Politics and the fantastic

[Hannah Bell]

A long-time socialist and member of the British Socialist Workers Party, (China) Miéville has won or been nominated for every major literary science fiction or fantasy award, and has the distinction of being the only three-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award. In 2008, science fiction website IO9.com called his novel Perdido Street Station one of the "20 science fiction novels that will change your life..." His latest book, Embassytown, which he describes as more definitively in the science fiction genre, was released in the U.S. earlier this month. Miéville spoke to Nicole Colson at Chicago's Comic and Entertainment Exposition in March about the role of politics in his writing, his thoughts on science fiction in popular culture and how politics and faction interact:

SCIENCE FICTION and fantasy is having a huge pop culture moment right now, yet in terms of literature, there still seems to be a real degree of sneering at it. A Booker Prize judge, John Mullan, said a couple of years ago that science fiction was "bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other."

I DEBATED him about that actually... yes, there is a great deal of snobbery about it... I think it's got a lot to do with the triumph of a certain genre that we now call "literary fiction," which has become terribly successful at pretending it is not a genre, but is in fact the definition of literature. That's the result of very powerful marketing campaign over the last 30 years or so.

But I think it does go further back than that. I think it's something to do with a shift in late Victorian and early Edwardian culture--a certain phase of bourgeois culture. Writers had done stuff across fields before then, but something shifted, and quite a strong ideology emerged of mimetic representation. There are literally books and books and books on why that is, but I think it is the result of a certain ideological moment... I don't want to be saying that the dominant ideology hates science fiction. If you look around, the dominant ideology loves science fiction. But there is a certain sense of generic hierarchies. But I also think that it's breaking down at the moment...



http://www.www.socialistworker.org/2011/05/23/politics-and-the-fantastic

[Odin2005]

1. Great article!