Green Planets (34 page)

This literalism follows from Miéville's love of thoroughgoing application, of taking a trope as far as it can be taken. So Wati, originally a model of one of those servants intended to serve the Egyptian upper class in their afterlife who rebelled against that servitude, has gone on in semi-immortality to organize all such beings into revolt or protest. As events unfold in
Kraken
he is leading a strike of the UMA, the Union of Magicked Assistants—a huge variety of those who drudge and are industrially exploited as familiars to magicians: mice, beetles, pigeons, and whatnot. The narrative of the strike—pickets, scabs, strikebreakers—is threaded through the text; meanwhile Wati also helps Billy and Dane in
their flights and quests connected with the missing squid and the way in which the squid seems to be precipitating the apocalypse to end all apocalypses. To do this he manifests as a voice and a spirit—not, now, in the original clay model such as one sees in the Egyptian department of a museum, but in anything that is replica or statue-like, banal or dignified. He can go anywhere he can find these things, and Miéville entertains himself with varying them—the insignia on a car, a bronze statue, a crucifix on a necklace, a figure of Captain Kirk from Star Trek:

 

“How'd you feel about a Bratz doll?” Dane said.

“I've been in worse.” (177)

 

The magical rubs up against and is sometimes derived from the everyday, and the everyday comprises not only perennial trash and grunge but also banal contemporary things like Captain Kirk dolls.

Similarly the personage called “the Tattoo” is one of the two crime lords who are masters of the violence of the novel's alternative London. He turns out to be a literal tattoo. He has been imprisoned in the form of a tattoo on the back of an innocent guy named Paul, and from there directs his minions, to Paul's severe discomfort. Later, after a series of adventures, Paul will regain control of his self simply by having a tattooist sew up the mouth of the Tattoo. Earlier Paul and Marge had muffled the Tattoo with tape. The Tattoo, a man able magically to speak and command even though imprisoned as a tattoo on another man's back, is nonetheless subject to ordinary conditions, such that if you plaster tape across his mouth he can't speak. Who imprisoned him? The other crime lord, Grisamentum. Grisamentum is in violent quest of Billy and his allies in order to get hold of the kraken (or more precisely the apparently stolen or disappeared giant squid from the Museum of Natural History). He believes he can restore his own life by combining with the ink of the squid, and can do this by sympathetic magic or magic of literal proximity, whereby if something is near or even concerns another thing, it is on the way to becoming that thing. Grisamentum plans to melt the ink off the writings about the kraken that he has had his minions steal, and blend with that ink too. It all stems from a kind of power in metonymy, or in contiguity.

By this stage we need to invoke another aspect of the world of the novel. This is that there are no gaps in existence, only gradations that may be bridged or used as stepping-stones. It is a Derridean world of slidings and deferred differences, not so much interdependences as overlappings and metamorphoses.
There is no absolute or broad division between death and life. Grisamentum is in process of coming back to life, by way of the ink of the squid and even of the writings about the squid or the kraken, added to his ashes. He utilizes “an interzone closer to life” (that is, closer than his apparent state of being dead), “a threshold-life” (401). Dane comes back to life after being tortured to death. The squid, dead and preserved in the huge glass tank of fluid at the museum, stolen, teleported to a truck, thence to the embassy of the Sea (literally thus: a place at which this vast power may be contacted) and back to the museum, comes to twitching life, dies again in self-sacrifice: transpositions, transformations. The way to spirit (that is, aliveness with more capacities than aliveness has in our world) is through matter, and often the grungiest of matter at that. Familiars or golems may be made out of “a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair” (215) for instance; magicians and esoterics animate and give purpose to a flock of pigeons or a cloud of dead leaves. And even though the plot is largely concerned with keeping the missing squid from a bunch of criminals who are capable of reckless violence and torture, there is a sense in which no distinction exists between good and evil, because both sides are united by a similar kind of manic energy. No one is really in control of the oncoming apocalypse, and both sides have to become manipulators of the forces and factions of alternative London.

