Lebbeus Woods is seen as belonging to a Chthulucene avant-garde, while his denounced bricolage aesthetics is re-considered in relation to architectural activism.

As a Fantasy text and therefore unconstrained by the demand for ʻreality’, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is situated so as to be able to literally interrogate Deleuzeʼs notion of being "trapped in the dream of the Other". This paper explores how Miévilleʼs novel does not simply represent the Deluzian idea through the soliloquies of Yagharek, who is not sure if he is dreaming the world into existence or if he is intruding on anOther’s dream of it, but also attempts to simulate it by making the reader aware that her position is analogous to Yagharek's. Perdio Street Station, in other words, suggests that all readers of Fantasy literature are somehow trapped in the dream of the Other.

Science fiction—as a literature of the fantastic—has become a part of the religious landscape of modernity. In a secular world, not all of religious activity is explicitly so; indeed, much contemporary religious thought and practice happens implicitly, in ostensibly secular arenas. Yet the human need for meaning and enchantment has gone undiminished in the age of secularism, and science fiction is a powerful route for fulfilling such desires. In China Miéville’s _Perdido Street Station_, we see how traditionally religious themes are woven into a science fiction story, but also how the book itself illustrates a religious goal of divine creation. Using actor-network theory, this essay contributes to the building of a sociology of religion that acknowledges the powerful ways in which science fiction texts like Perdido Street Station offer transformative experiences for readers and for culture.

Philip K. Dick suggested that comprehension follows perception, encapsulating the manipulative spirit not only of his oeuvre, but all fantastic fiction. Arguably, the particularities of Dick’s pointedly dystopian energy—surveillance states, virtual reality, (post)humanism consciousness—has become something of a contemporary cultural shorthand for all the things we intuit as gaps within Western society. That is, all dystopias render pictures not of the future, but of the present and what it lacks. 
Standing in the shadows of Todorov and Darko Suvin, this paper argues that such gaps are not specific to dystopian science fiction. Rather, they haunt the fantastic. Using China Miéville’s This Census-Taker (2016), it suggests that darkness, which is to say an absence of illumination, inherently affects the way we see ourselves (our desires, memories, and traumas) and the worlds we inhabit, becoming a mystery to be solved, a condition to be understood. But what happens if it can’t, if the darkness cannot be unseen, and we remain in the dark?
Significantly, such a question reconceptualises the ontological hesitation of the fantastic and absences (of meaning, closure, and certainty) as a form of perceptual coding, reprogramming how we perceive reality.

Criticism of the work of American architect Lebbeus Woods often revolves around the idea that the science-fiction inspired aesthetics of his images is at odds with the political commitment of his texts (Leach, 1999). In response, this article leans heavily on the critical theory of science-fiction developed by Darko Suvin, Carl Freedman and China Miéville, and argues in favour the political potential of the genre. Three key projets are given an in-depth analysis: Underground Berlin (1988), Zagreb Free-Zone (1991) and War and Architecture (Sarajevo, 1993). The connections between Woods’s architectural storytelling and political activism are then further enhanced by analysing his concept of « freespace » from the perspective of social mouvement theory developed by Francesca Polletta. In a speculative conclusion, War and Architecture is seen as an early expression of « radical fantasy », a contemporary derivate of the utopian mode, interested in inciting individuals to coalesce into collective actors, but determined to treat the future as an open-ended, indeterminate project. Text published in French.

A short postscript to the draft article 'London Stone: History and Myth'. Why, quite suddenly in the early 21st century, has London Stone, previously ignored by writers of fiction, taken on an important role in a number of London-based novels belonging to the so-called 'urban fantasy' genre? 4 June 2015 (minor updates to references 15 December 2020): now incorporated in 'London Stone; History and Myth'.

There has been little elaboration of complicity’s etymology and how this inheritance connects the idea of complicity to spatiality. This paper approaches the villains of China Miéville’s award-winning 2011 novel Kraken as figures that can help elaborate this resonance within complicity. Kraken is a unique novel for Miéville because it breaks with the genre strictures of the Weird before Miéville again advances the virtues of such generic procedures. Goss and Subby are Kraken’s centuries-old assassins for darkly sacred hire. Their comic thuggery is imagined with supernatural abilities to fold, stretch, and swallow in implacable pursuit of the protagonist, squid caretaker Billy Harrow, through the multiapocalypti London underworld. It will be argued that these spatio-corporeal movements of Goss and Subby align their villainy with complicity’s etymological inheritance as an invitation to comply. Composed of ‘com’ and ‘plicit’, or, ‘with’ and ‘fold’, complicity is weirded by Miéville’s villains. The horror of Goss and Subby is that their devouring violence is invited, and devout.

