The following conversation with novelist China Miéville was conducted by Joshua L. Miller before a live audience in Ann Arbor, Michigan on October 6, 2016. It has been edited for length and clarity.

JOSHUA MILLER: I would like to begin by asking you to talk about the Remades—the human-animal hybrids of the Bas-Lag trilogy. Perhaps you can also speak as well to mixture as a metaphor and motif as a govern- ing practice of turning genre into experimentalism.

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Thinking of a story, a narrative mechanism whereby I could create a literally endless number of composite bodies, was a way of having as many monsters as possible. Then there was a political point, not a particularly sophisticated political point, which was I was thinking a lot about—the increasingly sadistic pathologization of the criminal and the criminal body, particularly in American culture, but also bleeding over into British culture and globally. There was a fairly direct metaphorization of this idea of making the criminal an absolute monster and literally embody- ing the monsterfication of the criminal. There was a certain very simple, to the point of simplistic, politicized outrage at that, transmogrified into an aesthetic form.

MILLER: You yourself have pursued a remarkable variety of genres and styles, even within individual works. For example, in The Last Days of New Paris you crafted a counterfactual narrative, but that’s just one layer. It’s an alt-historical novel about Surrealist artists, which is an extraordinary, head-spinning framework. In contrast to many of your prior novels, which are explicitly about things that either are yet to happen or never could hap- pen, can you tell us where the surreal meets the ab-real? Is this recent work a way to think through how history didn’t go but perhaps could have? Or perhaps it did, and we just didn’t realize it?

MIÉVILLE: To me that’s several questions at once. The Last Days of New Paris was an enormous—it’s not a word I tend to use about my own stuff— but it was an enormous amount of fun to do, and it’s very much a jeu d’es- prit. It’s a light, playful book, which was literally written on the basis of a video game setting that I was developing, hence this idea for this world, partly because I’m interested in video games as a form, although I don’t play them because I’m really bad at them. I’m interested in them as a form, and Surrealism is a huge influence on a lot of game design, partly because the Surrealists were so interested in play and partly because the images they created were so amazing. The notion was essentially of a world, a Paris that has become . . . not just surreal, but literally Surrealist-ized.

One thing I wanted was to have a polemical position on the nature of the Surrealist canon, because Surrealism, a movement that was almost echt radical when it occurred, then became commodified and banalized at an incredible speed. The canon of artists that are always recited, Magritte, Dalí, and so on—some of them I admire, some of them I don’t. I’m not a Dalí guy. There’s a kind of alternative Surrealist canon. Unsurprisingly, many of these artists are women, many of them are artists of color. There is an at- tack on a lot of the Surrealists, which is that these are essentially bullshit artists talking it big on the Left Bank—playing around. There’s no question that some of them were, but I think that’s very unfair about the best of that tradition. For example, if you look at some of the very early journals in Surrealism, their position on decolonialization, a radical anti-colonial position, was literally decades ahead of most of the Left—an unflinching, unremittingly militant anti-colonial position. Some writers and artists fea- tured in the first Surrealist journals were writers from Légitime défense, a Martican radical publication.

Then you have the queer writers and artists of Surrealism like Claude Cahun and others. One of the things I wanted do was to take the opportu- nity—not to bypass all of the big names, I’m a huge Max Ernst fan—but to make my Surrealist canon a radical wing of the Surrealist movement. Those are the specifics of Surrealism within that book.

It’s interesting that you make a distinction between the surreal and the ab-real, because I think I would too. Surrealism is an influence that’s been powerful and important to me for a long time, despite all of its domestica- tion. It’s something I return to all the time, one of the absolute taproots for me, artistically and politically.

The prefix ab- is also something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I was slowly trying to develop a theorization of what it was, what it was doing, and, ultimately, I was tentatively putting forward a position that it is a way of thinking about something distinct from the uncanny.

I make this distinction between the ab-canny and the uncanny, the un- canny being the returned repressed, and the ab-canny being the irruption of a kind of radical bad sublime. These, to me, are both different iterations of unrealism and non-realism that I find endlessly fecund and productive, both as a reader and a writer. I think, for me, all the different specificities, whether it’s weird fiction of the 1920s, which I think of as pulp modernism, whether it’s the Surrealists, whether it’s some of the avant-garde writing or linguistic experimentalism, whether it’s pulp science fiction, whether it’s the New Wave science fiction of the ‘60s and ‘70s, these to me are all different moments within a broader aesthetic of the unreal to which I always return.

