In The Anubis Gates, which came out in December 1983, magic and science coexist uneasily. The book’s entire plot hinges around an attempt to bring back ancient Egyptian gods and rejuvenate the dying magic they once fueled. Certain elements of magic in the book involve scientific principles (there’s a reference to a “Newtonian” reaction after the summoning of fire elementals), and others, like magic being negated by a physical connection to the earth, are repeatable and explained.
But the book leaves plenty of magical elements soundly in the realm of the inexplicable, as well. The book’s sorcerers eventually start to gravitate (literally) toward the moon rather than the earth, but the reader never learns why. As in Dragonlance, magic in The Anubis Gates has a deleterious effect on the body, but it’s never quantified. While sorcerers in the book complain about being exhausted by their magic, they always seem to have enough energy left to cast a spell when they need to.
The news in December 1983 was a little less optimistic than that it was when Dragonlance was born a year later, but there was still plenty to feel good about. Coverage of developments in science included new satellite images and improvements in surgical techniques. Advertising imagery was even more futuristic, with car drivers talking to robots and science fiction movies being presented as the best reason to buy a VCR. One article on improved telephone technology ran complete with a picture of a keyboard, a joystick, and an astonished-looking man reflected on a computer screen that showed a wire model of a digital telephone. Given the news and the ads, it seems likely that the zeitgeist that affected Dragonlance had a similar effect on The Anubis Gates.
There’s been a steady stream of steampunk novels, movies, conventions, comic books, and video games since The Anubis Gates, and in 2001 China Miéville, one of the genre’s latest darlings, broke big with the award-winning steampunk/New Weird novel Perdido Street Station. In that book,magic exists side by side with science, and the line between them is often blurry. Both subjects are studied in university, and scientists and magicians often operate in the same fashion with similar results. Magic can be unpredictable, but its results vary in the same ways that results can fluctuate in physics and chemistry when you’re working with imprecise tools. Magicians sometimes use machines to work their magic, and scientists sometimes use magic to improve their machines. In Perdido Street Station, neither the magic nor the science is wholly fleshed out, but neither is completely obscure, and both are subsumed entirely by the overwhelming alienness of the story as a whole.
Early 2001 was a quiet but unsettled time. The U.S. had just been through the polarizing first election of George W. Bush, and its magazines and newspapers were covering the new administration and the pardons Bill Clinton made during his last days in office. In the UK, where Miéville was pursuing a Ph.D., the presses were rolling on an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, train crashes, and political sparring over an upcoming election. The period was an uncomfortable one, full of scandals and disasters. Reading the headlines, you can catch a whiff of the skepticism that was in full force by 2006. It’s little wonder that Miéville’s blurring of science and magic, and the way his characters vacillate between the two while trying to solve their problems, went over well in that environment.
It’s difficult to draw any major conclusions from the juxtaposition of systems of magic and history. It would certainly be as unfair to assume that the creation of a system of magic stemmed completely from its zeitgeist as it would be to claim that it was entirely independent of it. And while readers react undeniably to the magic in fantasy novels, they also fall in love with (or despise) characters, worlds, storytelling, and voice. The interactions between magic and zeitgeist are complicated, to boot. In the uncertainty of the 1950s, readers enjoyed the nonscientific magic of The Lord of the Rings. In the uncertainty of the new millennium, they flocked to the more scientific magic systems of Mistborn and Perdido Street Station.
Trying to look at past cultural moments and the magic that developed in them in a way that would allow us to predict the future will probably always be a lost cause. There are too many variables to take into account. But at the same time, it remains fascinating to think about. The zeitgeist we live in is a tumultuous one. Commercial space travel is edging closer and closer to reality. Earth’s climate grows painfully and inexorably warmer every year. Technology is rapidly worming its way into every moment of our lives. Politics are as fraught and dysfunctional as ever. It will be exciting, at least, to see what magic may grow out of it.
About the Author
Author, freelance writer, and editor Jeff Seymour has been creating speculative fiction since he was a teenager. His writing covers a variety of genres, from magical realism to SF to young adult fantasy, and his first book of short stories, Three Dances, is slated for a Fall 2012 release. Jeff is also serializing a novel on Wattpad.com, and he presently works as a freelance editor for Harlequin’s digital-first imprint Carina Press. In his free time, Jeff blogs about his writing and editing, climbs mountains near his home in Colorado, and dreams about someday getting a cat.
In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville
Jeremy L. C. Jones
Intense, immersive, and startling, China Miéville’s novels have done more than won many major awards—they’ve helped change the face of speculative fiction. The English-born fantasist attended Cambridge University, earned a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and has taught at Harvard University. He’s the author of the Bas-Lag series, which comprises Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. His standalone novels include King Rat, Un Lun Dun, The City & the City, Kraken, Embassytown, and the recent Railsea, his second Young Adult novel.
