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This essay discusses how and to what effect Weird and New Weird fiction use description in unique and genre-defining ways. Using H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" and China Miéville's The City & The City as examples, it shows how the Weird relegates a comparatively large part of the text to description and attempts to elicit dread as an aesthetic effect. The essay argues that the Weird breaks with the traditional use of description by employing formally realist tendencies which it defies functionally, and by combining over-description with the failure to describe, whereas the New Weird is more concise in its use of description, ties it more closely to the narrative, and is less reliant on descriptive failures. Both the Weird and the New Weird demand more active reader participation in their creation of aesthetic illusion, which they encourage through the frames they create around their descriptions, thus preparing readers for the potential of aesthetic distance in the reception process and diminishing its effect. The analysis emphasizes the potential of description to be more than a subordinate to the narrative mode and to be a central component in the formation of a text's implied worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses "Forms of Life" in two senses: first, infrastructure as a social process that fosters particular forms of collective life and second, the agency/vitality imputed to infrastructure. The essay considers an unremarked ambivalence in energy humanities about infrastructure: the extant infrastructure of fossil fuels poses an obstacle to energy transition, while the act of making infrastructure visible and "following the pipeline" is regarded by incisive petrocritics as necessary but insufficient. What do cooling towers, electric pylons, or railways make happen (or keep from happening), socially and narratively, when they "work" or when they're hacked? In other words, is there a narrative grammar of infrastructure? How much has to happen for nothing to happen? And how do cultural texts differ from built environments in thinking infrastructure as a form of life? China Miéville's story "Covehithe" mobilizes the literary imagination to depict sunken oil platforms as revenant and reproductive organisms that pose new questions about relationships among humans, nature, and technology, and about the care, responsibility, and politics such forms of life demand. This weird tale doubles as documentation of dead infrastructure: its platform characters are actual rigs that litter sea beds around the world. What imaginative or conceptual forms, then, can help us grasp infrastructure's forms of life? This question is particularly urgent with regard to fossil infrastructure, which here names not only infrastructure that processes, circulates, or depends on fossil fuels but also infrastructure that is archaic, obsolete, and otherwise tethered to the past, standing as an obstacle to transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphors are ubiquitous in natural language; in fact, no language without metaphors is known. But can we construct a language without metaphors? An issue that is particularly relevant to this question is the relation between metaphor and simile. Some argue that metaphors are a type of (elided) simile, whereas others claim that the two phenomena differ in kind. Ideally, a way to settle the dispute would be to find a language that contains similes but not metaphors. There is no such actual language. But two science fiction authors have attempted to conceive of and describe just such a language. David Brin, in The Uplift War, creates birdlike aliens, whose language is claimed to have similes but not metaphors. However, Brin reproduces utterances of these aliens, in which he reflects their avian nature; and he often does so by metaphor. China Miéville, in Embassytown, also creates aliens whose language is claimed to have similes but not metaphors. However, these similes are frozen, and are actually idioms: they have a fixed, conventional meaning. Later on, the aliens acquire metaphors, and only then do they begin to have, in addition, novel similes. Hence, both Brin and Miéville fail: the former constructs a language that has both similes and metaphors, whereas the other constructs a language that initially has neither, and later acquires both simultaneously. Science fiction authors are, after all, humans, and are bound by the constraints of human languages. Hence, their failure to construct a language that contains similes but not metaphors tells us that the two phenomena are fundamentally very close. To the extent that it is possible to construct a language without metaphors, it appears that it would have to do without similes too.

