Material Horror

China Miéville counts Mervyn Peake and M. John Harrison among his primary literary influences, and any fan of those two authors will certainly not be disappointed by Miéville's Perdido Street Station. Dickensian in scope, Kafkaesque in bleakness, the novel tells the story of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a scientist who promises to help a wingless garuda fly again. But when Isaac accidentally unleashes a soul-sucking horror on the city of New Crobuzon, he must team up with the strangest collection of characters in modern fantasy to make things right again.

Miéville spoke with Amazon.com's Therese Littleton about his geographical influences, filmic inspirations, and secret zoological notebooks.

Amazon.com: Perdido Street Station takes place in a dense, dark city--what real-life places are reflected in New Crobuzon?

China Mieville: Primarily London. But I also lived for a while in Egypt and spent quite a bit of time in Cairo. Cairo was very influential on me and on New Crobuzon, particularly on trying to depict how every little crevice is filled. And the reconfiguring of the planned environment, that's very Cairo. So those two loom biggest. A lot of cities from fiction, too, and New York to a certain extent--the scale.

Amazon.com: Your mother lives in Cuba, and you've traveled there. Are there elements of Havana in New Crobuzon also?

Mieville: Oh, I should have included Havana in the list. I had already written a lot of Perdido when I first went to Havana, but I went back and changed a lot of it because of stuff I'd seen there. The trees in Havana--a kind of banyan. Also the thing that everyone goes on about--the decayed elegance of Havana--is actually real. It was very influential indeed. It's an astonishing place.

Amazon.com: Another thing you do is populate the city with weird races and species, some of which are influenced by various mythologies. Do you have favorites among your creations... any that you'd like to meet?

Mieville: I really like them all, I'm very proud of them. That's the funnest thing for me--inventing creatures. I just doodle monsters. But I've got a soft spot for the cactacae. I really, really like the cactacae, partly because I just think the term cactus people is cool. So I suppose they're my favorites... and the Weaver. I really like the Weaver.

Amazon.com: Speaking of the Weaver, you've said in other interviews that you don't like it when fate and destiny run the story as plot devices. How is the Weaver different from that?

Mieville: I needed the Weaver to do certain things in the course of the book, but there was a danger of it turning into a deus ex machina and being pulled out at any point in the story. What I hope makes it different from destiny is firstly, it's not foreordained. I find the foreordination of destiny and fate completely deadening to narrative, and that's what I really hate. So even though in many cases the Weaver comes through, you don't know it's going to come through, and that's important.

The second thing is the capriciousness of the Weaver. Because the fact is that sometimes the Weaver doesn't come through, and if it does, it may come through in a completely unexpected way or a way that has a great deal of cost. And not a cost in the sense of a kind of mythic sacrifice for a higher end, but just a really shitty thing that happens. There's an element of chance. It's just complete, illogical chaos. There's nothing fair about it.

I don't like mythic structure, things that operate according to abstract absolute strategies into which the story slots as if the moral architecture preexists. That really irritates me. The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it.

Everyone who tries to trust the Weaver in the book ends up not getting what they want or getting it in a messed-up way.

Amazon.com: What makes an alien character like the Weaver really effective?

Mieville: One of the things that always annoys me is that alien creatures in SF aren't really alien at all, they're humans dressed up in metaphorical rubber suits. Having said which, if you want to make alien creatures characters or protagonists, as opposed to forces of nature, if the reader can't identify with them, there's really no way in. So I kind of cheat and have it both ways. In creatures like the cactus people, and the khepri, and the vodyanoi, I quite consciously decided that these are creatures that we can identify with. Basically, they're not really alien, in the sense that I can put readers inside their heads. But they come from radically different cultures. So the miscommunication and misunderstanding is culturally based. In a way, it's exaggerating the difficulties of the real world.

But if you leave it at that, it's not really examining the whole alienness thing. So I have the Weaver, which is a really alien character. And because of that, I would never try to write what's in its head. I would never use first person from the point of view of the Weaver. Definitionally, I can't do that.

Amazon.com: Do you think of New Crobuzon as being populated by lots more races than you described in the story?

Mieville: Absolutely. I tried to create a sense that the world is total and exists beyond the bounds of the book. This book just dips in and follows a particular narrative thread and a few little side threads.