MILLER: Since we’re talking about prefixes, I’ll take that as my entry to ask you about language broadly and Embassytown in particular. However, as I was preparing for today and thinking about your work, I was struck by how fully fleshed out your interest in language has been throughout your career: Bellis Coldwine, translators, linguists, mediators of language, dip- lomats, narrators who do particular things with words. I’m curious to hear about the ways in which Embassytown is a novel in which language itself is medium, plot, setting, character, aesthetic, and philosophy. Language is front and center in the novel throughout, and at the same time it’s also an engagement with philosophies of language.

Can you talk with us about the different roles language plays in your ways of engaging the ab-real?

MIÉVILLE: My initial interest in language was through sociolinguis- tics, but from Embassytown you can see that I got, and remain, completely fascinated with metaphor and the philosophy of metaphor and writing metaphor. I have a long-stalled project, a non-fiction book about metaphor, of which Embassytown is essentially the fictionalized version.

Language is something that I’m interested in at a relatively abstract level. There is a strong tradition, as you know, of language, linguistics, fea- turing in science fiction, fantasy, and the fantastic. It often manifests in a kind of very close fascination with the specifics of invented languages. Most famously, Tolkien’s entire oeuvre was spun out of a desire to create Elvish.

I’m actually not very interested in those specifics. When I was writing various books, I would try to create words that were plausible, but I had absolutely no interest in creating a lexicon and so on as some authors do. I was very interested in the philosophies of language, in its underpinning. It’s interesting hearing you talk about the various other books and the way lan- guage appears. As so often, it’s much clearer to me now that you’re talking about it than it was at the time. You’re right, I do talk about language a lot!

Embassytown is entirely structured around language. However, to me it’s as much about theology as it is about language, and, particularly, to do with the interception of the two at a philosophical-theological level. The seventeenth-century debates about the Adamic language and the angelic language and so on, and the nature of combining that with the nature of the Fall and the discussion about the Fall.

On one level, the interest in language is nothing new in my field. One of the things fiction does, it allows you to take theories that you know are false and use them for narrative as if they weren’t. In the case of Embassytown, although it’s not the main organizing principle, there is an inference that works within the context of this particular world. Take, for example, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is essentially saying that language deter- mines thought, that your thought patterns are created by your language. I had some pushback on this from some linguists and anthropologists, telling me that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong. I know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong. What I thought was that it would make an interesting peg for a story. You can literalize these thought experiments in a way that I find very powerful.

In Embassytown, my interest was less to do with language tout court than the specifics of metaphor and the specifics of language as theology—not just language and theology but language as theology. One coda to that—this is something that happens to me not infrequently, and I find quite exciting—is realizing, very, very long after the event that there’s been kind of an occult influence that I’ve forgotten, disavowed, not taken account of. In the case of language, it’s a book I read many years ago, which had an immense impact on me. It’s Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. It’s a postapocalypse book written in 1980 by a writer not particularly associated with science fiction, kind of an experimental high literary writer, an American based in Britain. The shtick of it is, it’s a postapocalypse novel, and it’s written in a broken language. It’s written in a new language that is, essentially, the detritus of language, as filtered through apocalypse. It latterly occurred to me that sense of language as ruin and indeed of salvaging language from that ruin is something I wasn’t remotely conscious of that at the time, in the way I was about metaphor, for example, but I think it’s very current.

MILLER: It’s so interesting because so much of what you’ve just said puts features of Embassytown into sharp relief. It’s a science fiction novel; in fact, you’ve called it your first work of science fiction. It takes place in the distant future. Earth is a lost mythic origin. Humans exist, but speak a language called Anglo-Ubiq. Humans are colonizing a planet inhabited by a popula- tion called the Ariekei, who can only speak Language (capitalized) through dual mouths. Speech is rendered in the novel as a linguistic fraction dividing utterances in half.

MIÉVILLE: Again, the seeds go back a long way. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a very important book to me and has been for a long time. A lot of these games and ideas are in Swift. The Ariekei can’t lie because their relationship between sign and referent is direct. That’s in Swift, the Houyhnhnms can’t lie. And then there’s a group of people who think it’s inefficient to speak because it’s using signs instead of directly talking about the thing you want to talk about, so they carry everything they might ever want to talk about around with them. It’s kind of harking back to that, but not played for satire, but played for apocalypse.

MILLER: The protagonist of the novel, Avice, is described as becoming a simile in Language in exactly that way. She becomes the thing that’s car- ried along; she participates in a scene in order to invent what they can’t say otherwise.

