Your Town [Review: The City And The City]

We are living in a golden age of TV adaptations of science fiction and fantasy books. Hot on the heels of The Expanse, Altered Carbon, Man In The High Castle and American Gods comes a new series based on Good Omens, a new version of War of the Worlds set in the era of WW1, and more. Right now I'm enjoying the BBC's miniseries based on The City and The City, possibly my favourite China Mieville novel.

I regret never posting a review of this novel, I may need to re-read it after watching the series and may write some more about it. I did write this blog back in 2010 about C.J. Cherryh's novel Wave Without A Shore which features a similar conceit - societies that choose to live as if they cannot see each other.

The City and The City is a traditional detective story, set in two interlinked cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma. The Besźel tourist orientation video above sets out the scenario nicely - and you should watch it, it could save your life. The plot reminded me of The Bridge - the body of a murder victim is found across a border, under circumstances that bring together the police forces of both cities and leads to conspiracies within conspiracies. The series stars David Morrissey as Besź detective Borlu, and relies heavily on deep colour grading and depth of field to differentiate between the two cities - one is always out of focus.

This is also a great example of a fantasy concept that refers to many situations in real life. One of the things I love most about London for example is that it contains many more cities than just Besźel and Ul Qoma - hundreds of nationalities, communities and active subcultures some visible, some just out of focus; also without taking this post too far into political waters Besźel and Ul Qoma bear similarities to post-Good Friday Northern Ireland and to other conflicted or disputed lands around the globe.

They're Here! They're Here! [Review: Arrival]

Monolithic alien spaceships appear in twelve seemingly random locations across Earth's continents. The military call on linguistics professor Louise (Amy Adams) for an opinion, and she quickly talks her way onto the contact team and finds herself leading the contact mission alongside physicist Ian (Jeremy Renner).

What follows is a beautifully low-key first contact movie with echoes of both Contact and Interstellar, as the team races against time to decode the aliens' language before the fragile pax between involved nations breaks down. Adams stands out with a melancholy and human performance as a scientist plagued by memories of loss, and this is very much her movie - Renner is here in a supporting role although there's some good chemistry between the two.



Overall this is a well-scripted movie, and there's lots to enjoy - not least the alien language which is realised in depth, and the tension that builds between nations as teams at different sites become suspicious of each other.

There are however a couple of minor shark-jumps. Louise's first successful communication with the aliens is based on such a simple idea, I had trouble believing this hadn't been tried already. Later, despite being set in a military camp with tight security, one soldier manages to connect to a fundamentalist website on his laptop without triggering any alarms. These do not spoil the movie which stands on its performances and eerie atmospherics. The big twist, which I won't reveal here, is a narrative gamble with internal logic that in my opinion just about holds together. I liked it but it may well divide viewers.

The theme of interpreting alien languages is a science fiction favourite, although it can also get swept under the metaphorical carpet (yes, Babel fish, I'm talking to you) and it's a potential pitfall if and when we make contact with aliens in the real world. Of the many sci-fi novels that take up this theme I particularly enjoyed Jennifer Foehner Wells' Fluency, which features a scientist hero not unlike Amy Adams' character in Arrival, and Embassytown by China Mieville, a particularly bizarre tale of aliens who recruit humans to become metaphors in their language.

Socrates' Stone

In C.J. Cherryh’s classic novel Wave Without A Shore, the scholarly inhabitants of planet Freedom believe that they can decide what is real. They choose not to see or acknowledge the indigenous aliens or a human underclass, both of whom share their city. This theme occurs elsewhere in science fiction – in Ulan Dhor, one of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth tales, the Grey and Green tribes share a ruined city but are magically unable to see each other; also in China Mieville’s recent novel The City and The City, two cities share the same space but citizens are discouraged, on pain of disappearance by sinister secret police, from seeing each other.

A related idea was put forward by avant garde architects Superstudio in the 70s. In the City of the Book, the last of their satirical Twelve Cities, they imagined a city made up of tunnels in which two contradictory moral codes co-existed. A book of laws could be read by sunlight on the city’s exterior or by filtered light in the tunnel cavity - in each location different words would appear, so the same citizens would behave in an upstanding moral manner in one setting but indulge in excessive vice in the other. The authors claimed that this, like their other City concepts, was based on a real city although they did not reveal which one they had in mind.

Wave Without A Shore is about post-modernism. Modernism is the idea that reality is empirical – it can be measured and understood; it’s closely related to science and to the Enlightenment. Post-modernism isn’t one philosophy and there are post-modernist trends in every walk of life, but the cross-hatch is that most of these ideas downplay or refute the existence of any base reality, instead emphasising a reality that is constructed by ourselves.

On this topic I’ve always taken the Philip K. Dick line as a good working definition: reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it. A version of this argument existed long before post-modernism ever reared it’s socially constructed head – Plato challenges Socrates to refute the suggestion that he only exists in Plato’s imagination. Socrates, kicking a stone, replies “I refute it thus.” From the title onwards, Cherryh’s novel is very much a response to post-modernist ideas and is about the hubris of choosing what is real.