The ultimate villain, the one revealed after all the preemptions, fakes, false leads, and inconclusive, supposedly climactic battles, is a certain Vardy, who has no moral character, or at least none that has any kind of manifestation comparable to the highly colored nastiness of characters like Grisamentum and the Tattoo. Vardy is the anomaly among all these personages whose anomalousness is bound into the rules of transformation that otherwise prevail in the novel's apparently anarchic universe, but he is a mere shadow of the resolving third terms we have noted in earlier texts; it is the reimagining of imagined apocalypse as the scene of a dialogue between humans and universe that brings about resolution in this novel.

Each of the novels that have been discussed rethinks and restages the relations of the ordinary and the anomalous in our contemporary, apocalypse-obsessed culture. It is the value of the ordinary, and the threats to it from contemporary culture, that shapes each novel. Each arguably offers a democratic imagination of apocalypse, or apocalypses.

We can observe a shift from
The Lathe of Heaven
through
Girlfriend in a Coma
to
Kraken
, though in each case the governing condition is that reality is the product of human dreams. The struggle against the apprehension of future
calamities gives rise to guilt and anxiety in George Orr, the main character in
The Lathe of Heaven
; the universe responds to his effective dreams, often in unexpected ways that give rise to more problems, but otherwise it stands aloof, and help has to come from outer space. Resolution requires an analogous but grander anomaly in Coupland: a teenage ghost, a fake apocalypse. By the time of the carnivalesque
Kraken
, however, we can speak of a release of human fearlessness in the face of apocalypses, and here the universe is “persuadable,” though it seems to be only by luck that what persuades it is the version of itself that Darwin advanced, rather than the more violent versions on offer in the world of the novel. The trajectory from
The Lathe of Heaven
to
Kraken
is, then, one that illuminates the issues at stake with contemporary apocalypse, because of the variations played on the relations between the human dream of apocalypse and the universe's responses to it.

These novels further suggest that the ordinary cannot be imagined without being put into relation with the banal and commodified. It is this contemporary condition that challenges Coupland and Atwood, in particular, calling forth their strongest diagnoses. Both Coupland and Atwood give us bizarre and weird worlds, but make us recognize them as our daily and familiar creations, not as alternatives. In the society of
Oryx and Crake
language operates to conceal and trivialize the horribleness of the products of science and commodity culture; Snowman's ordinariness is mediocrity at best, and Oryx, the elusive outsider to the system in this novel, does no more than haunt the aftermath of disaster. Coupland's dealings with the banalities of consumer culture in
Girlfriend
are ambiguous, and incite him to a series of risky narrative moves that only just come off. In this regard Miéville's tactic in
Kraken
is noteworthy in its difference: Miéville seeks instead to redeem and revitalize the banal in ordinary things and to knit them into a thoroughgoing erasure of and play with the blurring of ontological boundaries.
Kraken
thus builds an alternative to our current world not out of extremity or radical difference, but out of its most familiar and most ordinary bits and pieces—and the effect is freeing.

Notes

Javier Marías,
Written Lives
, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (London: New Directions, 2006), 99.

 

1
. Perry Anderson, “The Force of the Anomaly,”
London Review of Books
, April 26, 2012, 3–13 (8).

2
. Brian Stableford, “Man-Made Catastrophes,” in
The End of the World
, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 126.

3
. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.,
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 160.

4
. China Miéville,
Kraken
(London: Pan, 2010), 78.

5
. Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Lathe of Heaven
(New York: Avon Books, 1997).

6
. Thanks to Rachel Ellis for discussions about Coupland.

7
. Douglas Coupland,
Girlfriend in a Coma
(New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 63. Additional references to this work in this section will be provided by parenthetical citation.

8
. Ibid., 267–68.

9
. Linus asks Richard what is the difference between the afterlife and the future:

“The difference,” I said, “is that the afterworld is all about infinity; the future is only about changes on this world—fashion and machines and architecture.” We were working on a TV movie about angels coming down to Earth to help housewives. (92)

10
. Margaret Atwood,
Oryx and Crake
(London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 27 and throughout. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.

