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Gothic Politics
A discussion with China Miéville

China Miéville has quickly established himself as a leading contemporary British

writer using a blend of fantasy and Gothic themes. His first novel, King Rat, was
nominated for award by the International Horror Guild. The Bas Lag trilogy
(Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council) received the 2001 and 2005 Arthur
C. Clarke Awards for best science fiction of that year. Miéville has also written arti-
cles on international law and the Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis, and the book
Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2005). On 30 May
2006, Stephen Shapiro, for Gothic Studies, met Miéville at the Tricycle Theatre Café
in Kilburn, London to talk about narrative politics.

Gothic Studies: In modern narrative theory, there is a recurring tendency to evalu-

ate works based on a generic opposition defined by an assumed reader/viewer response.
One thinks of Nietzsche’s split between ‘Apollonian’ work that is analytical, distanc-
ing, and individuating and ‘Dionysian’ pieces that are emotive, integrative, and mas-
sifying. This split also aligns with Brecht’s rejection of Aristotelian aesthetics, which
use mimesis to generate emotional tension that first magnetizes the reader’s identifi-
cation with represented characters and then relieves this pressure through catharsis.
Brecht instead championed cultural productions that would snap the spectator’s col-
lusion with the author, especially through techniques of formal disruption, montage,
and so on, with the hope of carving a space for the reader to reflect critically on the
power dynamics that shaped what had just been read or seen. Works in Gothic and
fantasy idioms have often been denigrated for residing more on the Aristotelian side of
the equation, which is often seen within Left criticism as being complicit with the dom-
inant order, not because they generate emotional intensity, but that they do so as a
means of channeling this affect away from social critique.
Fredric Jameson, in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), seems to reinscribe this
line when he makes a distinction between the generic modes that he calls ‘science
fiction’ and ‘fantasy’ (which can also be read as including ‘Gothic’). Even as he
cautions against simplistic separations, he suggests that science fiction is marked by a
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conceptual rigor that, because of its low sales, is relatively autonomous from the
commercial market’s pressures. Its preferred mode of historicism treats differences in
modes of production and its primary narrative mechanism is allegory, which is privi-
leged as it enacts Jameson’s larger definition of utopian writing as providing a cogni-
tive map for thinking about historical change and the formation and reformation of
social structures.
Fantastic (and Gothic) works are branded by Jameson for their dependence on high
sales in the marketplace and tendency towards serialization (there’s an echo here of
Adorno’s critique about seriality and debased culture). Fantastic works’ historicism
depends on a religious Manichean division between good and evil. They champion the
‘aristocratic ideology of medieval aesthetics’ that bases itself on a fantasy of power that
cements caste hierarchy with religious values, unlike the actual historical period in
which there were prolonged tensions between the European peasantry and the Church.
While fantasy uses the ideal of organic Nature, it does not do so as an allegorical device,
but as a fetish of stasis and the absence of historical process. In his argument, fantasy
and other non-science fiction forms are suspect because they do not create Brechtian
instances of cognitive estrangement. While Gothic and fantasy works might have a
mythopoesis, to use Tolkien’s phrase, in that they are world imagining, they do not
incline the reader to think outside the terms of a mechanical and automatic morality
about the systemic construction of dominant and alternatives values within their
worlds.
China Miéville: Jameson is reiterating here a very classic argument in Left genre
theory: Darko Suvin’s claim that science fiction is about cognitive estrangement
and the other factors that you’ve just listed. Jameson is reinvesting this argument
with a lot of thoughtful rigor, and he is trying to take the fantasy side of that dyad
quite seriously, which in the early formulations of that split is often basically waved
away as superstitious. Jameson’s effort is to be applauded and some of the claims
are quite interesting, such as the notion that fantasy is replicating a certain kind of
a structural model of medieval theology while stripping that theology out of its
allegorical nature. But he is deeply reluctant to get rid of the larger Suvinian dis-
tinction, which he thinks is fundamentally important. I have a problem with that
for two reasons.
Firstly, for such a historical thinker, Jameson does not historicize the actual
history of fantasy and Gothic. He says that they have much older roots than science
fiction, which appears to be an odd notion that in some more or less direct way
genre fantasy comes out of fairy-tale or medieval epic. If that is what Jameson is
saying, and he does not completely spell it out, then it’s quite wrong. I would turn
to someone like José Monleón’s argument in A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Socio-
historic Approach to the Fantastic (1990), that sees a distinction between fantasy
generically speaking and ‘the fantastic’ in general, and claims that the former has
to be understood as a genre of modernity that is formed at the same point that
(indeed as part of the process by which) (proto-)science fiction is formed. The
Gothic’s relationship towards the rise of the industrial revolution is a key moment
in that formation.
