Fantastic Metropolis

Perdido Street Station
China Miéville
Macmillan, 2000

Imaginative fiction which refused to rationalise its flights of fancy as dreams, visions or scientific speculation used to be called simply ‘fantasy’. The description suited books as varied as Grant Allen’s The British Barbarians, Well’s The Wonderful Visit, Garnett’s Lady Into Fox, Woolf’s Orlando, White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, Peake’s Titus Groan, Richardson’s Exploits of Engelbrecht, Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, Amis’s The Alteration, Harrison’s In Viriconium, Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor or Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

Today Tolkien-cloned Fantasy has become a bookshop category like Mysteries or Romance. We know it has something to do with talking animals, elves, heroic quests or, if we’re lucky, comical wizards but we have a problem distinguishing the individual, the literary, from the popular generic.

We once emphatically described J.G.Ballard as speculative fiction rather than science fiction because we needed to distinguish his work from a public perception, in spite of Kingsley Amis’s puritan prescriptions, that sf was all spaceships, purple people eaters and pulp plot lines. An impression, of course, which TV and movies have confirmed a millionfold since New Maps of Hell was published in 1960.

It’s currently fashionable to call an unrationalised fantasy a parallel- or alternate-world story, terms borrowed from sf. Such stories began as ideas rather than backgrounds. The best known modern example is probably Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which proposed a present in which the Allies lost the Second World War. Saki did it best, for my taste, in When William Came (1914), written before his death in the trenches, about Germany winning the First World War and a British ruling class coming to terms with its conquerors. In the hands of desperate professional writers this device quickly becomes an easy way of tarting up some shabby old plots. The exotic lost land adventure, which began with Defoe, if not with Palmerin of England, suffers badly from actual exploration. Mapped, logged and claimed, the mysterious becomes merely untrue. She or Tarzan of the Apes can no longer exist in the Africa we now know. They can, however, plug on happily in a ‘parallel’ Africa, where the sun never set on the Empire, some Ruritania, or even Dickensian London.

A more ambitious kind of fiction creating a mysterious city or world, such as Gormenghast, has considerable irony and is only a shade away from Faulkner’s Yawknapatawpha in intention and sensibility. This fiction tends to use its backgrounds as part of its narrative structure. The best is M.J.Harrison’s Viriconium sequence, which indulges a Walpolean taste for the exotic and the antique. It’s a romantic, knowing, post-modern version of the Gothic in which strange, ruined cities are not merely given soul, but achieve sentience, even senility. An often overlooked example is Brecht’s Threepenny Novel, which offers a marvellously distorted Edwardian London. More recently there’s Steve Beard’s Digital Leatherette. Beard was published beside Mieville, Steve Aylett and Tim Etchells in last years Britpulp! anthology edited by Tony White. All borrow elements from popular fiction, have their own invented worlds, with their own architecture, own history and own bizarre inhabitants. Aylett’s absurdist thrillers (Slaughtermatic, The Inflatable Volunteer) mostly happen in the city of Beerlight, while Etchells’s sardonic fables are set in Endland, a world of infinite rundown housing estates, boozers and fast food restaurants.