_Iron Council_, like Mieville’s earlier novel _The Scar_ has a lot to say about betrayal. However, the most important betrayals of _Iron Council_ have less to do with personal deceit than the the more subtle treachery of political mythology; its ambiguous consequences and necessary faithlessness to the individuals whose struggle is mythologized. On the one hand, political myths hold out hope and inspire action, on the other, they don’t reflect the aspirations of the individuals whose actions gave rise to them. _Iron Council_ has at its heart an unresolved and unresolvable argument about the relationship between revolution, myth and history.
There’s been some grumbling about China Mieville’s third entry (which, apparently, is the last one he plans to write for a while) in his series of novels about the remarkably filthy city of New Crobuzon. I have to assent to the loudest grumble–namely, that the novel takes too long to get itself in gear: while the ambiguity of the opening chapters is fine in and of itself, narrative tension temporarily collapses under the cacophonous weight of the usual odd creatures. Once things get rolling, pun intended, the pace intensifies noticeably. The narrative itself is divided among three alternating focal characters: Judah Low, a would-be messianic figure who specializes in making golems; Cutter, his lover and most devout follower; and Ori, a discontented young radical. And then there is the “Iron Council” itself, a quasi-utopian mobile city of ex-criminals, ex-laborers, and ex-prostitutes, forever in motion on its stolen train. The plot’s actual workings are much closer to The Scar than to Perdido Street Station, although Mieville continues his cheerful habit of happily killing off or psychologically mutilating his main characters. Two of the novel’s major plot points resolve on complicated double-crosses, albeit not quite so detailed as the one in The Scar.
Science fiction and speculative fiction have always been as much about the past as about the future. Buck Rogers, reawakening in the 25th century, liberates his oppressed compatriots by refighting World War I, complete with artillery barrages. A step up from this kind of pulp, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series inaugurated the “future history” genre with a replay of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Then there are the innumerable translations of medieval romances, sea stories and Westerns into various mixtures of SF and fantasy.
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Warning: Enormous spoilers to Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council, follow.
INTRODUCTION AND CAVEATS.
I am deeply flattered by and grateful for the attention that the Johns, Belle, Miriam, Henry and Matthew have paid to my stuff, and by their invitation to respond. Even more than having your work liked, having it thought about means a huge amount.
It puts me in a slightly awkward position, though. I don’t generally publicly respond to reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’ responses to critics seem to me at best undignified. One of the usual arguments authors level is the foolishness that ‘I know better than you because I wrote it’. To make my position absolutely clear: authorial intention be damned. I do not necessarily know best. Which is to stress that this unusual and gratifying opportunity will inevitably be a Response To My Critics, and I beg them not to read it as defensive. Where I disagree, I say so in the spirit of open-minded debate.
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We can all stop blogging now (and not a moment too soon). “Query Letters I Love” has found the ultimate use for the medium: posting and mocking real Hollywood script queries from wannabe screenwriters. Just a sample:
“The protagonist’s challenges throughout the story are:
1) A seagull attack gave him Seagull Herpes, an incurable disease that will soon kill him.
2) The seagull attack also tore a bone within his calf in two. His best medicines are herbs and acupuncture, so the bone never fully heals, and it causes internal bleeding for him to walk. The story involves him running a lot…”
I’m in love.
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Jim Henley says it “in plain English”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_01_09.html#005789.
bq. All together now: Saddam was worse! In terms of body count in Iraq this is true, though the man had a big head start on us, so we ought to be allowed a couple of decades to catch up. But what about the world ? Is it better? And are we? We have gone from a time in which the tyrant of an oil patch with a broken army and 23 million inhabitants practiced a tyranny which all decent people abhorred, to a time in which the largest and most powerful country in the history of mankind justifies torture and contemplates assassination teams – we should call them terror squads – as official policy. And the people who most consider our virtue unchallengeable are the quickest to publically avow our need to torture and murder.