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A Discussion with China Miéville 63

The other problem is that Jameson does not have a theory of fantasy. What he
has is a description of the dominant mode of generic fantasy in the marketplace.
This is fine and many of his substantive criticisms hold insofar as that kind of
fantasy is the object of the critique, but what he does not flesh out is a theory of
what makes this fantasy, let alone its ideal-type. The closest he comes is when he
talks about magic, but I remain unconvinced that there is anything intrinsic to the
form of a story predicated on the impossible being true – as a very rough and ready
theory of fantasy – that is antipathetic to either historicism or utopian thought,
such as he sees as characterizing SF. Such a story certainly vigorously does not nec-
essary hypothesize the rigid separation between good and evil. Crudely, I think
Jameson has taken the overwhelming tsunami of post-Tolkien fantasy – what’s
sometimes called EFP: Extruded Fantasy Product – and taken it as definitional to
the form, which is a wrong-headed thing to do.
Look at earlier fantasy, like Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novels and
short stories, even something like E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ourobouros – the idea
that they are fundamentally about the ‘good and evil’ binary is quite wrong.
Similarly, there’s a lot of modern fantasy predicated on magic that does not do
those things (among the many examples, one of the most important, that embeds
a quite astonishing social critique and historicism is Michael Swanwick’s The Iron
Dragon’s Daughter). If Jameson is making a soft argument that most commercial
fantasy operates in the way that he describes, then fine, but I think he is making a
harder argument that there is something about the form of fantasy itself which
tends inevitably this way, and this seems to me unsustainable.
The science fiction part of the binary, the notion that SF is predicated on rigor,
is a model also constantly undermined in the actuality. A lot of science fiction that
pretends it is about scientific rigor is actually predicated on a kind of a late
Enlightenment model of the expertise of the scientist. This is a kind of caste or class
model that is, in a way, the Enlightenment’s betrayal of itself, since it says: do not
ask questions because we have an expert here who will understand this stuff for us
(and for the bourgeoisie). What you get in a lot of science fiction is a man in a white
coat telling you what something is and why it is, and this is supposed to be ‘cogni-
tive rigor’. This gesture evacuates science substantively of its actual rational content
so that it becomes predicated on charisma and authority. This is a parody of the
high Enlightenment and a highly class-based ideological parody at that.
GS: This is simply its own form of magic, not a removal of superstition.
CM: Absolutely. There’s a danger of reductionism here – claiming that the wizard
simply becomes the scientist – but there is a lot of room for this critique. My friend
and comrade, Mark Bould, has written about the gobbledy-gook language of
science in SF B-movies. What the post-Suvinian model does not seem to realize is
that these procedures cannot produce a cognition-effect because they are not actu-
ally about cognition, but its pretense. Citing these devices as evidence of scientific
rigor does not rescue the model, it problematizes and undermines it.
Of course, some wonderful science fiction does more or less work in a ‘cogni-
tively estranging’ sort of way to actualize its fantastic, but the boundaries between
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the impossible of the fantastic and Gothic on the one hand, and the impossible of
science fiction on the other, are simply too fuzzy to be systematically maintained.
What they share is as important as what distinguishes them. What they share is the
starting point that something impossible is true. Whether it is not possible because
it is not yet possible or whether it may never become possible, this starting point
of radical alienation from actuality is the fantastic moment that both ‘science
fiction’ and ‘fantasy’ share.
Jameson’s position as I understand it is that magic as a narrative form can only
engage with utopianism when it becomes about the death of magic. That, firstly,
begs the question whether utopianism is actually the key epistemological and polit-
ical moment of science fiction, a position with which I do not agree. I have tried to
indicate that science fiction and fantasy/Gothic are less about utopia than alterity,
the not-this-ness of this. That is not to say that utopia has nothing to do with this,
but to say that utopia is one iteration of a wider obsession with alterity, rather than
it being the only driver. (Of course you could say that any positing of alterity at least
projects a possible horizon of a utopian alterity – that’s arguable, but it’s hardly a
strong case that it’s the utopian-ness rather than the other-ness that’s key.)