Set on a train in a world of railways and wastelands, Railsea maintains a constant, pressure-cooker tension between the vast outside world and the claustrophobic interior. “This is the story of a bloodstained boy,” writes Miéville in the book’s prologue; that boy, Sham ap Soorap, is an idealistic young doctor’s assistant who sets out on his first hunt, traveling on the moletrain Medes in search of the giant moles called Moldywarpes. With parallels to (and subversions of) Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Railsea is perhaps Miéville’s tightest novel in terms of plot, but it’s still suitably sprawling.
Something of a traveler himself, Miéville spoke with Clarkesworld about his writing process, his fidelity to the notion of planning, and how books can be methods of transportation.
Do you get much time to write while you travel?
No, no. I write in very intensive chunks at various times. I am not someone who is very good at writing a certain amounts every day. I know that’s what one is told one should do, but what I tend to do is kind of sequester myself away while I am in London for a few weeks at a time and become very antisocial and write very, very intensively over a relatively short time. I am much more of a burst writer than a steady-state writer.
Is there ever any anxiety between bursts that the words won’t come next time you sit down to write?
Not exactly. I wouldn’t say “anxiety.” I don’t tend to doubt that I will be able to think of things to write, but there can be a kind of low-level dread, because especially the early stages are quite hard. So I don’t have that existential dread so much of, “Oh my God, I am never going to be able to write another book,” but I do have that sense of this is going to be hard work, which is fine, that’s appropriate, but especially early on in a project. Once you’ve built up a certain amount of momentum, it rolls much more swiftly and is much easier to continue, so my heart needs a certain amount of bolstering early on in a project. That’s the definitely the case.
Does the writing that you do early on in the burst every need to be scrapped?
Absolutely. I’m ruthless with early drafts, as one has to be. As the general rule, although I am getting better about it, but as a general rule I write long first and then end up doing quite a lot of cutting. More and more as I get older and as I change as a writer, so what tends to happen is
the first draft tends to be quite long and maybe quite flabby, then I’ll trim that down. There can be occasions when it’s very difficult because there are some sections that you really want to keep in, but, at the same time, you know that you probably ought to get rid of that bit. Sometimes, you have to be quite ruthless with yourself. But there is no question that I end up getting rid of quite a lot of stuff.
There is no easy read between the way things are written and what works. Sometimes, things that are written in a very exhausted, overnight state that you would think would be among the most kind of scrappy and worse stuff is actually some of the stuff that works best. You can’t narrowly says, “Okay, these five days because I was in such and such state, I probably will not use any of that.” You just never quite know.
How do you know when it works?
Well… sometimes you don’t. This is where you need to try and minimize your own ego and have friends you trust and editors who are prepared to look over stuff. But I think you can train yourself into a certain kind of rigor about your own work. There are all sorts of little tricks. You’ll often hear writers say that one of things you have to do is to read things out loud and that can be really helpful. You have to sort of read it as ruthlessly as possible and always with the possibility in your mind that you’re wrong. That’s why you really do need outside, especially on the second and third draft, you really do need outside people to come and give you thoughts about this. The short answer, I guess, that you don’t always know. You don’t. There are ways of getting closer to it, and I think the two key things are to try to have as much humility as you can in the sense of being aware that your own stuff might not work and of trusting certain people with earlier drafts that you wouldn’t want anyone else to look at.
Do you have a sense of where the story is going from the beginning, or is it a process of discovery?
No, I tend to be very much a planner. I mean obviously details veer in the telling all the time, that’s clearly the case, but in terms of the broad architecture of a book I plot carefully and if things start to veer halfway through, I tend to stop and either pull them back on course, or if I realize they are going in a better direction, I extrapolate and work out what effect this is going to have further down. I am not one of these writers who is able to enjoy flying by the sit of my pants. And there’s no value judgment there, incidentally. I am very well aware that some absolutely fantastic, wonderful writers do that. For me, no, I cannot do it. I have to plan quite meticulously, so often the first several weeks of a book, writing will consist of me grumpily chewing over notebooks and scribbling notes and that kind of thing and not actually putting pen to paper at all other than vague and incomprehensible notes to myself.
Were there any veering moments in the writing of Railsea?
Yes, absolutely. The ending changed quite a lot a couple of times. Again, what happen is I get halfway down and then I suddenly think, “Hang on a minute, this going in a different direction,” and I stop, and I tinker, and I do some more plotting, and I say, “Well, if I do that, then I am going to do this, and that’s going to mean that, and so on.” And I extrapolate it down. That did happen with Railsea not just the ending, certain details got added. Some things you can add without making a huge difference to the structure of a book, and other things break the structure much more. In a way, what you dread is suddenly realizing something that will make the book much better, but which will necessitate quite a big structural revisions because then you really ought to do it, but you know that it’s going to be a lot of work. I had a couple of those. You get them with all books. There was nothing unusual about Railsea in the sense that there was no more or less than usual. I think that it would be very rare that it stuck completely, rigorously to the plan all the way through. It’s not a question of fidelity to the plan as I have written it at the beginning, so much as a fidelity to the notion of planning.
