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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 articles 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 evaluate 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, distancing, and individuating and 'Dionysian' pieces that are emotive, integrative, and massifying. This split also aligns with Brecht's rejection of Aristotelian aesthetics, which use mimesis to generate emotional tension that first magnetizes the reader's identification with represented characters and then relieves this pressure through catharsis. Brecht instead championed cultural productions that would snap the spectator's collusion 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 dominant 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 conceptual rigor that, because of its low sales, is relatively autonomous from the commercial market's pressures. Its preferred mode of historicism treats differences...