Even if you accept Jameson’s terms, his case about magic is only true if based on
a model of post-Tolkienian fantasy whereby the magic is essentially a reflection of
a nostalgic, rural enclave. If we define fantasy on other models, then there is
absolutely nothing intrinsically antipathetic to a relationship between magic and
utopianism. Elsewhere I think he gets at this better, where he raises the notion of
magic as a kind of aesthetic projection of a sense of human creativity, analogous to
Feuerbachian religion. The problem is that the post-Tolkienian model of fantasy
has become so dominant that critics try to retroactively construct theories of genre
from The Lord of the Rings, which is like trying to theorize romantic fiction by
looking at Mills and Boon rather than Jane Eyre.
A final problem with this theory of the fantastic is that it has a simplistic reading
of the genre as a function of the market. Not to say that the market is irrelevant to
genre theory, but if it becomes key to boundary policing I think that constructs a
peculiar reception-based theory of genre at the expense of the specificities of artis-
tic form. No one would ever dream of denigrating Kafka on these grounds, no
matter how well he sells, while they might otherwise for another story in which a
character wakes up and discovers that by magic he has turned into a giant cock-
roach. What distinguishes Kafka’s use of the fantastic from Tolkien’s?
GS: Bracketing the Lukács–Frankfurt School debate about Kafka, Jameson might say
that the difference lies with how reader is encouraged to read The Metamorphosis
allegorically.
CM: OK, I think that this is right, but there are two problems here (and I’m not
suggesting, by the way, that we can’t make arguments distinguishing the uses, just
that what arguments do exist – such as that based on EFP or the market – are often
inadequate). Firstly, if we see the utopian moment in non-mimetic fiction as pred-
icated on allegory, we are stripping away the a-realism of that fiction and saying that
the fantastic is only meaningful when it is about the real and the non-fantastic. This
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A Discussion with China Miéville 65

is a backhanded vindication because it is saying that science fiction and fantastic lit-
erature become important when they really are not about fantastic things at all, but
‘real life’. This is disrespectful to the form of the fantastic. If allegory is its purpose,
then why not simply say the thing that it is an allegory for? And this is where we
get to the key about what makes the genre different. What unites the genre of
fantasy/Gothic and the genre of the science fiction is that they literalize their
metaphors. I am much happier with the notion of metaphor than allegory because
metaphor is much more ‘fractally begetting’ than a one-to one allegory.
Modern genre fantasy, for example, differs from medieval epics of magic as it lit-
eralizes its metaphors, so that if you meet a dragon in a modern fantasy novel you
are meeting, who knows, arbitrary State power or the violence of ignorance, but
you are also, crucially, meeting a giant lizard with green scales that is going to
breathe fire at you. That is not a failure of genre; it is actually a strength, which is
shared by science fiction. To literalize your metaphor does not mean that it stops
being a metaphor, but it invigorates the metaphor because it embeds its referent
within the totality of the text, with its own integrity and realism. When you read
fantasy, Gothic, or science fiction by non-generic writers, they are often so anxious
that people understand their writing is not actually ‘about’ this – the reality it
depicts – but about ‘real social concerns’ that the stories they tell are often less
believable. (To that extent, maybe you could argue that much of this ‘literary fab-
ulism’ has more in common with medieval allegory than with conventional
modern fiction of either generic or ‘literary’ stamp.) I don’t believe Margaret
Atwood’s monsters because I don’t believe that she believes in them, which means
that as metaphors for genetic engineering, as in Oryx and Crake, they have much
blunter teeth than a monster that I actually think is kind of scary because I believe
the writer believes it – loves it. Similarly, the hamfistedness of Paul Theroux’s
invention of a society in O-Zone is in part a function of his neurotic insistence that
the book is ‘really’ about sans-papiers, ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and so on, rather than
about the society depicted. The point of course, is not only that you could have
both: the paradox is that genre by its very literalism invigorates both its metaphor
and its ‘internal’ reality.
GS: Could I slightly reframe the question? If we put a little pressure on the phrase
‘the literalization of metaphor’, then it might be an analogous to something like
Raymond Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’. This is his term for how texts attempt to rep-
resent something that is indeterminate and difficult to represent because it is under-
going social change. Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism is respectful of things
that are not clear, which only seem static because the explanation for ongoing events
is difficult to perceive, and narrative allegory has limited uses under these conditions,
since allegory is best applied as a technique either for retrospective analysis or analy-
sis done with a more confident sense of what motors events.
