Interview with China Mieville pt. 2

This is part 2 of my interview with China Mieville. If you didn’t see pt. 1, be sure to check it out as well (it’s just below)!

PC: In your 2003 interview with Joan Gordon, you stated, “The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to ‘game stats.’” Specifically, you talk about how they stat out Cthulhu, and how do you create stats for something so powerful that we can’t comprehend it. My question is, are you concerned that the Bas-Lag RPG will have a similar affect on creatures in your world specifically like the Grindlylow or the Weaver or things like that?

CM: Well, I’m obviously not so worried that I didn’t want them to go ahead with it, but it’s certainly a danger. If you were to stat out the Avanc or something that would be quite silly. It would be like trying to fight a city or something, but it was interesting the response to that article and I said similar things at a con and it got reported and there was some response to this. And I don’t know if it was a question of it being misreported or if I wasn’t clear, but I was startled because it seems that there were some role-players who thought I was dissing role-playing. I was very surprised by this and if that was the impression I gave, then I need to hold up my hands to the hobbyists and say that was not my intention. I owe RPGs a huge amount of my mental furniture. I have enormous affection and love for them. I learned a lot from them. What I was describing, and I think you put your finger in it, is a tension and it seems to me that the mania of systemization is sometimes absurd (and I think it’s absurd to stat out Cthulhu) at the same time, it’s an absurdity that appeals to me. I get it. I have great empathy for that desire to do that.

When I was role-playing, one of the things I did, I got frustrated because I didn’t think they were statted enough. I didn’t think they were systematized enough. One of the things I loved aboutRuneQuest was hit locations. I homebrewed a whole bunch of tables to add hit locations to things like Cthulhu. “Roll a d20. Okay, you hit one of his tentacles. Nothing happens, he still kills you.” It was completely absurd, so it’s not like I don’t have complete empathy for this.

What I think I was saying was that the fantastic genre uses that kind of tension and you can see books and fiction lean towards one way or another. So you have things that are like magic realism or high literary fantasy that are against that high systemization and it becomes more like a kind of a dream logic and then you have the other end which are simply like a book version of a D&D campaign where you have a list of spells prepared per day and that kind of thing. There is some kind of oscillation between that sense of awe and that systematizing of that awe making a kind of a totalized and comprehensible. And I think that’s a completely insoluable tension because the point of the awe is that it is unknowable and the point of that systemization is to not just know it, but to kind of rigorously taxonimize it. So, I think it’s something that can’t be solved, but I do think it creates a really interesting tension and because it can’t be solved, it doesn’t mean that you’re ever find an elegant way out of it, but hopefully that kind of oscillation back and forth can lead you to some really kind of interesting effects.

I feel that tension in myself. I often think of the creatures I’m creating in RPG terms even if I don’t slap my own wrist sometimes. Like, how do you stat out a Weaver? And that tension is quite productive. I’m fascinated by that tension. I know that there are role playing games out there that are trying to move away from that kind of mania systemization. I’m talking about the stuff I knew and the stuff I grew up on.

It’s a quantum relationship to the unreal. A kind of constant superpositional vibration between blasted awe and nerdy dice rolling that I find really really interesting.

PC: Lately, you’ve been moving into the realm of comic books, and I was curious as to your relationship with comics. Did you read a lot as a kid?

CM: I always read comics. In Britain, we have a slightly different tradition of comics and they were very important to us. I suppose I wasn’t one of the super comicy guys who used to keep up with everything partly because I couldn’t afford it, partly because I found a kind of neurotic, plastic bag fetishism about your monthly titles being kind of stressful. I prefer collectives which proper comic fans kind of despise.

I was a kind of a midling comic geek. I was aware of Watchmen at the time, I wasn’t someone who came to it 15 years later.Watchmen, Dark Knight, Ronin and all that – I was reasonably up to date of all that. I wouldn’t say I was completely up on the Marvel and DC universes, but I had a vague sense of the big things that were going on. I read the Alan Moore Swamp Thing. I was into underground comics like Charles Burns, and Chester Brown, and people like that. I always black and white art.

PC: You were attached to revamp Swamp Thing and I was curious as to what kind of take you had on the character?

