“Socialist Surrealism: China Miéville’s New Crobuzon Novels,” in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction – eds. Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox

How do politics and the science fiction and fantasy genres inform each other? Science fiction has always had a strong undercurrent of utopianism – writers as different in their ideological predilections as Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin and Frederick Pohl have used it as a means to reimagine political and social arrangements better to their liking. The dominant political strain in post-Tolkien fantasy, in contrast, has been an unabashed nostalgia for the loss of organic bonds and feudal relationships (although there have been counter-strains of fantasy that has questioned these assumptions). China Miéville’s three New Crobuzon novels – Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council stand as an important – and entirely self-aware – counterargument to dominant strains in both fantasy and science fiction. Miéville’s work draws on both genres as well as horror. Indeed he argues that these three subgenres aren’t really distinguishable from each other, but instead form a common genre, which he dubs Weird Fiction. But even as he draws upon their tropes, he both reimagines them and argues with them.

Henry Farrell, “Socialist Surrealism: China Miéville’s New Crobuzon Novels,” New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction eds. Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox (University of South Carolina Press: 2008).

Access the full text here.

Other Writing:

Essay

The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions ...
Read Article
Essay

The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely. – with Abraham Newman

For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has ...
Read Article