How does one redefine the boundary between madness and rationality? This is the question that launches Ben Woodard on a discussion of the methods for accessing the Absolute or what he refers to as the Great Outdoors. Immanuel Kant’s theoretical framework with its “legalistic” norms is the first target of his criticism, which argues that Kant’s bulwark shielding rationality from madness is untenable. Kant had “circled his wagons” against madness in order to clearly distinguish philosophical speculation from the ravings of a madman, but that defense deprived philosophy of the capacity to describe reality as it is. Speculative realism positions itself as an alternative to Kant that holds out the promise of access to the Great Outdoors; therefore it must somehow distinguish philosophy from madness. Rather than indulging in the “mad speculation” or theoretical permissiveness of some followers of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to leave the narrow limits of reason behind, Woodard applies the thinking of Thomas Ligotti and Howard Lovecraft to make a two-pronged attack on anthropocentrism. Lovecraft represents a “shoggothic materialism” that energizes the horror of formless matter, while Ligotti represents a “ventriloquist idealism” highlighting the inherent horror of having a consciousness. Weird fiction then is no longer a literary excuse for madness that justifies pursuit of after stunning imagery at the expense of meaning, but is instead an important theoretical tool for grounding the external as such. What is ultimate is not attainable through altered states of consciousness or otherwise distorting language or bodily being. To the contrary, it is reached by rather tedious work with a text which is itself already positioned in the Outdoors with respect to the reader.

Paper given for the 42nd ICFA on Climate Change and the Anthropocene.

The two short stories “Polynia” and “Covehithe” were published in China Miéville’s 2015 collection Three Moments of an Explosion. In the first story, icebergs inexplicably materialise in the London sky while the second story imagines the return of collapsed oil rigs, emerging from the depths of the oceans like so many awoken Cthulhus.
My paper proposes to explore how Miéville tackles the issue of climate change in the framework of the Weird. The “radical alterity” that the Weird conjures up (Tony Venezia) and the ensuing defamiliarisation of reality allow Miéville to question our response to an overwhelming and alien – albeit human-induced – phenomenon. In that respect, the total absence of explanation – one of the staples of many stories in the collection – reinforces the reader’s and the characters’ cognitive estrangement from a formerly known and reassuring reality. The effects of climate change are taken to an extreme that does not fall into the realm of plausibility (flying icebergs and zombie oil rigs), and yet, the various characters have no choice but to accept the unacceptable.
My paper aims at analysing what Miéville’s preference – the almost undefinable sensation of the Weird over a more classic and overdetermined science-fictional depiction – means for our possible comprehension of climate change and our potential role in this changing world. The format of the short story itself also reveals a refusal to delve into long explanations and details, and to focus instead on a “unity of effect” consistent with the Weird as a sensation, “a moment, a suggestion, a tease, an intervention, an attitude, and above all, an argument” (China Miéville).

In Yes to Solidarity, No to Oppression, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak analyses radical fantasy texts (China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus sequence, Frances Hardinge’s Gullstruck Island, Fly by Night, Twilight Robbery and A Face like Glass, and David Whitley’s Agora trilogy), alongside what she calls ‘radicalizing rather than already radical’ fiction (102), such as Ursula Le Guin’s Powers, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Terry Pratchett’s Nation, Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina and Shadow Scale, and Kristin Cashore’s Graceling and Bitterblue.
More: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/ircl.2018.0257

Estamos aquí porque amamos lo fantástico. Estamos obsesionados con lo que produce lo extraño; con cómo hace lo que hace; y en particular, con aquellas figuras que salen cojeando de esa extrañeza, aún empapadas y chorreando de ella, llamadas monstruos. Sabemos de alguna forma lo que las hace venir: el Sueño de la Razón. Para llegar a su quididad, que es aquello para lo que estamos aquí, no podemos partir con la razón misma soi-disant, con lo opuesto de lo que amamos, con lo no-monstruado, lo no-extraño, lo mundano sin fantasía. Lo quietante [canny] 2. En estos días en Inglés-Inglés, "canny" significa astuto, pero llega a nosotros vía el Anglosajón "ken"-algo así como conocimiento, entendimiento.