The aim of the present paper is to consider Remades (posthuman figures who populate China Miéville’s “Bas-Lag trilogy”) as simulacra of their social milieu, highlighting the interconnection of power and economic systems which shapes the “remaking” process and ultimately the position of Remades in society. Two methodological approaches are applied to the analysis. The first draws from Halberstam, Livingston and Micali to account for the “posthumanity” of Remades, interpreting them as liminal figures who physically summarise various categories of inhabitants of the Bas-Lag. The second moves from Foucault’s reflections on the relation between power and punishment and on the centrality of the body in this relation to determine how these categories – power and punishment – work in the context of the specifically posthuman bodies of Remades. Combining these perspectives produces interesting results. First, it can account for the “otherness” of Remades on the level of their physical transformation (from “whole” bodies to Remades) as well as on the level of their social position (from citizens, to prisoners, to outcasts). In addition to this, by providing some key examples, the paper foregrounds that, if the dialectical relationship between Remades and society is overtly inscribed on their bodies, different societies are likely to alter them in different ways. As a result, a totalitarian structure will inflict marks that are not superimposable with those produced by an egalitarian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the theory of the subject and of subjectivity in relation to recent debates on the emergence of cities as spaces that are transforming global politics and international relations. Engaging with the contributions to the theory of the subject in the work of Michael Shapiro, Gayatri Spivak, and Jodi Dean, the argument develops an account of the city as an aesthetic subject. In this account, subjectivity is not a property of an individual human but is instead a force and resource emerging through the subject’s engagement in the aporetic boundary practices that define and delimit the subject’s possibilities. This understanding of subjectivity is then developed in relation to the material metaphors of urban fabric as explored by China Miéville in his novel, The City & The City. The article concludes by revisiting the idea that cities have emerged as crucial spaces or actors in response to diverse global crises, arguing that accounts of cities that reproduce the model of the subject as an individual with defined properties–in terms of the qualities attributed to the city as it seeks to become a node in globalised networks–also fail to account for the politics of the city as an aesthetic subject. This politics is a ‘wild politics’, unbounded by the borders that seek to contain and separate fiction and fabrication, concept and material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present paper is to consider Remades (posthuman figures who populate China Miéville’s “Bas-Lag trilogy”) as simulacra of their social milieu, highlighting the interconnection of power and economic systems which shapes the “remaking” process and ultimately the position of Remades in society. Two methodological approaches are applied to the analysis. The first draws from Halberstam, Livingston and Micali to account for the “posthumanity” of Remades, interpreting them as liminal figures who physically summarise various categories of inhabitants of the Bas-Lag. The second moves from Foucault’s reflections on the relation between power and punishment and on the centrality of the body in this relation to determine how these categories – power and punishment – work in the context of the specifically posthuman bodies of Remades. Combining these perspectives produces interesting results. First, it can account for the “otherness” of Remades on the level of their physical transformation (from “whole” bodies to Remades) as well as on the level of their social position (from citizens, to prisoners, to outcasts). In addition to this, by providing some key examples, the paper foregrounds that, if the dialectical relationship between Remades and society is overtly inscribed on their bodies, different societies are likely to alter them in different ways. As a result, a totalitarian structure will inflict marks that are not superimposable with those produced by an egalitarian one.

This article explores teaching international politics, international political economy (IPE) and urbanism through a reading of China Miéville's novel, Perdido Street Station. The novel as an artefact of popular culture affords a critical encounter with the production of space for students of international politics and IPE. Departing from prevailing approaches to understanding the urban in relation to the international that tend to focus on networks and circulation, the article offers a reading of the novel as demonstrating the production of space. The article links a critique of the hierarchical relations between teacher and student to critiques of the subordination of labour to design and planning, both of which render invisible the work of producing knowledge and space. Through an analysis of the political struggles over the formal and real subsumption of labour in Perdido Street Station, the article argues that studying the politics of urbanism in relation to the international through artefacts of popular culture can disrupt the invisibility of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how a number of artists have employed the counter/actual as a form of past-talk in a conscious intervention into socio-political and ethical issues arising from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I argue that such uses of the counter/actual more effectively foreground the injustices arising from the occupation while not only problematising the process of representation but also deconstructing the ways in which histories are intimately intertwined with relations of power and practises of legitimisation; they do not simply reproduce “the (f)actual” but work to repossess the past from the dominance of hegemonic interests.

