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China Syndrome

Chris Flynn October 05

Prolific British science fiction author China Miéville is a busy man. His last four novels have been released a year apart and all been highly regarded. 2009’s The City & the City was Miéville’s homage to detective noir and is a tremendous book, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award and jointly winning the Hugo, science fiction’s highest accolade. A feat of great imagination and originality, The City & the City is a cop thriller set against the backdrop of two cities, Beszél and Ul Qoma, which overlap. In otherwords they occupy the same geographical space but are perceived differently. In fact, citizens of each city ‘unsee’ the other place and are penalized if they notice what is going on elsewhere.

This sort of mind-bending concept appears regularly in Miéville’s work. 2010’s Kraken was a comedic fantasy romp around London in which an employee of the British Museum of Natural History must track down thieves who have stolen a giant squid. The language on show is eclectic and funny, with lots of Cockney rhyming slang and invented words (the author’s name refers to ‘my old China plate’, or ‘mate’, which is what his father used to call him). I interviewed him for The Big Issue at the time and we got into the use of language.

“My issue with the gravitational pull towards a certain type of unadorned prose is that it is deemed to be the correct way of writing. People say ‘this is really good writing because it’s really spare’. Well, whether or not it is really good writing, why is spareness a given desiderata? The last time I looked there wasn’t a word shortage. It is not in and of itself an admirable quality. Justify these predicates—why should writing be terse?”

The novel after Kraken pushed the limits of language even further, and in many ways is specifically about language and colonization. Embassytown is not an easy read at first but once you get your head around the concepts, is supremely satisfying. Here, humanity has become dependent on a strange alien race for biotechnology but the problem is one of communication. The Hosts, sentient jellyfish-like creatures, have two mouths and when they speak say two words at once to express their concepts. Miéville conveys this as follows: surl/(tesh-echer)

Blessed with only one gob, us feeble humans cannot emulate their language. The Hosts think we are making little more than grunts and squeaks, and so Ambassadors are genetically engineered – twin human individuals whose brains are interlinked so when they speak the Host language it can be understood. The tenuous relationship between the two races undergoes a revolutionary and violent upheaval when language is abused, particularly when the Hosts discover lies, of which they had no previous conception.

This year’s novel is Railsea, a riff on Moby Dick that takes place underground, on a mining vessel, and features a giant white mole. Despite their serious themes, humour often plays a key part in many of Miéville’s books and fans of his work will no doubt have been delighted at the news earlier this year that he would be the main writer on a reboot of cult, obscure DC Comics title Dial H for Hero. There have been several versions of the comic down the years and Miéville’s is understandably, and temptingly odd. Protagonist Nelson Jent stumbles into a phone booth and accidentally dials a combination that transforms him into a random, and sometimes fairly useless superhero. Thus far, Miéville’s take on the franchise has seen Jent become The Iron Snail, The Rancid Ninja, Pelican Army (a man in control of a flock of pelicans), Contol-Alt-Delete (who can ‘reboot’ recent events), Boy Chimney and Captain Lachrymose, an emo who draws strength from the traumatic memories of others, thus forcing them to experience an emotional breakdown. It is anyone’s guess what Miéville has in store for us next.


 

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