CM: I had scripted out five issues in total and I had done an outline for ten more, so there was a little done on it. It was a 15 issue arc. Basically, it was going to be quite political (probably not surprising), but I have enormous respect for Alan Moore as a writer, I think he is absolutely amazing, and I also very much like how he deals with politics in his work, but at the same time, his politics and mine aren’t always exactly the same (although we are both on the left in some sense), but I wanted to have a sort of respectful argument with him about what the notion of ecology is. His run on the Swamp Thingwas very much about the deep ecology stuff, and I find myself to be a bit skeptical of that, but I do count myself as a green, but I think of myself as a kind of “red green.” So, some of the ways of ecological thinking are kind of anti-humanist and toxic.

I’m being deliberately a little bit vague, because I don’t want to say too much about what was written because I don’t want to presume anything.

It was meant to be a respectful argument with Alan Moore. It was going to take a couple of minor characters from the DCU and pumped them up and sort of retconned some stuff in the universe. I think in a way it was kind of rigorous but wouldn’t have fucked with stuff that had gone on before and introduced a couple of new characters. It was big, violent and epic and had wars in it. It was a big, sweeping thing is what it was.

PC: I’m in love with Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and I think that’s really fascinating to think about a different way to look at ecology.

CM: There is more than one way to think about ecology from a progressive position. Alan Moore is very much a progressive and I’m very much a progressive and I have a huge amount of respect for him as a writer, but that doesn’t mean we have exactly the same politics. There is more than one way in thinking from a progressive position about the relationship between humans and nature and vice-versa and where I wanted to respectfully argue was where I felt that there was a certain privileging of one over another which I had a bit of a problem with.

And you didn’t have to care about that stuff. It was a big, cool, kind of kick-ass, and sort of blinding fight scenes in there as well.

PC: One final question that I’ve always wondered is how magic is utilized in fiction and how do you write magic in a believable way that avoids the deus ex machina?

CM: Well, I mean there’s different ways of doing it, isn’t there? You can go the D&D route and think in terms of magic having very very rigorous rules and have your characters do magic within the context of the rules and no more. My own thing is that as long as it has it’s own internal, consistent logic, even if it’s dream logic, people will largely let it go.

Even the deus ex machina thing, it’s not exactly the most elegant way out of a plot, but they can be done well. It isn’t the worst sin in the world. For myself, one of the things I’m been interested in is taking a different kind of thematic metaphor and having it as a kind of conceptual backdrop for the magic. I really hate books that take their fantasy and subordinate it to the metaphor so that you’re constantly having the writer kind of tell you what it means. I don’t want to do that. It has to have an internal belief in itself, but there is that internal organizing theme in the backdrop and that can lead you to a certain kind of internal rigor.

For example, in Perdido Street Station, the notion of magic is a kind of literalized metaphor about the idea of tension and crisis leading to resolution. It’s deliberately almost kind of camp, but it’s a dialectical logic of synthesis – of thesis/antithesis tension leading to something else.

In the Scar, it’s a radicalized sense of quantum possibilities. The logic of many worlds and thinking about how would you weaponize quantum events. What are the uses and limitations of these events.

In Iron Council, it’s the notion of human interaction in the world as symbolized and forgetting it’s a symbol within a golem maker and that being a contradiction with someone who works with elementals because elementals it’s much more to do with not controlling them but making deals with them.

And in Kraken, it’s a completely different logic again. The logic has to do with simile and metaphor and the idea of something being like something else and it’s intrinsically a chaotic logic. It’s a riff on Thomas Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow has a lovely passage where he talks about the way humans make connections between things and he has a description where somebody is seeing rubbish and interpreting it as if it is a literary text and he’s kind of teasing because this is what he does all the time. He knows it’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s kind of what we do as human beings and it has a certain kind of amazing poetry to it, but it’s also kind of bogus and he calls this Kute Korrespondances.

And so in Kraken, one of the things I was wanting to do was to take this idea of Kute Korrespondances and push it a little bit further. That logic of simile of one thing being like something else actually has kind of material magical effects in the real world. You are actually making magic out of simile. Again, then the logic becomes logic of persuasion.

In each of these cases, the events hopefully present themselves and as long as you remain reasonably true to the internal logic of the theme and the system you have created, then hopefully it doesn’t simply become a kind of “get out of plot difficulties” free card.

PC: Thank you so much for doing this interview! I really appreciate it!