CM: Williams is trying to consider the record of something that is always in
motion, and a metaphor might make it more possible for that process to be
represented. A problem with Brecht’s model of self-alienating literature is that in
an age of increasingly empty irony, the lumpen postmodernization of culture has
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highjacked Brechtian techniques to the extent I think that radical fiction can
sometimes do as good, if not even better, a critical job by acts of radical naivety
and radical forgetting of the fact that this is a work of fiction, as by attempted
‘alienation’ (particularly in its now common and often vulgar forms of metafi-
ctional shenanigan). One of the things that I like about genre fiction, as distinct
from the fabulations of Theroux or Atwood or some of the post-magic-realist
texts, let alone the excesses of modern whimsy, is that it does not wink over the top
of the text at the reader, it pulls the readers in, giving the metaphors room to play
in ways that would otherwise be hobbled as soon as they are pointed out.
GS. Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, even though written before Brecht, can
be read as a reply to that position. I take Sorel to be addressing the problem of subal-
tern or working-class education. How is it that you educate a mass or popular audi-
ence, perhaps a poorly literate audience, who already experience class struggle, into the
written critiques of political economy? For Sorel the answer to this problem of peda-
gogy can be found in the spectacular images felt within a mass strike or demonstra-
tion. A strike, almost like a dream, can scenify and condense a long history of injustice
done to the proletariat through a supersaturated image that immediately delivers an
intuitive left philosophy or common-sense to the viewer. For Sorel, the spectacular can
have a critical or didactic edge, but not necessarily through the techniques that Brecht
was trying to advance. The Sorelian image constructs communality and a sense of sol-
idarity, while the Brechtian one seems to desire the production of a more emotionally
isolated individual.
CM: I think it would be an absurd mistake to turn one’s back on Brecht, particu-
larly for me at the level of prose. There is a problem in that genre fiction has often
had a vulgar relationship to modernism at the formal level, with the obvious excep-
tion of Samuel Delany, the great modernist in the field, and a few others. I have no
problem with a ‘soft’ Brechtianism whereby the language itself acts as a kind of rap
on the forehead of the reader. Yet it is difficult to think of the framing narrative of
The Caucasian Chalk Circle and not wince at the hubris or hope of the notion that
the audience is going to nod slowly and then sit down and have a discussion group
– though I fully admit the cynicism that I am displaying may simply be a triumph
of right-wing ideology. Sorel’s notion of a critical intuition, which is quite
Gramscian in a way, appeals to me as a potential category. I would not say that it is
the only or right category, but certainly a powerful potential category. For a lot of
critics the fact of secondary world fiction, a group of stories set in an internally
coherent world, seems absurd, and to hard Brechtian critics it is worse than that –
it is like a kind of political betrayal. But in the left-Sorelian sense you can see it as
powerful, an inhabiting of a kind of space in which critical intuition can hit you
because you are inhabiting the totality of work of art, and I do think that this can
be a kind of useful radical naivety and forgetting.
GS: Perhaps one problem here is that we are stuck within what is fundamentally a
modernist debate and that one of the projects of contemporary Gothic and fantasy is
to move beyond the terms in which they would have been considered by this older
Adorno-Lukács-Benjamin discussion?
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CM: With genre fiction it is less that it has gotten beyond that, but that one of its
dominant currents has always been somewhat to the side of that debate because it
comes out of pulp. Of course, some critical modernists, like the surrealists, were fas-
cinated with pulp. But pulp has generally been separate from much self-conscious
critical modernist debate because of its status as para-literature and mass- or vulgar
cultural product. That did mean, though, that at its best, it had access to the rugged
resources of what I have described as radical naivety – and in some ways mimicked
certain modernist projects. I have never seen pulp successfully dealt with at the level
of its formal prose, for example, and there’s something about the prose of high pulp
as a kind of lumpen modernism that deserves greater attention.
GS: Is this critical naivety modeled for the reader by the characters in the Bas Leg
trilogy? In these books, the initial emotional context through which we are introduced
to the characters is the trauma of shame-induced isolation, disconnection, and exile.
This psychic duress is often also an embodied one, where interior distress is external-
ized in acts of physical mutilation and non-congenital disability, most obviously with
the Remade, the criminalized whose punishment includes being made chimerical
through organic and inorganic tissue and limb grafting. There are two striking aspects
to the pairing of social anomie and gross anatomy in your work that differ from their
common use. Firstly, the utopia of regeneration is never conveyed as a matter of recu-
perating the past’s ideal social/physical form in protective retreat from society, as is
often the case in bourgeois narrative. History hurts, it seems, but there is no going back,
no beatific repair that will take us back to a pre-traumatic moment or body. Tied to
this is the notion that any therapeutic response will be achieved through a process of
social co-operation and mutuality. Because of the social aspect to damaged states, your
work arguably can be located in a particular strand of modern representations of the
grotesque body as indicative of social dysfunction. By this I mean something like Mary
Wollstonecraft-Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is directly informed by the arguments of
her parents, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, for friendship as a medium for overcoming
social divisions. In Wollstonecraft-Shelley’s tale, the narrative voice calls the sentient
form the ‘creature’, while it is hailed as a ‘monster’ only by the figures that deny human
solidarity.