Giraffe terror comes to London [Review: Un Lun Dun]

This China Mieville novel is written for the teenage or YA reader however can be enjoyed at any age. The scenario, in which two friends are transported magically into an alternative version of London where all the rubbish goes, is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere although, unfettered by Underground station puns, Mieville's fantasy seems a little fresher.

The book sends up many fantasy cliches - the "chosen one" Zanna is incapacitated early leaving her ordinary, prophecy-free friend Deeba to save the day. In doing so Deeba is tasked with a chain of thirteen magical-object quests - but refreshingly decides to jump straight to the last one. The inhabitants of UnLunDun are utterly ridiculous (martial arts dustbins, animate umbrellas etc.) but still manage to be both engaging and threatening at times, and the Smog as an evil entity works well even though the anti-pollution message is perhaps a little too obvious. Finally Mieville proves with this novel that he clearly understands the true terror of the giraffe - I'm now keeping my second-storey windows firmly closed at night.

The patter of tiny feet [Review: King Rat]

The first of China Mieville's novels, King Rat, is set in more or less present-day London, although the grime and muck is described just as colourfully as in later novels such as Perdido Street Station. The plot takes the hero, Saul, on a free-running tour of the rooftops and sewers of London in the company of his new-found uncle, the titular humanoid rat, and his bird and spider analogues as they fight for survival against their nemesis who is eventually unmasked as a familiar mythical figure. The book also explores club culture, particularly the jungle scene, and jungle music proves central to the final showdown.

This is a good book and within it you can see the beginnings of Mieville's later masterstrokes - familiar environments in London are seen from new angles and rendered threatening, while other imaginary or fantastic locations are brought to life and made familiar; whilst the origins of Mieville's fantasy characters are made clear at the end, they remain original and captivating creations. Saul is a little more shaky in the beginning - there are lots of reasons he might have decided to distrust the authorities and go on the run following his father's mysterious death, but his motivation at this point seems too vague. Saul's rat-like tough-guy character is gradually fleshed out as he learns to free-run and survive and uncovers his own past.

Seafaring fantasy #1: The Scar

For some reason fantasy and high seas adventure seem to go well together. In The Scar, China Mieville's sequel to Perdido Street Station, linguist Bellis Coldwine goes on the run from the New Crobuzon militia. Typically for Mieville, the scale of events increases exponentially from chapter to chapter. Bellis takes passage on a ship, the Terpsichoria, that turns out to be on a secret, spying mission, but this is only the beginning - just as the captain orders it back to New Crobuzon, to Bellis' disappointment, the ship is overrun by pirates and Bellis and her fellow passengers are taken to the floating pirate city of Armada. They are given their freedom - including the Remade convicts locked in the ship's hull for whom this is a welcome change from the New Crobuzon apartheid - but may not leave.

Like New Crobuzon, although necessarily smaller, Armada is a joy to explore, with different districts built from ship hulls, each with their own rulers, factions and eccentricities. The uneasy truce is held by current rulers The Lovers, whose history is itself a fascinating subplot. Being populated by pirates it's a brutal society and Bellis has to find herself a niche, adapt and survive. Armada itself is changing. Historically it has drifted from secret location to secret location, surviving (naturally) by piracy - but now there's a power struggle going on, and new factions have ambitious plans to summon a powerful force from the depths of the ocean, which itself will be just the start of an even more audacious plan.

As with the first Bas-Lag novel, The Scar overflows with colourful descriptive prose and equally colourful characterization. The restrained but resourceful Bellis carries the story although many of the other characters, human, Remade or otherwise, are also memorable.

Perdido Street Station (spoilers)

I don't confuse sci-fi with fantasy. I do read fantasy as well (and other genres too) however can easily get bored with standardized tales of wizards and elves. I wonder if Tolkien in the long run has done more damage than good to the genre - on the one hand there's so much to enjoy in his own books; on the other hand there are all the other books "inspired" by the Tolkiverse.

To my mind fantasy should be about fantasy: you fantasise. A fantasy writer should be free to allow anything into his or her novel from his or her mind. While a certain amount of internal consistency might still be helpful, it's not about keeping things plausible or nearly plausible, or sticking to the rules (like, say, hard sci-fi).

This is why I'm bringing up Perdido Street Station - it's brimful of highly original beings and events. The setting combines magic and steampunk; the world includes all manner of creatures and hybrids - to give you some flavour, the heroes, a journalist (with a beetle instead of a head), a freelance scientist and a criminal fixer are trying to defeat a giant dream-stealing moth, that should give you a start. The setting - the city of New Crobuzon - combines the absolute worst excesses of every major city on Earth. Mieville has a wonderful prose style that describes settings in three-dimensional, 32-bit colour and HD resolution; and he's never happier than when finding new and fresh ways to describe just how mucky the current setting is. And there's not an orc to be seen anywhere.