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Earlier this year John Mullan wrote an article proposing that the essential difference between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ is that only ‘literary’ novels ‘ask us to attend to the manner of their telling’. The implication is that genre fiction with ambitions – that uses complex narrative structures such as multiple voices, twisted chronologies or stories within stories – seeks not to be genre fiction at all. Mullan’s two-tier hierarchy doesn’t hold up, however, when confronted with Miéville’s fiction, which has no intention of escaping genre. Embassytown is an SF novel through and through, unironically committed to its own narrative, and serious, like a no-nonsense B-movie, about providing the discerning genre fan with the monsters she’s paid to see. There’s no reason this should preclude an interest in the manner of a story’s telling. And the genre of ‘the weird’ is itself a sustained formal strategy. By asking us constantly to imagine surreal transformations, bizarre bodies and impossible architectures, Miéville confronts us, sentence by sentence, with the spectacle of language representing what can’t exist. Far from inviting the lazy genre reader to sink, unreflecting, into the tale, ‘the weird’ insists we pay attention to the unbridgeable distance between words and what they stand for….
Avice, who once wanted only to escape her hometown, finds herself entangled in its destiny. ‘Politics finds you,’ she says. Miéville, a leftist activist, seems both optimistic and cautious about the interactions between fiction and politics. He has written (in Historical Materialism) that it would be ‘ridiculous’ to suggest ‘that fantastic fiction gives a clear view of political possibilities or acts as a guide to political action,’ but insists nevertheless that weird fantasy has an inbuilt potential for radical political thinking, because it begins by throwing out standard definitions of what’s possible and what isn’t. Embassytown’s preoccupation with monsters and metaphors keeps reminding us not only that everyday reality is sustained by language, but that language is a kind of fantasy fiction, always confabulating a world that doesn’t otherwise exist. Not taking ‘the real’ for granted means noticing that the real is a story you’re being told.
Avice, who once wanted only to escape her hometown, finds herself entangled in its destiny. ‘Politics finds you,’ she says. Miéville, a leftist activist, seems both optimistic and cautious about the interactions between fiction and politics. He has written (in Historical Materialism) that it would be ‘ridiculous’ to suggest ‘that fantastic fiction gives a clear view of political possibilities or acts as a guide to political action,’ but insists nevertheless that weird fantasy has an inbuilt potential for radical political thinking, because it begins by throwing out standard definitions of what’s possible and what isn’t. Embassytown’s preoccupation with monsters and metaphors keeps reminding us not only that everyday reality is sustained by language, but that language is a kind of fantasy fiction, always confabulating a world that doesn’t otherwise exist. Not taking ‘the real’ for granted means noticing that the real is a story you’re being told.