CM: My argument about naivety certainly is not intended to suggest putting the
critical faculties on hold; it’s a heuristic of reception, which is about saying: live in
the book while you are reading it. Allow yourself the ‘sense of wonder’. That is the
category science fiction always used to talk about and is now very embarrassed
about because it is such an atheoretical notion – it is now often derogatorily
rendered ‘sensawunna’. But I think we might need to rehabilitate that notion and
the surrender it implies, thinking about it in terms of the Sublime, of alterity and
alienation. I think it is linked to an ecstatic visionary tradition. That tradition
had hitherto been largely religious of course, but also, crucially, politically and
socially dissident in its depiction of a direct relationship with the numinous – one
thinks of the Baal Shem Tov, of Gnosticism, of Blake, of the Victorian mystics
like Francis Thompson, and many others. Considered as part of that lineage in
the context of a bureaucratizing and degrading Enlightenment rationalism, the
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political potentialities of an aesthetic surrender to the numinous, a sensawunna,

become clearer. That kind of wonder at otherness might even constitute an internal
rebuke to a certain triumphalist vulgar (capitalist) ‘Enlightenmentism’ – the
Dream of Reason, after all, brings forth monsters.
In my stuff, the writing about the Remade is precisely an attempt to do two
things at once: to interrogate notions of the monstrous and terratological as they
have been used in Gothic and postgothic texts, but also to indulge them.
GS: It would be difficult to find any body that is held up as normative in the Bas Lag
trilogy.
CM: Absolutely. In certain cases, these bodies have some amazing and beautiful
abilities, and there is an attempt to create a narrative about coming to inhabit the
body that is now your body, which is either a moment of joy or simply a matter-
of-fact moment that is not necessarily problematized. I should say that it would be
a mistake to be too pleased with oneself about this, because the idea that you need
to go back to the pretraumatic body is nowadays undercut by films as mainstream
as Shrek or the X-Men. This is hardly a massively radical position: it can be a kind
of liberal notion that you are beautiful just as you are. In the Bas Lag trilogy, there
is an attempt to embed the social, rather than the individual, fact of the somatic.
The Remade are, in a very direct way, socially created bodies and when they become
rehabilitated by the inhabitants of those bodies that rehabilitation also takes place,
whether it is in The Scar or Iron Council, through a process of social change and
social rehabilitation and social contexts.
GS: Recent writings on the social construction of disability have often charged Gothic
and fantasy writing with obscuring the social construction of disability by relying on
representations of non-normative bodies to carry forward and resolve the plot. For
instance, Quasimodo in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris is the figure who bears the con-
tradictions of the encounter between two historical phases; his contorted body is the
fleshly device of a period’s ‘combined and uneven development’ in the early modern
period. The critic Lennard Davis says, let’s look at the nineteenth-century novel and
notice the key place of the disabled and how the disabled body is fetishized as a pivotal
device for mystifying the larger social contradictions embedded in these narratives. Is
there a way that a left narrative can differentiate itself from bourgeois uses of disabil-
ity as a representational instrument?
CM: I am acutely conscious of the tension and would tentatively make the dis-
tinction between grotesquerie and pathology, especially as it unravels through the
Bas Lag trilogy. In Perdido Street Station the Remade are obsessively pathologized
because Perdido Street Station is essentially a viewpoint of a naïve tourist who
arrives in the city. In The Scar one of the viewpoint characters is a Remade. This is
important. A key moment of reengagement comes as he learns to love his new
body, but his attempt at reconfiguration does not quite work because it is a very
honorable, but essentially atomized attempt. He was in a new social situation, but
was very much thinking about himself in terms of himself as a new but still rela-
tively atomized agent. The key moments of Iron Council have entirely to do with
the self-emancipation of the Remade using the abilities of these new bodies given
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to them in an act of violence, seen usually from the outside because I want the view-
point characters to be witnessing this as if through the glasses that they have inher-
ited from the city. This, however, is the most successful reconfiguration of the
bodies in the three books because it does not just change the individual’s relation-
ship to her or his own body in a new system. They are the pivots of a social prob-
lematization leading toward a moment of liberation. When an unaltered woman
ostentatiously kisses a Remade man, it is a moment of social pathology but it is also
a moment when a key becomes turned.