MIÉVILLE: There’s a certain ellipsis and slipperiness in the book, in the sense that it is about a passage of signification. The entire book is predicated on certain impossibilities, but trying to take those impossibilities as if they weren’t impossible and trying to treat them with a glassy-eyed conviction. What that means is you have to think in terms of tendential logic. The Areikei, if they want to use similes, have to enact scenes which they can then describe as a way of comparing other things to them. They cut a rock in half so that they can then say, “It’s like the rock that was cut in half,” because if there was no rock cut in half there’s nothing to refer to. That, in its form, implies a thinking beyond the literal. For me this is very much to do with the dialectical shift from simile to metaphor. The more I think about it, and the more I read about it, and the more I circle around it, the more I think metaphor is everything. Metaphor is the key to an awful lot of things.

MILLER: Part of the plot of this remarkable novel, too, is that metaphor and other figurative language is impossible because it’s a lie in the literal sense. What’s not materially accurate can’t be said, but is titillating, so there’s a prelapsarian mode of language, as you were saying. But that lin- guistic construct is then placed in dialogue with early twentieth-century language philosophy, because if Avice becomes a simile, the scene evokes the argument that we don’t speak language, language speaks us. And then there’s the fractured or fractional language of the dual-mouthed Ariekei.

MIÉVILLE: I have a great deal of fidelity to my own obsessions. The things that have interested me, the things that interest me have tended to interest me for a long time. This sounds like a cute story made up for marketing, but it is 100 percent true that the first draft of what later became Embassytown was written when I was eleven. The generative thing was actually the idea of a language that’s spoken with two mouths at once. I have this little docu- ment that I wrote in pencil or whatever when I was eleven in which there’s an alien language rendered with two lines of text over a kind of mathemat- ical symbol. I think partly this is a very simple, very naïve pleasure in text that messes about.

From a young age, like I remember being, I don’t know, thirteen, I think, and discovering Tristram Shandy and the idea that you have this book writ- ten in the eighteenth century that has text that is the wrong shape and that has black pages and that is aware of the materiality of text on the page. In a very unembarrassed way, part of it was simply the pleasure of thinking, “How can you render something in a book in a way that hasn’t been done before?”—because that’s interesting. Rather than thinking,“Here’s my idea, how do I now render it?”—just think,“That’s a cool idea, that’s a cool image. Now, what might it mean?”

MILLER: So what does it mean to write a multilingual alien novel? How does one represent the communicational transfer (or lack thereof )? Is a divisional or fractional language a way to represent the experience of the human character who can’t communicate with the Ariekei? Can a novel rep- resent that lack of understanding? Is it a kind of noisy silence?

MIÉVILLE: I think that’s a very good way of putting it; a “noisy silence” is absolutely right. The short answer is no. I think, for me, one of the inter- esting paradoxes of science fiction is that it’s a genre which is obsessed with the alien, and yet, definitionally, the alien can’t really be depicted. I think that’s literally true and particularly if you’re thinking about alien cognition, a genuinely nonhuman way of thinking. I think it is a simple statement of fact that if you are a human writer, you can’t really write inhuman thought. This goes back to stuff we were talking about the other day about the fas- cination of the unsayable, this goes to the interest in the ecstatic religious tradition about the unsayable. The ultimate source of the unsayable, the ultimate source of the unthinkable, the beyond language is God/the real/ the sublime. That, I think, is the telos of all these discussions.

The interesting thing about science fiction as a genre is that it both knows this and disavows it endlessly with various degrees of élan and swag- ger and enjoyability. The great majority of aliens in science fiction are what I think of as Star Trek aliens, which are just humans with rubber bumps. I mean that at a cognitive level, their cognitive processes are simply ours plus the phrase, “Hmm, on our world we dot dot dot,” but it’s essentially human. This is not a diss, because that’s fine, you can tell a story that way, there’s no problem with it. The other option, and it’s something that I realized I’ve been trying to do since at least Perdido Street Station with the Weaver, is to think genuinely and with some degree of seriousness about an abso- lutely inhuman cognition, the unsayable, you know, the beyond words. You definitionally can’t do it. The other tradition of fantastic fiction which tries to take it really seriously and actually meet that challenge head on is always already going to fail. Always.

It will fail, it can’t not fail. The best it can do is think of strategies for better failure. There’s the Beckett quote which we all trot out all the time about failing, failing better. It’s not just about trying and failing and failing better; it’s about strategizing preemptively for your inevitable failure. I think a lot of my attempt to think these unthinkables, whether it’s in theory, in nonfiction, or whether it’s in fiction, is to try and be as rigorous as possible about my strategy for inevitable failure and to make it as fecund and inter- esting a failure as possible.

MILLER: Then I want to pose a question about time, about the impossibly far future and the distant past and the ways in which the play with time factors into the fantasy and the fantastic for you.

