In the nineteenth century, advanced engineering pushing what the engineers had to work with to the very edge of the possible had a heroic romantic allure that seem archaic to us now, but a romantic allure nonetheless.
This to me seems to be the essential appeal of steampunk. Retro, wistfully heroic, silly maybe, but also sweet.
And no more so than when it comes to locomotives, trains and the rails taking them over the far horizons, especially as when, in Ares Express, even whistle stops tend to drop you into yet another exotic dreamscape.
There's a story in Ares Express that includes confrontations with Artificial Intelligences and higher forces beyond Mars, dimensions beyond the human realities of the surface. Sweetness runs away from her train, her family, and her culture to flee from an arranged marriage she abhors, embarks on a picaresque journey through a series of more or less fantastically baroque cultures with colorful traveling companions, searching for the grandmother who is searching for her, and later for her lost spectral twin who sort of never was born but sort of lived inside her. This ends up involving her in a war among the entities who terraformed Mars, a malignant Luddite guru with a flying city that's pedaled through the air by his acolytes who wants to bring about some kind of apocalypse, and various forces and persons who love Mars just the way it is.
Sweetness, of course, happens to be entrusted with a mission key to the outcome of this over-arching storyline that McDonald admirably links to her personal tale.
It's coherent, dramatic, and comes to a satisfying conclusion. but for me, at least, it's the locomotive pulling the train of attention through McDonald's richly colorful and richly enjoyable Martian landscape that's central, not only to this one novel, but to this sort of discursive tale in general. As with any well-done discursive novel, and particularly a picaresque railroad journey novel, science fiction or not, the journey is more than half of the fun.
The Dervish House, McDonald's latest novel, is quite a different thing in one way, and like Ares Express in another.
With River of Gods and Brasyl, the former set in an India of the much nearer future, and the latter in Brasils of more than one future and the past as well, McDonald showed an almost sui generis genius for extrapolating the futures of non-Euro-American cultures in complex, rich, and telling detail, up to and including semi-imaginary pop cultures extrapolated seamlessly from the ones presently current.
But even so, in these novels, story and character, not the imagined worlds, are more front and center, the enjoyment of the less discursive magical mystery tour icing on the cake, as it were. And in The Dervish House, McDonald sets out to do the same sort of thing for a future Turkey—more explicitly, for the city of Istanbul.
Indeed, the novel is set just about entirely in greater Istanbul, though what more or less turns out to be the central plot of The Dervish House, or at least the major one, revolves around events that take place in the natural gas fields of Central Asia. There are three plots here, coming together, or, better, radiating out from, The Dervish House of the title, an old Sufi ashram-cum-communal-dwelling, now turned into a rather seedy apartment compound, where the paths of the characters, some of them a bit seedy themselves, cross and intersect.
But the novel might just as well, and certainly more accurately and simply, have been called Istanbul. For the city itself is front, center, and dominant, its millennial history alive and meddling in its fictional future, its living folklores, its place as the capital of the most populous and most recent member of the European Union, its diverse, volatile, and dangerously divergent mix of Shia, Sunni, Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, Greek, European Turkish, and Anatolian Turkish cultures.
Once again, McDonald makes his imagined future world, his imagined future city, exhaustingly real, vibrantly alive, his Istanbul, for in The Dervish House, you can feel his deep emotional connection to his semi-fictional city.
When it comes to the main characters and the plots, that is, the multiplex story lines, it's a bit of a muddle.
The most deeply felt character, perhaps, is a boy with a strange heart condition that makes loud noise life threatening. He has robot cloud toys that metamorphose and move at his electronic command and form his main connection to the wider world outside the Dervish House.
There's an art dealer pursuing an ancient body preserved in honey, which becomes a kind of vision quest, and her wheeling and double dealing lover, a market trader wizard setting up the dirty deal of a lifetime.
There's a character who unwillingly becomes able to see djinn, a faded one-time star economist with an old tragic love story, and so forth, with a cast of well-rendered minor characters.
But the over-arching story line revolves around a complex swindle scheme concerning Central Asian gas, and the subplots do more or less converge upon it formally. There is and are formally satisfying denouements.
But while the story lines don't really come off as perfunctory structure, the main line in particular is so deliberately complex a futures market scam that it becomes rather over-complex for gripping dramatic involvement, and the human characters less vivid and deeply felt by the reader, and one suspects by the writer, than Istanbul itself.
Geography, folklore, climate, weather, history, politics, food, ancient religion, future pop culture, slang, tech, the media sphere—it's all there, as in River of Gods and Brasyl. But in The Dervish House the centrality of the extrapolated city is almost defiantly front and center. Istanbul is the main character here, and McDonald makes no bones about it.
To quote the very last lines of the last paragraph of the novel, where McDonald comes entirely up front about it:
This is the secret name of God, written across Istanbul in letters too great and yet too small to be comprehended. This is the stir of djinn and rememberings, which are not as different as humans think, in the twilight of Adem Dede Square, outside the old dervish house. This is the turn, this is the whirl, this is the dance that is woven into every particle of the universe. This is the laughter of Hizir the Green Saint. This is Istanbul, Queen of Cities, and she will endure as long as human hearts beat upon the earth.