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Dan Hunter recently posted a paper called “Walled Gardens”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=635141 on SSRN. Although the paper has received some attention from legal bloggers (“here”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/archives/2005_01_01_lsolum_archive.html#110494748452395983 and “here”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_01_00.shtml#1105044769), it’s been all praise so far. Hunter argues that law reviews should allow open access to the papers they publish. And what legal academic could disagree with that? As Hunter says, academics are interested in the widest possible dissemination of their ideas.[1] And free or open access certainly promotes the value of spreading information and ideas.
Hunter’s basic position is that law reviews should permit and indeed encourage authors to self-publish. Journals should also make articles available on-line for free consumption. I’m generally sympathetic to this position. I’ve only published one “paper”:http://ppe.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/3/2/191 (forgive the shameless plug), but it’s not easy to get access to it. It’d certainly be nice if everyone could read it for free. But I’ve also spent most of the last year working for a law review, and, from the perspective of a student editor, I think Hunter’s criticisms are somewhat harsh. I also think he underestimates the long-term costs of doing business—even on-line. What follows is a first pass at Hunter’s argument. I put these thoughts forward tentatively, and I hope they’ll be received that way. I think Hunter’s paper is important and provocative. It raises lots of interesting questions about what (legal) academic publishing should be like, especially in a paper-free world. But those questions appear to me far more open than Hunter sometimes suggests.
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CHUCK SIMMINS NOTES that George Soros appears to be missing in action on tsunami relief. So are some others you’d expect to be giving. (Via Bill Hobbs). On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that Soros’ foundation did a lot of good work regarding the Ukrainian elections.
Hack. There must be some set of values under which it’s entirely appropriate to criticize the mainstream media for bias in the morning, for sloppiness in the afternoon, and then pump out this bilge in the evening. Somewhere, deep in The Way Things Ought to Be, Google is the only tool you need to make this sort of accusation. It’s clearly inconceivable that a multi-billion dollar philanthropist would donate to a horrible tragedy without advertising it on a blimp, at an absolute minimum.
A real journalist who wanted to follow this angle wouldn’t do so without contacting Soros. A journalist who published a piece sneering at a private citizen’s lack of charity, based entirely on his lack of self-promoting press releases, would face some harsh words. For the world’s foremost political blogger, it’s just another day at the keyboard. We’re not going to be overtaking the MSM any day soon.
“But he said ‘appears’!” I’m sorry, that’s no kind of standard. I could spend all friggin’ day commenting on the apparent grevious failures of people that I don’t especially like. (Did you know that Sammy Hagar appears to have never denounced NAMBLA? Makes you think, dunnit?)
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A marvellously generous blogger named Michele Agnew will donate $1 to Oxfam’s tsunami relief for every comment to this post (until she closes it; I think that she’s already gone well above and beyond her original plan of keeping it open for 24 hours.) I’m getting to this very late in the day, but don’t hesitate to try.
UPDATE: Her comment thread is now closed after 500 comments. Many thanks to Michele, and many thanks to everyone who had a chance to participate.
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A rather interesting paper by Richard Tuck at the OPT conference on Hobbes and Rousseau contained a longish quote from “De Cive”:http://www.constitution.org/th/decive10.htm (10.9) about the inconveniences of democracy. At the time it seemed to me to contain wise advice about the downsides of blogging, and on chasing it up, that view is reinforced:
bq. But perhaps for this very reason some will say, That a Popular State is much to be preferr’d before a Monarchicall; because that, where all men have a hand in publique businesses, there all have an opportunity to shew their wisedome, knowledge, and eloquence, in deliberating matters of the greatest difficulty and moment; which by reason of that desire of praise which is bred in humane nature, is to them who excell in such like faculties, and seeme to themselves to exceed others, the most delightfull of all things. But in a Monarchy, this same way to obtain praise, and honour, is shut up to the greatest part of Subjects; and what is a grievance, if this be none? Ile tell you: To see his opinion whom we scorne, preferr’d before ours; to have our wisedome undervalued before our own faces; by an uncertain tryall of a little vaine glory, to undergoe most certaine enmities (for this cannot be avoided, whether we have the better, or the worse); to hate, and to be hated, by reason of the disagreement of opinions; to lay open our secret Counsells, and advises to all, to no purpose, and without any benefit; to neglect the affaires of our own Family: These, I say, are grievances. But to be absent from a triall of wits, although those trialls are pleasant to the Eloquent, is not therefore a grievance to them, unlesse we will say, that it is a grievance to valiant men to be restrained from fighting, because they delight in it.
