Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.”īLDGBLOG has always been interested in learning how novelists see the city-how spatial descriptions of things like architecture and landscape can have compelling effects, augmenting both plot and emotion in ways that other devices, such as characterization, sometimes cannot.
In “Reports Of Certain Events In London,” from the collection Looking for Jake, Miéville describes how constellations of temporary roads flash in and out through nighttime London, a shifting vascular geography of trap streets, only cataloged by the most fantastical maps.Īnd in his 2004 novel Iron Council, Miéville imagines something called “slow sculpture,” a geologically sublime new artform by which huge blocks of sandstone are “carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. In his story “The Rope of the World,” originally published in Icon, a failed space elevator becomes the next Tintern Abbey, an awe-inspiring Romantic ruin in the sky. Decktop houses were cracked and strained from the boats’ constant motion.
Parklands crawled across clippers, above armories in deeply hidden decks. They passed over the converted vessels on bridges, between mazes and plazas, and what might have been mansions. The streets between the buildings were tight. Centuries-old pagodas tottered on the decks of ancient oarships, and cement monoliths rose like extra smokestacks on paddlers stolen from southern seas. They were built up, topped with structure, styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and aesthetics into a compound architecture. In The Scar, a floating city travels the oceans, lashed together from the hulls of captured ships: In his 2000 novel Perdido Street Station, for instance, an old industrial scrapyard on the underside of the city, full of discarded machine parts and used electronic equipment, suddenly bootstraps itself into artificial intelligence, self-rearranging into a tentacular and sentient system. The work of novelist China Miéville is well-known-and increasingly celebrated-for its urban and architectural imagery.
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