Left Luggage is the working title of my science fiction trilogy. My agent, Rebecca Pratt, is handling it and has sent it to lucky publishers for appraisal.
While I waited for the months to go by, I sent the opening scene to a
competition called Strong Scenes. The result today is that mine is one awarded an Honorable Mention for May 2010. here
http://www.strongscenecontest.com/ about half way down.
Again my mrs had to work in Llangollen so I chauffered, donned my hiking boots and headed for the hills. I’ve just uploaded a clip to Youtube if you’d like to view http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToFrMzoymo0
I only encountered two other people in four hours, who’d have thought you could be so alone in Britain. Marvelous for thinking plots and characters.
The path was probably tramped by the Romans and ancient Welsh before them. A ruined Cistercian Valle Crucis monestory is nearby so the ghosts of monks were no doubt following me. Eglwyseg escarpment is popular by climbers but not before July to allow the birds to finish nesting.
The City & The City
ISBN: 978-0-330-49310-9
China Miéville
Reviewed by Geoff Nelder
I could see, then unsee, why this is science fiction and yet not.
This book arrived on my shelves enveloped in controversy. It had just been awarded two science fiction awards, nominated for more, and yet journalists were asking if it was really science fiction or just a crime novel with added dimensions. If I thought it was akin to when Margaret Atwood is in denial of her obvious-to-most science fiction writing, then I’d be wrong: China insists that everything he writes is science fiction and that any discussion of such niceties is ‘silly’. But it isn’t silly when he wins awards set aside for science fiction works.
Reading the blurb, I was both pleased and gutted. Pleased anyway because I relish China’s love of the art of writing. I am not one who thinks the author should be invisible and there are phrases China uses that makes me stop and admire his skill. Pleased also because of the premise: two cities occupy the same physical space and yet the occupants of one city ‘cannot’ see those of the other; nor their buildings and vehicles. I was gutted because it seemed to me this is a story where parallel universes meet at a city-size intersection, and I wanted to write such a story. The two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, have different architecture, language and social mores yet share knowledge of the rest of the world. So they all know who Tom Hanks is, and can travel to the same Britain, Canada and the US. The notion of parallel universes and a possible intersection is certainly a concept within the bounds of Quantum Physics and hence science fiction. For an undeclared reason it is illegal for the citizens of either city to see each other. It appears that if this happens they commit a breach of protocol and a particularly powerful body called Breach punishes them. This becomes complicated because how can someone drive along a road that is in both cities but has to unsee vehicles and buildings belonging to the other city? Accidents happen and Breach swoops. To me there are many contradictions in this aspect of the plot – it is too easy for naughty children to throw stones at windows of either or both cities, committing Breach all over the place. CCTV is referred to but the logical consequences aren’t. That is: how can anyone view a photograph of the city without noticing cars, people and buildings from the other city?
But wait. First let’s praise where it is due.
Mostly, this is an extraordinarily well-crafted crime story with three main characters – police from the two cities – who are alive and credible. You can tell who is talking from their speech patterns and mannerisms, faultless. Love the idea that a policeman from one city is needed to help solve a murder that takes place in the other. The victim is crucial to unravelling the mystery of the two cities and it seems there are groups eager to keep the secret. China does a terrifically moving job of making the two detectives distrust then come to admire each other, in their own way. Brilliant. Generally, an author has his work cut out to describe one unique city so that the reader believes they are there, but here two cities are created in the same spot. Excellent and original. I would have liked more flesh on the character of the protagonist, Borlu. We are told he has two women, who don’t know each other but we feel more for his assistant. There are times when he should be scared stiff yet isn’t. When his Breach officer is shot, he should have been worried that the other Breach would suspect him but he seems to be unaware. I like his character though I think I made up more than was revealed in the novel.
You need to have a good imagination to appreciate The City & The City and to keep having one to the end. It isn’t a light read even though it is fast paced. I’d like to say that I walk about my own city (Chester) wondering if I am in another parallel city but hadn’t noticed before. Yes, we all go through life half blind to architectural niches in a too-familiar town, but it isn’t the same. The inhabitants of both cities in TC&TC have been indoctrinated from birth to unsee the other and know they have been. This is hard to take on – it lacks credibility in a modern society with TV and international travel even with a tough Breach enforcement.