In the 2004 Socialist Register, which appeared less than a year after the Second Gulf War commenced, Amy Bartholomew and Jennifer Breakspear published an essay on the prevalence of human rights rhetoric in what they and many others were then inclined to characterize as the "new imperialism". Bartholomew and Breakspear put pen to paper in the wake of a flurry of troubling developments in the United States: the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001; the attacks of September 11, 2001; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; the administration’s "unsigning" of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in May 2002; the invasion and occupation of Iraq; the normalization and programmatic consolidation of a variety of neoconservative proposals to realize a "new American century"; and the concomitant elaboration of the "Bush doctrine" of preemptive or anticipatory self-defence, according to which powerful self-styled "liberal democracies", chief among them the United States, are entitled to intervene in other states for the purpose of neutralizing imminent or prospective threats. Taking stock of these developments, Bartholomew and Breakspear trained their lens on Michael Ignatieff, whose writings provided a foil for their argument on behalf of a "critical cosmopolitanism" that would avoid utopian idealism while encouraging trenchant critique of state power. In their view, socialist strategy necessitated commitment to international legality and international morality alike. And this, in turn, called for a cosmopolitanism that would take human rights seriously enough to countenance the temporary suspension of post-1945 norms of non-intervention and sovereign equality under exceptional circumstances. Sovereignty was to be respected and safeguarded, but not at the expense of losing sight of the importance of protecting human rights or fetishizing the "defined territory" that international lawyers continue to regard as constitutive of statehood. This essay revisits the questions with which Bartholomew and Breakspear were concerned, but it adopts a different posture and offers a different set of responses. It does so with an eye to the current conjuncture, highlighting continuities between the Trump administration and its predecessors in regard to questions of humanitarian intervention. I argue that the modalities of such intervention have evolved since 2004, with the most prominent contemporary form being the "responsibility to protect", an "emerging doctrine" of sorts whose conceptual imprecision renders it all the more useful politically. I argue further that recent actions in Syria and elsewhere have demonstrated that the animating logic of humanitarian intervention--that military action may be ‘legitimate’, indeed necessary, even when in violation of relevant law--remains operational to a very significant degree. The willingness of Trump and others to mobilize the moralistic rhetoric of "humanity" in support of bombing campaigns works hand in glove with their disdain for many forms of international law (including, importantly and not without irony, human rights). Indeed, such interventionism builds upon efforts to de-formalize the international law of the use of force that have been underway since the conclusion of the Cold War, particularly since NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In the context of questions of intervention, Trump’s is not a world "turned upside down" so much as a particularly crass expression of a world that many have sought to craft for the better part of three decades by recourse to more "flexible" forms of (military and non-military) intervention.

The paper addresses the issue of evolution and transformation of Weird Fiction in Anglophone 20th- and 21st- century literature. The first part is devoted to the question of genre, placing Weird Fiction within the fantastic genre and discussing its defining characteristics in contrast to those of fantasy, science-fiction and the Gothic novel. The second part reviews the three major stages in the development of Weird Fiction: its establishment in the Old Weird tradition of the 1880-1940s; the transformation of the Old Weird model in the 1940-1990s and the making of the New Weird movement in the 1990-2000s. The Old Weird is viewed in the paper as a type of atmospheric literature aimed at achieving a single effect of ontological horror and unease on the reader through a short story mode. It is argued that the hallmarks of the Old Weird are visionary sensibility and attention to detail, despite general disregard for the plot, and novel, primarily tentacular, teratology. The transformation of the Old Weird cannon is attributed to the influence of F. Kafka, M. Peake, the New Wave writers and naturalistic horror in the 1940-1990s. Its focal aspects are seen to include a new approach to plot-building (exemplified in “the surrender to the Weird” principle), a shift from writing short stories to novels, exploration of surreal visionary sensibility and introduction of social and political agenda of the real world into the fictional worlds. The current state of Weird Fiction – the New Weird – is defined as an eclectic type of literature which utilizes and subverts the tropes of science-fiction, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism and horror to achieve the estrangement effect necessary to interpret the real world inferences in the weird reality of the New Weird fiction.

26. Gothic science fiction is a blending of two genres that are themselves always already hybrid and plastic. This chapter briefly reviews how the emerging discourses of Romantic science were inflected with profoundly dark and fantastical tropes, and how these entanglements have taken diverse forms since. It reviews longstanding debates around whether science fiction and the fantastic are mutually exclusive, and argues for the value of blurring these critical boundaries, drawing on the work of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Gary Wolfe, John Clute and others. In their grotesquerie, hybridity, and representations of suffering, many blendings of Gothic and science fiction demonstrate an abiding concern with the vulnerable human form within profoundly exploitative milieux. Since 1980 these kinds of texts have tended to explore ‘anxieties and taboo pleasures’ emerging from ‘the rise of global capitalism, and national identity in a post-imperial world; the profusion of technology; the sanctity of body boundaries and the place of the human subject within the grip of the abstractions of law; and the threat of apocalypse’ (Wasson and Alder 2011: 8). I illustrate some of the directions that might be taken in response to some of these preoccupations by discussing China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station (2000). Texts which merge science fiction, Gothic and horror continue to offer evocative representations of emotional darkness, strange affect, and a sense of broken, hybrid, and discontinuous being. In the process, such texts can offer rich material for rendering - and challenging – a tortured present and feared futures.