This is a love poem to a city.
China Miéville's Kraken is also a kind of love poem to a city, if not an unambiguous one—a more or less contemporary London transmogrified but not quite transformed by the New Weird. The City and the City is all about an entirely imaginary city or cities somewhere and somewhen in literary Central European Ruritania, bordered on both real contemporary European countries and the outer reaches of the Twilight Zone, one city but also two interpentrating cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma.
But these two city novels, written more or less one after the other, superficially similar in thumbnail description, are radically different.
The City and the City is a strange, tautly written, and not overlong novel, a cross between fantasy and the police procedural that works and works very well. Its first person narrator is Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad, and the plot is a murder mystery, which expands into political macro-consequences, and which forces him to work across the border with an Ul Qoman detective.
Thus far, from such a thumbnail description, it would seem that this is a novel that simply combines a few well-worn genre templates—the police procedural; what the French call the roman noir, the sort of thing written by writers like Raymond Chandler; the murder mystery in which the murder proves to have political consequences beyond homicide; and the Ruritainian novel of the nineteenth century that takes place somewhere in a nonexistent middle European city drenched in then-exotic atmosphere.
But Beszel and Ul Qoma are and are not the same city, and the frontier between them is not a line on a map but something conceptual. This is a concept so difficult to fathom—and, I would guess, by Miéville's deliberate intent—that even the inhabitants themselves don't all get its metaphysical complexity, and no one knows who created it or why.
Beszel and Ul Qoma are interpenetrating cities that occupy the same geogr
aphic space but not the same political and psychic space, and we are not talking here about “alternate realities.” Buildings, neighborhoods, and even government edifices exist in either Beszel or Ul Qoma. Citizens of each city are supposed to “not-see” the buildings and people in the other. Streets and highways run through both cities, but the automobile traffic on them deliberately “not-sees” the other city's vehicles, though if necessary drivers do to avoid collisions.
Not seeing the other city has to be a deliberate act of will, because in physical terms everyone in both of them can see everyone and, everything in the other. This bizarre frontier is called the Breach, and being purely conceptual, has no physical existence. It is entirely conceptual and non-linear, but violating it and crossing over is a grave crime in both cities.
The integrity of the Breach is policed and guarded by a mysterious group also called the Breach. Their authority is absolute, and they appear more or less literally from nowhere to arrest violators and whisk them off to no one knows what end or where.
The Breach may or may not be the original creators of this set-up that no one seems to know who, why, or even when it came into being. It is the question the archaeologist, who is the murder victim McGuffin, was trying to solve.
And that being the setup and this being the kind of novel that it is, that is as far as I should go, rather than enter into the plot complexities that are the engine of any good detection thriller. In The City and the City Borlu is very much front and center, being the first person narrator and an interesting and simpatico one despite himself. This is a noir detective tradition, and this being in form a noir detective novel, so is the plot.
But The City and the City is more than a noir detective novel, much more, though exactly what more remains complex and elusive. China Miéville is a writer who enjoys world-building, and a thoroughly urban one—just how urban we shall see in Kraken—and the two interpenetrating cities are far from just being necessary setting. Miéville imbues them with just the kind of Victorian eastern European noir atmosphere of nineteenth century Ruritania, non-extant, conjured out of imagination, but somehow not a fantasyland at all.
The City and the City is a different novel from what Miéville had done before, at least for adults, and a successful one, and certainly weird. But not “New Weird” at all as I've just come to understand the concept, or think I have after seeing the film Inception.
Inception is a story about a mercenary operative and his crew who enter the dreams of targets to either mine them for the targets’ secrets or implant false memories to cause the reaction commissioned by the client. So far, so good. The hero (or anti-hero) has a good psychological reason for doing what he does, and the story line that takes him through at least the first half of the movie or so is coherent and interesting.
But the story then degenerates into an FX orgy of endless combat sequences, car chases, explosions, action cliffhangers, and so forth, which take place within dreamscapes where anything that can be visualized with FX technology goes—and with modern computer FX technology that means just about anything you can, uh, dream up and have the budget to afford. Not only do the laws of mass and energy as we know them not apply, there are no alternate ones either. Worse still, this massively overlong thud and blunder denouement takes place in three intercut dreams interacting arbitrarily and pretty much incoherently.
This has been a powerful cinematic trend the past few years, spawned by the success of The Matrix, which takes place entirely within nested matryoshka doll realities, nightmare dreamscapes for the most part where everything goes in the service of directorial slow-motion FX derring-do.
Movies as superhero action comics.
No rules of mass, energy, motion, or even magic.
At least in cinematic terms, this is the New Weird.
Fantasy for sure, but not fantasy as we have known it.
And in literary terms, likewise Kraken, a novel that would seem to make the theoretical and rhetorical concept of the New Weird concretely clear, for better and for worse.
Back in the day, the critic Alexi Panshin wrote about “science fiction that knows it's science fiction,” meaning a purely literary game, fantasy of a kind, where the created reality more or less operates under the known laws of mass and energy when they don't get in the way of the tale, but which stretches them with as much rubbery science as needed when they do to suspend disbelief.