If having two different cities occupying the same geographical space isn’t hard enough there may be another, Orciny, which was there before the two started. There is a hint that an alien force created the conditions for Beszel and Ul Qoma to develop separately and unseeing from the ancient original. If anyone discovers the truth there could be disastrous consequences – in my imagination and with Quantum Mechanics in mind, I thought perhaps the true knowledge of each other might snuff out one or both. Rather like a Schrödinger Cat experiment. Because of Breach and indoctrination, such thoughts are outlawed, but there are factions. Great geopolitics here, with groups wanting unification, others demanding either Beszel or Ul Qoma as the true city.
Before I say why the ending disappointed me, I have to praise the writing. Breach are specially trained security – they are expressionless, reinforced to make them different to the normal police of either city. “Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.”
Phrases I wished I’d written: “Silence went through the room, leaving itself behind.” “…was addressed to me, prisoner, condemned, consultant.” The juxtaposition of opposites there very well done, and when you read it in context, apt.
Maybe it is because I jumped to the parallel QM conclusion too early and eagerly waited for such an exposition, I was becoming anxious near the end. By half way I’d written it differently – I’d have had the messing with the seeing / unseeing of and by the citizens of each city create a sudden coming to a mathematical point, an elimination of one or both. In the end, nothing so exciting (for me) happened. It kind of fizzled out as if China didn’t know how to finish the novel – an outrageous point of view I know, and improbable. Right from the start, the QM aspects kept the book firmly as Science Fiction. Then, in the last few pages we find that it was all a con. No parallel dimensions, no QM, Breach and the indoctrination is all that keeps the two cities going. What? That to me is far too contrived. I cannot believe a dual system kept in place by force and culture like that. Fair enough, Apartheid kind of did, but in an obvious way, not with unseeing and all the contradictions that throws up. I am disappointed at the end, but I would struggle to say the novel isn’t Science Fiction. In many ways it is with the original concepts, alt history, and possibilities.
The City & The City is a great crime story for readers with intelligence and admiration of lateral thinking. Maybe it is worthy of the Clarke Award, but I hope it isn’t a sign that future Science Fiction will follow suit. Not that I want all my SF reading to have aliens and rockets, but I don’t want to watch a film of Raiders of the Lost Ark to end with a ‘sorry there was never an Ark in the first place’ either.
Amazon UK has introduced a way for authors to show their short biography and photos along with books they authored that exist on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B002BMB2XY
There are other books and magazines I am involved with as editor or contributor but I’ve yet to figure how to insert them on that page.
I have yet to read China Mieville’s The City and The City as I’ve been bogged down getting through Stephen KIng’s The Stand, a long-promised read (the 1400 page version). I make the admission in order to clarify that I am not making a judgement on China’s award-winning book. I love his other books mainly because of the literary style of his writing, and it shouts at me from the bookcase to be read.
It is fascinating through how doubt has been levelled at The City and The City as to whether it is science fiction or just a damn good crime story with a two city setting along with a ‘fantastical’ element. This opinion is set in the Guardian review pages by Alison Flood. She also says that China isn’t bothered what people think and that as far as he is concerned all his writiing is science fiction. Consider that China’s The City and The City has recently won awards by people who know their science fiction – the Arthur C Clarke Award and – it is nominated for the Hugo Award for science fiction novels.
China says: ‘ ”What I don’t want to do is disavow the fantastic tradition I come from. This is a book from within the fantasy tradition, which hopefully can also be a perfectly faithful crime book – and a good book.”
Maybe it is pure crime or crime with fantasy, but is it science fiction? China says such discussions are silly but that’s a cop out.
What a contrast then to Margaret Atwood who shouts that NONE of her writing is science fiction even though most of us would consider stories like Oryx and Crake, set in the future with GM humanoids a yes for a SF genre. I explore her attitude and look at classical definitions of science fiction in Kalkion at this link
http://kalkion.com/column/it-science-…
Now I will have to rush the last 250 pages of The Stand so I can judge China’s latest for myself.