Did I read somewhere that you wanted to do a book in every genre?
What happened there was that that was a throwaway comment I made in an interview some years ago, which as you know the Internet has a tremendous capacity to never forget anything. People have been asking me about that ever since, but what happened was, and this again is not that uncommon, as I said that’s a kind of throwaway line and then people kept saying back to me. The more I thought about it the more I thought, “Yeah, that’s a really good idea. I should probably do that.” It was an off-the-cuff thing, but it’s an off-the-cuff thing that has a certain truth and resonance.
The thing is I am really very, very interested in genres. I find genres fascinating. I’m very interested in the way they work and the way they put things together. That includes genres that I don’t have any strong tradition with, genres that I have to come in from the outside and learn how they work. I don’t have a checklist in my pocket and I’m not going to rush it through. Especially those genres that I don’t know so much about… when I wrote Iron Council, I took quite a lot of time to read a lot of Westerns and work out how the Western works. Genres like Regency Romances that I have read, but I am not steeped in, I do like the idea of taking some time and taking them apart and working out how they work. And I thing that that idea of slowly over the course of career travelling through these different traditions and trying to be respectful to them but also do something, bring your own stuff to that table, I think is a really exciting idea.
Your fondness for the notion of planning seems to be very similar to your fondness for genre. The plan is there, then you deviate from it, or you don’t.
It’s an interesting formulation. At a conscious level I cannot say that I am fond of planning. I would say it’s more a question of my psychological model requiring planning. I take neither pleasure nor displeasure from plans. I just need them to proceed. Whereas with the genres, I take a lot of pleasure with the genres and in the way they work and their protocols and so on.
But I think you are probably onto something in the sense that I tend to be quite a structured thinker. I tend to find structures very useful in ways in terms of organizing my thoughts and the things I do and so on. That clearly has some ramifications in both those fields. It’s not something that would have occurred to me, but I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, you’re probably onto something.
Do you ever experiment with not being structured at any point in the process? Does being structured become a limitation, or is it always a strength?
I think it varies writer to writer. There are certainly writers for whom being overly structured would not be a strength at all. I don’t doubt that one could probably make a strong claim that some of the things… The people that don’t like my stuff might say that some of the problem with it stem from this kind of care, some would say neurosis, about this sort of planning. It’s very difficult to say because it’s so kind of integral to my mental model that thinking outside of it is to kind of think in terms of a different me. I have on a couple of occasions tried writing things which don’t have a structure and don’t have a plan in mind. What I can do, I think, reasonably well, I think I can write good sort of very short, mood pieces, maybe a page long. These are not plot things. These are almost sort of prose poems. Those, I think, work very well, for me anyway. I like both. That can kind of tap into certain intensity, but for anything that’s longer that has a narrative, I just get a bit lost without a plan.
It’s also the case that having a plan and a structure does not negate the intensity. I think sometimes there is an anxiety that if you plan too much you will end up with something quite bloodless and that doesn’t feel urgent. I am sure that may be true for some people. I don’t feel it to myself at all. They’re two separate axes. I can very, very rigorously plan something over a couple of weeks and then I actually sit down to write it, I am rushing with that kind of buzz, that sort of high, just as much as if it had just spilled out of the pen there and then.
What is the secret to capturing mood so intensely?
I don’t know. This is the kind of thing
that writers agonize over for centuries. I suspect that it’s something to do with a relatively unmediated sense presence. All these things that you do when you are trying to write something that’s very evocative of scene and you kind of sit back and close your eyes, you know it may look a bit ridiculous sometimes, but it’s perfectly reasonable thing to do. Writing and invoking images and that sort of thing are… You know, there is no division between the mind and the body, they are bodily acts. Putting yourself into a state of mind where you are very reflective of those moments may very well involve putting your body in certain place. This is why some writers write very brilliantly on drugs, which I don’t as it happens, it’s not my interest.
Certainly, a certain kind of very repetitive music, and a certain kind of close intensity can be very evocative. For me, I find often the most powerful writing that I think I do in terms of that moment, that kind of presence in a moment, is often very late at night when very few other people are awake and I am looking out of the window. I always work looking out the window. I am not someone who has my desk facing a wall. I am looking at the city and the lights are on in the windows. There is this great sense of being in a carapace of light. That sort of strangely dream-like moment, I think what you are trying to do when you get that kind of intensity is that you are trying to translate a sense that is basically like a dream in a waking moment. Anything you can do physically or mentally that gets you closer to that experience is probably good.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 60