Or to render the question of belief or disbelief irrelevant, since the writer and the reader acknowledge to themselves that it's all a purely literary game. Gregory Benford called this “science fiction as tennis played with the net down,” meaning ignoring the rules of scientific consensus reality; true enough as far as it goes, but what it really means is science fiction played by a different set of rules selected by the writer for literary purposes. Science fiction as a kind of consensus fantasy reality.
Out of this evolved the “New Space Opera” swamps on Venus, canals on Mars, faster than light starships, the good old stuff that everyone now knows does not and cannot really exist, but that makes for good ripping tales. Space opera settings and tropes as a form of science fiction that knows that it's really fantasy.
But fantasy, like the New Space Opera, which is a subset of fantasy, must establish a set of rules for the specific literary universe in question in order to be dramatically satisfying—the rules of its brand of magic, as it were—and the reader must more or less understand what they are as close to the onset as possible. Otherwise, it's the old “with a mighty effort the hero leaped out of the pit” whenever the writer feels like pulling a deus ex machina rabbit out of his hat. And it's damn hard, if not impossible, to create and maintain dramatic tension, which is to say, among other things, tell an emotionally involving story.
Or not?
The literary New Weird, like the cinematic New Weird, seems to deny all that. It might better be called the New Fantasy, because that's what it is—fantasy unlike what has gone before, not fantasy as we have known it.
Kraken is set in a contemporary London, at least timewise, and it is clear that China Miéville, a true Londoner, loves the city he inhabits, which is therefore his own even more deeply than Ian McDonald loves his Istanbul for the duration of a novel. One can't help thinking of another born and bred Londoner, Michael Moorcock, presently in exile, and his own ode to the city, Mother London.
Same geographical locus, same emotional attachment, roughly the same timeframe from a temporally detached enough perspective, but not the same London.
Miéville, like Moorcock, loves London for its time-deep and verdigris-overgrown historical and folklorical roots, its sense of heroic muddling through whatever, its richly mazelike cityscape, its somewhat decayed grandeur, its eternal proletarian and lumpenproletarian subcultures, and so forth. But there the similarities end.
The London of Kraken is a magical London, a fantasyland, though not at all a Disney version, and the main story line is one Billy Harrow's magical mystery tour through it, starting as a kind of police procedural at the more or less quotidian surface and delving stepwise down, down, down (or up, up, up, if you prefer) into its hidden magical deeps.
Billy is a curator in the Natural History Museum, and the novel begins with the seemingly impossible disappearance of the body of a giant squid, the kraken of the title, from its preservation tank. Initially, at least, he is both a possible suspect for a crime that couldn't have happened but did, and an expert on the disappeared McGuffin, “assisting the police in their inquiries,” as the British cops genteelly put it, in more ways than one. The story unwinds, exfoliates, and expands from there.
I suppose I must attempt to summarize the story as best I can. No easy task, since in plot detail, I found it damn hard to follow—not that there isn't detail in literally overwhelming profusion.
That's the problem.
Billy Harrow is a well-rendered and simpatico character who matures and grows during the length of the novel from a kind of hapless and clueless naif
into a main player. Yet, the game he becomes so deeply involved in—to save the world from the apocalypse, or at least to save London—is never quite clear.
Indeed, there are at least two apocalypse candidates in Kraken, maybe even more; at least two and maybe more mutually hostile giant squid-worshiping sects; a semi-personified spirit of the sea; magical gangsters; paranormal cops; the ka of a long-dead ancient Egyptian constrained to flit forever from statue to statue; and more minor players than I can count or quite remember involved in this sub-surface struggle to bring about one apocalypse or another, or prevent them all.
Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this. In fact, chapter by chapter, scene by scene, line by line, there are riches to enjoy. The Egyptian ka is the leader of a striking union of wizards’ stooges and magicians’ flunkies, themselves a vast array of creatures and spirits. The leader of the gangsters is a talking tattoo, a kind of semi-material loa on the back of a human horse. The walls have ears. The ears have walls. One pictures China Miéville chortling with glee as he writes this stuff.
The problem is not the profusion of magicks and magical creatures and beings—as witness, for example, what Jack Vance has done with his Dying Earth books, or Ray Bradbury with The Martian Chronicles, or the J.K. Rowling with the Harry Potter books, or The Odyssey for that matter.
That is not the “New Weird” per se. It's just fantasy. It's at least as old as Homer, older maybe. When it works, it's great fun, and sometimes great literature. And page by page, chapter by chapter, schtick by schtick, Kraken is great fun. And a bit more than that, a bit of a political edge and passion beneath and within the schick that is never entirely absent from Miéville's novels.
But Kraken doesn't quite satisfy as a whole. After finishing it, one finds oneself wondering what was really going on. With a certain dry wit, French intellectuals have been known to proclaim “It works in practice, but will it work in theory?” The New Weird works quite reasonably in theory, but Kraken demonstrates that the theory can create problems in practice even for a writer as puissant as China Miéville.
Asimov's SF, April/May 2011 Page 34
