More on Mieville

carlos, I think you probably have a point in that I was too sanguine about the idea of ‘resisting aestheticisation’ – aestheticisation is a lot tougher than that. As to the ‘striking a blow’ quote, it was meant tongue slightly in cheek. But with a serious point – what happens to Lin was thought out, deliberate, strategic, in (honestly) an attempt to avoid certain cliches that I think are gendered and sexist. But – I do sincerely accept that it may not have worked, and maybe swimming past one cliche it got et by another.

No girlfriends in refrigerators in the follow-ups. And GIR is a brilliant, phrase, by the way, which I hope you don’t mind me pinching.

Interesting interview but a terrible intro:The Scar and Iron Council, are socially relevant, politically current, and anything but derivative. Think Middle Earth meets Dickensian London on really good acid.
So it’s not derivative; it’s just Middle Earth meets Dickens! (aargh)

I liked Perdido Street. I liked the Scar more. Iron Council was even better. But… none of them quite seem to make sense. There’s always the lurking feeling that ‘you can’t actually make money doing that’ or ‘that isn’t really practically possible’ – things like the economics of Armada (where does all the food come from? They’re hundreds of miles from the coast! Or the coal?), or the railway rebels making their getaway, frantically laying track in front of themselves like Wallace and Gromit at the climax of ‘The Wrong Trousers’.
(Written by someone who doesn’t know very much about building railways with circa 19th century technology; I suggest ‘An Abridged History of the Construction of The Railway Line between Garve and Lochinver’ by Andrew Drummond).

There are two recent novels that hit on this theme very well. In Neal Stephenson’s ‘Quicksilver’, there is a scene at the Siege of Vienna where the protagonist sees Jan Sobieski and the Polish Winged Hussars ride past, and deduces that, since the Hussars are the most magnificent cavalry he has ever seen, the Polish peasantry must be abnormally poor, servile and downtrodden – a deduction which he then uses to his advantage. (A rather good counterbalance to all those noble horsemen in fantasy, incidentally.)

The other is Terry Pratchett’s ‘Night Watch’ in which, right after the Paris Communish rising starts, one of its leaders is forcibly reminded exactly how many cartloads of flour, cabbage, eggs, chickens, etc a city of a million people needs to take in OR DIE every single day.

I didn’t ask this question last time because I felt stupid asking it. I still feel stupid asking it, but now I feel even stupider for not having an answer. So.

How does one pronounce Mieville? Three syllables or four? Where’s the stress?

Ajay: as non-snarkily (towards any of the involved parties) as I can put this, suffice it to say that Mieville has a substantially different notion of how economies work than Pratchett or Stephenson.

If, like myself, you find your intuitive understanding of these things to be a bit closer to Pratchett’s, it’s probably best to read The Scar with the understanding that the economics behind Armada operate on the same principle as the watercraeft of the Vodyanoi or the reshaping of the Remade: wild, unknowable and certainly unexplainable magic. Otherwise, you’ll just get a headache.

China,
Thanks for the tip. My fellow fans around here kept getting tripped up during our arguments about your books. Anyway, very hearty congratulations on the prize.

Ajay,
I agree that Armada would need rather a lot of restocking. There are a fair number of details about home production, a couple of references to critical shortages (paper, particularly), a few descriptions of plunder coming in–but, yes, it’s a big city advanced enough to support comparatively leisure-class employment (Coldwine works at the library, not at the agricultural commune), and such structures tend to require regular agricultural supplies.

Still, I didn’t notice the problem on my first couple reads, and when I read the book again, the supply-side shortage will probably still not bother me all that much. And I think that the reason the plausability of Mieville’s explanations for the economic sustainability of Armada don’t matter so much to me is because the book is more an allegory of political ideologies. (Iron Council is more clearly concerned with questions arising from economic analysis, I think.) The exploration of motives is good enough to withstand a little skepticism of the “but where do they get their calcium” sort.

Besides, I expect that the citizens of Armada didn’t expect to live to an old age–not even those who lived under the benevolent vampiric dictatorship. Armada’s willingness to take on new citizens suggests, to me at least, a lack of anxiety about overpopulation…