GS: These instances of reconceptualizing the pathologized body, the body made
‘abnormal’ by institutions of power, as a corporeal ground for perceiving larger social
processes in play raises the question of how we locate ourselves in the passage of History.
Writing in the age of the Nazi, Fascist, and Falangist State, Walter Benjamin famously
argued that a critical left perspective involves excavating possible moments of alterna-
tive trajectories in history. He called this brushing history against the grain, and today
this notion, aligned with a dedication to uncovering the history of marginalized
groups, broadly informs much of recent historical and cultural studies. Benjamin’s
injunction often seems harder to enact today. How do we convey the texture of history
to generations that have had their access to history recollection and critique blocked by
a series of structural obfuscations in late capitalism? Kim Stanley Robinson seems to
argue that one bridging mechanism would be to relate past history in the future tense
so as to convey the notion that our history-to-be will be shaped much as the history-
that-was because we have not yet broken from these periods’ shared similar dynamics
within the capitalist world-system. In the Mars trilogy, Robinson argues that the best
way to narrate the Russian Revolution for a readership that is uninterested in history
is as a tale of twenty-first-century exploration of Mars. I mention Robinson because
you and he share certain biographical similarities and political sensibilities, even while
he is solidly located within generic science fiction and you are not. Do you see
Robinson’s method as a new program for narrating historical consciousness?
CM: I do not think that there is an easy answer to the way in which readers can be
replugged into historicism. If you think of Robinson’s trilogy as retelling the nine-
teenth century in the future, there’s no inherent reason that retelling previous his-
tories in and of itself would answer anything (which certainly isn’t a diss of
Robinson’s work). If I have any kind of strategy, it would be about thinking of
history as methodologies of change rather than narratives of particular historical
moments. It would be about the depiction of moments of historical change in ways
that are compelling, believable, and hopefully end in change, or at least interrogate
why change does not happen. Obviously that’s going to involve a plundering of
history, so Iron Council is a kind of crossbreed of the 1871 Paris Commune with
the American West. You draw from history, yes, and then there are key moments
that aren’t reconfigurations of specific historical moments but moments of class
power, such as when a group of police attack a particular demonstrator and there
is a moment of pause, as everyone else waits for someone else to stop it, and then
someone does, and it is someone who has not featured in the story before and does
not feature again, and is not one of the obvious leaders of the insurrection. Rather
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than saying, here is way for readers to think about change, it is hopefully a way for
depicting how change can happen in ways that are believable because they focus on
the minutiae of moment to moment change, that does not come out of nowhere
for readers because they have seen the staging of all these prior moments.
GS: In its own historical context, could the Bas Lag trilogy be read as a response to
New Labour?
CM: Definitely. The Bas Lag books were part of a wave of baroque writing that came
out of the late 1990s/early naughties. In the British context they were a response not
just to New Labour, but very directly to the post-Seattle anti-capitalist movement, a
moment in which the first time in fifteen years people felt like potentialities were
being opened up. Even though New Labour was a disappointment, the very fact that
it was a disappointment bespoke that there had been aspirations beforehand. What
characterizes the Gothic and fantastic fiction of that period is a sense of potentiali-
ties, and even the dark books, the gritty books, the sad books and the bleak books
are exuberantly bleak because potentialities are being opened up. Now I think we are
moving into a rather different period, and the fiction inevitably is changing accord-
ingly, but it’s on the basis of that earlier moment, in the shadow of which we still
stand.
I can’t yet really discern the tendency right now. Perhaps having moved away
from despondency, now we’re heading away from exuberance, and towards an
increase of tension. I know every political generation tends to think it inhabits end
times, so there’s a danger of exaggerating the ‘Weimarianism’ of the moment.
Nonetheless, as too many mainstream liberal novels continue a slide towards solip-
sism, the sense beyond those boundaries feels to me less playful and tenser, terser,
sharper than it did a few years ago. Neither worse nor better, necessarily, but more
fraught. That’s vague, I know – the trouble is, we’re right in the middle of it, so we
don’t have the perspective to see it. In a few years time, maybe, we’ll have a better
sense of what it is we’re doing right now.