MIÉVILLE: Time is unthinkable, and that’s not a new revelation. I sup- pose the go-to for me here immediately is J.G. Ballard’s work, which is ob- sessed with what he called “deep time,” essentially a scale of time, whether it’s past, future, or, more particularly, in a Ballardian sense, the experiential, the way time is actually inhabited, which is radically ahuman, often at an unthinkable, stretched-out slowness, though not necessarily.

The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has this notion of the arche-fossil, a thing which is a trace of something. He essentially is thinking deep time backwards, the idea of a trace, which is so radically preexisting any human subjectivity that it radically problematizes that subjectivity. One of the things that’s intriguing for me is how thinking about this has been in the most interesting fantastic fiction for a long time. A lot of Lovecraft’s work, the way he talks about his own monsters. He has this phrase in “The Call of Cthulhu” where he says that Cthulhu had been waiting for vigintil- lions of years. It’s this sense of Cthulhu as the living arche-fossil. I suppose, on one level, all I can say is I definitely consider myself part of that tradition of thinking about time as deprivileging human subjectivity.

I suppose maybe one of the things I’m interested in doing, again partic- ularly in Embassytown, is an impossible and always-going-to-fail attempt to marry a politicized humanism with ontological anti-humanism.

AUDIENCE: You talked about theology, and art, and literature as ele- ments that have shaped your writing. I’m wondering how, if any, your un- dergraduate degree in anthropology shaped what you do. Are there partic- ular places that inspired you for their oddities or particular anthropological ideas that you incorporated into your work?

MIÉVILLE: One of the things I owe to anthropology is an open-mind- edness to critical theory because in English—when I was studying it and where I was studying, which are important provisos—there were people who were very interested in critical theory and so on as a way of studying literature, but it was also possible to do a literature degree without touching any of that. You couldn’t do that in anthropology. If you studied anthro- pology when and where I did, you were axiomatically thinking about the theories of the way you were looking about the world.

Most of the theorists whose work has been very important to me have had a sense of totality. For me it’s something I come back to a lot, the sense of everything being connected with everything else. The sense that there is a way out there of connecting and thinking. That the exchange rates be- tween the French Franc and the US Dollar in 1974, women’s oppression, the Attica prison uprising, and Mickey Mouse are connected. And that was something that I got out of anthropology. Whether anthropology intended me to get that out of it I don’t know.

AUDIENCE: You were reflecting on the complexities and the difficulties of constructing an impossible world in such a way that the reader can accept the social logic and go with the flow and enjoy it. Is it feasible to imagine a socialist world in that kind of way? There are some classic socialist utopias and some unconvincing ones. But is it possible to do that in a way that’s not just plausible, a little propaganda, but complex, and enjoyable, and challeng- ing in all the ways that wonderful fiction can be wonderful? Have you ever thought of doing that, and if not, why not?

MIÉVILLE: My go-to answer here is no, I don’t think it is. Not only is that radically different for me from saying it’s impossible that that could be created, it is constitutive of believing that it could be created. I am not a person of faith, but as a socialist, someone committed to a postcapital- ist social world, my relationship to socialism is—and this is by no means unique to me—eschatological, it is part of that millenarian tradition. This is a connection which has been made many times, but I take it very seriously, very constitutively seriously. And it’s not just a question of saying one wants a better world, one wants The Big Rock Candy Mountain—although I do not in any sense denigrate the desire for The Big Rock Candy Mountain.

I’m quite serious, I think those dream utopias are quite important, in many cases because of their absurdity, but this goes back to totality for me. This is where there is an absolutely rational kernel to the connection be- tween the chiliastic tradition and the Marxist tradition: that if you take se- riously social totality, one of those components—along with Mickey Mouse and the exchange rates—is the human mind. That doesn’t mean that we are robots programmed by an oppressive totality, but it does mean we are absolutely conditioned by that totality and that we can’t think outside it. Which for me is one of the reasons that—I don’t mean this in a sectarian fashion—a certain type of anarchist politics, a certain type of ultra-left pol- itics, a certain type of hippy politics, which are predicated on prefiguration, are category errors for me. It is both to honor the totality of capitalism and to take seriously the radicalism of the potential of an alternative, to say that we can’t think beyond it.

It is in the process of changing it that one might change oneself and start to become someone capable of thinking beyond this shit. For that rea- son, no, I think any depiction of a postcapitalist totality will always ba- nalize, domesticate, fail, be unrealistic, be trite, or be dull, because it can only ever be a preemptively hobbled dream predicated on the now, on what Trotsky calls “the social lie.” In a post-lie world, we won’t be these people, so we will be dreaming different dreams and dreaming them in a different way.

No, I think this is undepictable and unthinkable.



A full video of this interview can be found on MQR Online