Unlike any other

“She wheeled from him, resenting his attempt to scoff away such wonders. The bit of poster had spun a new world before her, excited her, given wild, soaring impetus to her imagination; and now, without in the least understanding herself, she wanted that excitement and the soaring, even though it might stab and rack her, rather than the barren satisfaction of believing that in life there was nothing better, nothing more vivid or dramatic, than her own stableyard.” – Sinclair Ross, “Circus in Town”

I keep meaning to talk more about the books I’ve read lately, starting with China Miéville’s The City & The City. It’s recently been nominated for a Hugo Award, but what I keep coming back to more than anything else is this little piece of description from the jacket copy: “set in a city unlike any other”. And I can’t help but think that this is both fundamentally true and completely and totally false.

Because here’s the thing: without spoiling much, it’s almost immediately apparent just how different Miéville’s twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma are from any in the real world, and yet they are both recognizably real cities. They have to be, because as readers that’s where we live — in the real world — and as much as we may look to fiction for escapism and elements of the fantastic, I think what we ultimately want are characters whose own wants and desires, whose problems and decisions are, if not our own, than at least inescapably human. I think this is a reason it’s so difficult for science fiction to create aliens who are truly “the other” — one reason why they’re so often just humanoids with nose ridges or pointy ears or some other single defining trait. Because science fiction, and maybe all fiction, isn’t really about the other; it’s about how we, as humans, react to it. The metaphysics of Miéville’s book are dizzying, but it’s the human side that grants us entry.

It’s telling, I think that he set it against the backdrop of the real world, with the two cities interacting with the United States and other nations, rather than in his fictional Bas-Lag universe. These are cities that could have easily been at home in that world, but it’s clear that Miéville needed the trappings of this world to make his story feel more real.