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Hey, I’m nominated for a Koufax for Best Writing! Since I’m competing against, among others, Crooked Timber, this is a little awkward. But keep in mind that when people say Size Matters, what they mostly mean is that Grotesque Length matters. (How much post you’ve got tucked under the fold. I hope I don’t have to draw you a map.) Vote Holbo.
I’m too much like that Chris Klein character to vote for myself, however. I think I’m voting for Yglesias. I think I learn more from him on a regular basis than from any other blogger. Of course, his posts are drafty and full of typos, so it depends what you mean by ‘best writing’. I figure James Wolcott is going to trounce us all anyway.
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I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference, which was great fun. On my trip I managed to run into Chris Brooke of “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html , Marc Mulholland of “Daily Moiders”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/ and Sarah of “Just Another False Alarm”:http://rubberring.blogspot.com/ . I’ve met Chris before, but it was good to see the others as well and to compare blogospheric notes with Marc. Chris told me about “the fuss about the BBC’s broadcast”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4154071.stm of “Jerry Springer: The Opera”:http://www.jerryspringertheopera.com/jerry_opera.html . So of course I tuned in to this spendid TM production last night and greatly enjoyed such numbers as “Chick with a Dick” and “Mama Gimmee Smack on the A**hole”, before wowing to the Jerry in Hell special program complete with Jesus, God and the Virgin Mary. The microslice of the blogosphere that both hates the BBC _and_ was in a great lather of indignation over the British government’s incitement to religious hatred legislation (Melanie Phillips and co) is going to have a problem over this one. Here’s how I expect them to handle it: (a) they’ll argue that it exemplfies the double standards of a decadent culture (everyone is careful not to offend Muslims and Sikhs but Christians can be trashed with impunity) and (b) they’ll say that whilst _of course_ there should be no legal interference with speech, the BBC _is an exception_ , since, funded by licence-payers, it had an obligation not to transmit JSTO. Just my prediction, now let’s wait and see…
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Just before Christmas, a new cafe opened up outside the main gates of the “University of Arizona”:http://www.arizona.edu/. The coffee is good and it’s a shorter walk than the alternatives. The people are friendly, too. One of my colleagues was chatting with the owner, Danny, last week — he’s often behind the bar serving customers. Danny asked whether my friend taught at the university, and then in what department. “Sociology,” my friend said, which is usually enough to move the conversation to some other topic. But instead Danny said “Oh, my uncle was a sociologist — he was pretty well known in Europe years ago, but you’ve probably never heard of him. “What was his name?” asked my friend. “Oh, Mannheim,” says the owner. “Karl Mannheim?!” says my friend. “Wow, you know his first name!” says Danny. Small world. Sociologists know that already, but the point of that insight is precisely that you don’t know about every case. There are probably other connections of this sort in my acquaintance network that I’m completely unaware of. Yours, too.
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“Sam Heldman”:http://sheldman.blogspot.com/ seems to have returned to blogging, after more than a year away. I think that’s great. If you remember his old blog, you’ll probably think it’s great, too.
Voting is underway for the 2004 “Koufax Awards”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001581.html. If you have a mind to, vote for CT in the “Best Group Blog”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001591.html and “Best Overall Blog”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001590.html categories.
*Update*: Also “Best Writing”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001594.html.