128 Kris Kuksi, Prosperity, 2020 Kuksi's sculptures, often wall mounted, are highly complex constellations of found and doctored objects. Kuksi's surreal spatial aspirations, his mnemonic sensibilities and interest in the desiring, fractured Surrealist readings of combinatorial objects give his art great resonance. 5 Kris Kuksi, Victory of Perseus, 2017 Kuksi's compositional techniques have antecedents that include the subversive Dada collage-makers and the Surrealists. [Extracted from the article]

Since his novel The City & the City, China Miéville has been reshaping the genre which he brought to the literary mainstream, the New Weird. In order to exemplify this reshaping, we propose an analysis of another of his novels, Embassytown, in which is shown a disturbing association between language, imagination and narrative that refines the concept of rapprochement between literature and politics which Miéville has pursued in his oeuvre. --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n45a1095.

Using two recent science fictional (hereafter sf) treatments of linguistics, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” and China Miéville’s Embassytown, this article extends upon Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language through the texts’ respective imaginings of alien languages in order to reject the possibility of a normative account of language use. According to Wittgenstein’s linguistic stance, as articulated in his Philosophical Investigations, language is constructed collectively from communication and the emergence of culture, and a language’s development cannot in turn be divided from its community of origin. Structuralist accounts of language, such as Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, in contrast presuppose a normative view of language use in which innate mechanisms of the brain result in a relatively homogenous language output irrespective of culture. Troubling Chomsky’s universalism, the contemporary sf texts, “Story of Your Life” and Embassytown, posit human populations whose very worlds are shaken by the arrival of alien populations with completely foreign forms of language and, consequently, alien forms of life. In both texts, the protagonist becomes the chosen ambassador between the human and alien populations, and their vehicle of understanding, language. The human ambassadors’ subsequent actualization of a different worldview through their acquisition of the newly arrived alien language in turn demonstrates the importance of language to culturally acquired worldviews. Moreover, their gradual development of empathy for the alien beings as they become fluent posits language as, first and foremost, a tool of communication and understanding rather than the product of isolated minds. Ultimately, Chiang and Miéville’s alien thought experiments illuminate how Wittgenstein’s non-normative linguistic philosophies more fully account for language’s transformative relation to culture than Chomsky’s universalist structuralism.

This article unites infrastructural criticism, speculative fiction, and ecocriticism. Bruce Robbins, Patricia Yeager, and other scholars have been building the field of infrastructural criticism over the past ten years, but this work has largely focused on infrastructure within realist fiction. Because speculative fiction often emphasizes infrastructural objects and systems as the techno-scientific developments that differentiate their imagined worlds from ours, these narratives offer highly productive cases for rigorous analysis of those parts of the world that enable water, petro-culture, electricity, and telco flows and connections. This article presents through sustained close reading an ecological and ideological critique of the infrastructures at work in China Miéville’s short story “Covehithe” followed by consideration of how to develop this short story as a test case for a method of applying infrastructural criticism to other speculative fictions.