11
. See Veronica Hollinger, “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition,”
Science Fiction Studies
33, no. 3 (2006): 452–72. Hollinger suggests that it is almost as if Snowman is the only “real character” in the novel (467n.11).

12
. Miéville,
Kraken
, 116. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.

13
. A subgenre mixing
SF
, fantasy, and horror, as discussed by Roger Luckhurst; relevant authors include Peter Ackroyd, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair, and M. John Harrison. See Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn,'”
Textual Practice
16, no. 3 (2002): 526–45.

3

QUIET EARTHS, JUNK CITIES, AND THE CULTURES OF THE AFTERNOON

10

“The Rain Feels New”

Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi

ERIC C. OTTO

With many of his stories, Paolo Bacigalupi instigates a reconsideration of dominant ways of thinking in response to ecological degradation and its related social consequences. As such, the author is an environmentalist and a utopian, an ecotopian whose environmental concerns influence his participation in a literary form that articulates “the desire for a better way of being.”
¹
In utopian literature, the gap between the actual world and the narrative world encourages readers to think about alternatives that would bring about a future better than the present or would prevent a future that is worse than the present. Because the gaps that Bacigalupi highlights are the results of a number of existing and identifiable social and cultural forces, his stories participate in what Tom Moylan calls the critical utopian tradition. As Moylan notes of the revitalization of utopian literature and thought during the oppositional 1960s: “The critical utopias had and still have their place in furthering the processes of ideological critique, consciousness-raising, and social dreaming/planning that necessarily inform the practice of those who are politically committed to producing a social reality better than, and beyond, the one that currently oppresses and destroys humanity and nature.”
²

Bacigalupi mobilizes critical utopianism in the interest of critiquing social and cultural forces that degrade nonhuman nature and the human communities that are imbedded in this nature. As ecotopias, his stories are “efforts to reimagine a sustainable human society,” as Kim Stanley Robinson notes of ecotopian efforts in general.
³
In “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004), for example, Bacigalupi “argues for a nature that is not valued merely as a resource for humanity but that is irreplaceably, utterly different from us and valuable for that simple fact.”
⁴
In “Pop Squad” (2006), Bacigalupi works at the nexus of economic and
cultural production and biological human reproduction, engaging socialist ecofeminist questions about the tensions between production and reproduction and implicitly arguing for a more ethical relationship between the two.
⁵
In “Pump Six” (2008), he argues for a revised understanding of the connection between humanity and nonhuman nature as he thinks about the long-term sociocultural consequences of the infrastructural efficiencies we often take for granted—technologies like sewage pumps, which foster misapprehensions about human being and ecological being.

To say Bacigalupi mobilizes utopia to prompt a reconsideration of ethics, economy, thinking, and being in light of ecological and social degradation is not to say his imagined societies are
themselves
utopian. Bacigalupi's fictions are not about future societies that we can assume the author “intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived.”
⁶
On the contrary, dystopia is Bacigalupi's self-admitted “natural zone.”
⁷
A generic sibling of utopian fiction, dystopian literature “takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions.”
⁸
These developments, for Bacigalupi, are the ethical, economic, and epistemological assumptions and consequent practices that prevail today and structure modern life; the “devastating conclusions” are the rationally extrapolated but imaginatively rendered environmental and social costs of the present. “The People of Sand and Slag,” for example, is set in a future when humans have fully transcended the biological world and accept as normal an industrially decimated land and sea, as well as their own post-biological, superhuman, radically atomic being. In “Pop Squad,” women who are caught with children are shipped to work camps, their kids murdered by a population-control police force, while complicit citizens wonder what could make women abandon lives of economic and cultural productivity to have kids. In “Pump Six,” malfunctioning sewage pumps threaten to flood residents of New York City with their own waste, but apathy among the population prevails as citizens in this polluted future have devolved into thoughtless troglodytes.