Amazon.com: There are lots of gross, disgusting bits in the story--lots of extruding, excreting, grotesque things. Did you make yourself sick writing about them?

Mieville: I'm very interested in body horror and the physical, materialist basis of horror. From Lovecraft through to people like Cronenberg. Some of the disgusting bits--like the slaughterhouse scene--are taken directly from real life. And if you're trying for urban realism, you're going to get gross things.

It's interesting what people think is disgusting.

If I see someone spitting in the street, I go "Bleeahh." But the khepri spit art and architecture, I didn't find gross at all--I found it fascinating. The Remades are gross, I accept that. They are the nexus for the examination of body horror. When writing about extreme unpleasantness, there's always a danger of slipping into a kind of aesthetic sadism, which I don't like, and I find distasteful. But I think it would be disingenuous to say that there isn't an element of prurience. It's a prurient job you're doing if you're interested in body horror.

Amazon.com: Are you influenced by the Brothers Quay?

Mieville: I love the Brothers Quay, and they were a huge influence on me. Also Jan Svankmajer, the Czech animator--he more so, in fact. The Brothers Quay film Street of Crocodiles led me to Bruno Schulz, who wrote the original short story. What I get from them and from Svankmajer is tactility. Extreme, super close-ups of dust settling slowly. You look so closely at something that whether it's disgusting or not becomes irrelevant--you're looking at a kind of kaleidoscope of textures at that point.

You get a sense of the horror being rooted in material, in the physical, rather than in a moralistic ghost story.

Amazon.com: Did you spend time in zoos, or investigating zoology, to get to the mechanics of your creatures' bodies right?

Mieville: I have some medical textbooks, particularly anatomical atlases and so on, because I use them as references for drawing. I'm not a biologist; I couldn't talk about it scientifically, but I try to make sure everything works. For example, with the khepri, where you're dealing with a bifurcated creature with many more orifices than us, questions come up about excretion, digestion, and reproduction.

In my own mind, and in my notebooks, I know how it works. I draw all the diagrams--there's no immaculate conception. And what I like about creatures like the garuda and the vodyanoi is that they are creatures from myth, but treated completely disrespectfully. So it's a matter of taking the garuda of Indonesian myth, and saying, now what if this creature had to eat and breathe and excrete and mate. You strip it down of all the mythical stuff and treat it as if it were an animal.

Amazon.com: The character of Motley seems to be the pinnacle of Remade technology, and certainly its most horrible result. Is he New Crobuzon's ultimate citizen?

Mieville: He is, and he is also the place where clinicality breaks down. Motley defies description. With most of the Remades, I'm quite clinical about describing the actual, physical reality. With Motley, you never really have a sense of his shape--you could never draw a picture of him.

Amazon.com: Did you play with the idea of antiheroes, or unheroes, when creating characters like Isaac?

Mieville: I wanted to write an antifantasy, an unheroic, unepic fantasy. So structurally, yes, I very much did not want the kind of hero who can stamp their will on fate and history. But it wasn't a question of creating the character thinking about that--it was saying this is the kind of book I want, and this is the kind of character that fulfills that for the narrative. I had a lot of fun with Isaac. It was about trying to create a realistic character.

Amazon.com: The book is very cinematic, very graphic. Any plans for a film or graphic novel?

Mieville: I'd love anything of mine to be made into a film. But I'm nervous about it, because I think they'd muck it up. With Motley, the way to do it would be with a set of staccato close-ups, so you have a sense of fragmentation. You'd never get a sense of the whole--the camera would never enclose him. And I don't know if they would have the restraint to do that.

I love drawing, and I draw comics. I drew frontispieces for Perdido that were published in Vector, which is the British Science Fiction Association journal, and one of them is now shortlisted for the BSFA art prize. The main problem is that I'm really very slow. I could never make my living out of illustration. Especially with something like Perdido Street Station , that I would want to do perfectly, or not at all. It would take me years.

Amazon.com: What are you working on next?

Mieville: I've just finished a novel set in the same world as Perdido Street Station . But it's a standalone. I'm just dipping into the world and pulling out another narrative. It's called The Scar , and I'm very pleased with it. It's a bleaker book, and it might be tough going for some readers.