This article argues for China Miéville's The City & The City (2009) as a gothic Marxist fiction that articulates new modalities of communist expression which productively 'haunt' the work of the 'Idea of Communism' conferences. Firstly, the essay establishes a relationship between Marx and the gothic tradition, showing how Marx has long been concerned with the gothic mode as a vital explanatory framework for representing capital. Secondly, the essay enacts a comparative presentation between Miéville's novel and the recent contributions of communist intellectual Alain Badiou. Through this process, Miéville's novel becomes a powerful symbolic engagement with selected aspects of twenty-first century communism, unearthing new and productive relations with radical left thought while refusing to fully banish, conquer, or forget the history of the twentieth-century effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore China Mieville's novel The City and the City as a literary experiment for analyzing the dynamics of public secrecy. We explore public secrets as an intrinsic part of organizational life and as a framework for paying attention to the politics of organizing. First, we focus on the novel's invention and use of the verb 'unseeing' to bring out the embodied and sensuous aspects of public secrecy as part of organizational processes. Second we unfold how, although the content of public secrets may turn out to be less spectacular than expected, it is exactly their mundaneness which is key to their political importance. This is important because in an increasingly disorganized and uncertain world, secrecy proliferates and the visibility of secrecy is often a strategic move to justify certain hidden actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the nexus of the legal and the literary in the works of China Miéville. Miéville's acclaim and popularity among the genre fiction communities often overlooks his political commitment to a Marxist view of law. At the same time, literary criticism of Miéville's fiction tends to flatten this Marxist politik by ignoring its historical indebtedness to Pashukanian and Trotskyist lines of thought in Miéville's critical and creative works. This article responds to both these vectors by asserting that there is a significant and hitherto unexplored difference in the frame of possibilities to imagine law in the Weird speculative fictions that Miéville composes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China Miéville's novel The City & The City (2009) presents the city as a massively ramified ecosystem that comprises humans, other species, and objects, and is also embedded in larger systems like capitalism and environmental catastrophe. Cities are so deeply textured, and so continually scattered by the circulations of their component parts, that we cannot perceive them as a whole; the borders we use to define them are ultimately arbitrary. I argue that this perceptual disorientation, or aesthetic crisis, embodies the politics of the novel. Miéville depicts the continuous crises of urban existence--chemical spills, refugees seeking asylum, even a weed growing in the wrong place--as so many possibilities for metonymically grasping the larger ontological and political reality. Crisis does not entail a specific political (or artistic) response, however, since it can traumatize into complacency and xenophobia just as easily as expand one's commitments. The same kind of aesthetic crisis is provoked by the novel itself, because it frustrates expectations and eludes a clear genre, and readers can respond in analogous ways: with the urge to impose allegorical meaning and genre borders, or with a more refined perceptual sense. Thus, the form of the novel cleverly reflects its content and, in both cases, we are pushed to renew our sense of wonder at the strange alterity that inheres in the familiar and proximal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiction, and particularly current science fiction, (1) reflects, gives voice to, and may shape popular images of the city; (b) provides models of ‘world building’ whose methods may complement and critique other methods of informing the design of cities; and (3) plays out poetically rich thought experiments – cities of feeling – that can help designers understand nuances of current urban design and architectural theory. This paper examines the urban landscapes of three 21st-century award-winning science fiction novels. These cities of the fictive imagination can inform the creation of cities of the design imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Science fiction--as a literature of the fantastic--has become a part of the religious landscape of modernity. In a secular world, not all of religious activity is explicitly so; indeed, much contemporary religious thought and practice happens implicitly, in ostensibly secular arenas. Yet the human need for meaning and enchantment has gone undiminished in the age of secularism, and science fiction is a powerful route for such desires. In China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, we see how traditionally religious themes are woven into a sciencefiction story, but also how the book itself illustrates a religious goal of divine creation. Using actor-network theory, this essay contributes to the building of a sociology of religion that acknowledges the powerful ways in which science fiction texts like Perdido Street Station offer transformative experiences for readers and for culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acknowledgement names a peculiar, and frequently uneasy, relation to knowledge. For example, when one acknowledges as one’s own an act or deed with which one wishes to dissociate oneself, one is simultaneously owning and disowning that act. Through accounts of China Miéville’s novel The City & the City, and Marc Isaacs’ documentary All White in Barking, this article asks what that sort of knowledge can tell us about the relationship between modernity (articulated around the myth of rupture) and the 21st-century city which seems to be held in thrall by modernity’s loss. Miéville’s novel sets out a parable of what Slajov Žižek terms the post-ideological condition, in which the categories of the known and unknown have been replaced by the acknowledged and unacknowledged. The implications of that paradigm shift are then examined through Marc Isaacs’ exploration of what acknowledgement might mean in the supposedly post-racist city proclaimed by the multicultural narrative of urban modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the construction of law in China Miéville’s weird detective narrative The City & The City (2009). The discussion charts the excesses of law’s embodiment in Detective Tyador Borlú of the Besźel policzai with and against the primordial natural law discourse of the Law of Breach, and carefully examines the ways that this Law interdicts the common law in both parts of the fictional split city Besźel-Ul Qoma. Using the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance, this article unveils some of the modulations of authority presented by the novel’s unusual arrangement of politics, common law, and natural law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]