Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

Miéville’s latest book, “A Spectre, Haunting: On ‘The Communist Manifesto,’” is also a work of nonfiction, but it is not novelistic. (Full disclosure: I have been a speaker at several literary conventions at which Miéville also spoke and once appeared with him on a panel. It turns out that class war is a hell of a plot device. Novels like “King Rat” (1998) aren’t gripping phantasmagoric thrill rides despite their politics rather, it’s the politics that imbues them with so much excitement and conflict.

His fantasy novels are shot through with class struggle, and in ways that are integral to the narratives. It is technically possible to be familiar with only one of these aspects of Miéville’s career, but it would require an act of will. On both scores, his bona fides are beyond reproach: Since 1998, he’s published a string of best-selling, prizewinning, critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the so-called New Weird tendency, including the “ Perdido Street Station” trilogy and his breakout novel “The City and the City,” which was adapted for British television.Īs for Marxism, Miéville’s dissertation in international relations, “Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law,” was published by Haymarket in 2006, and he was the Socialist Alliance candidate for British Parliament for a district in central London in the 2001 election. “The way to tell if a fantasy novel was written by a Marxist,” an observant person once said, “is that it gets the ratio of peasants to lords right, while the bourgeois variety is off by orders of magnitude.”Ĭhina Miéville is a fantasy writer and a Marxist.

A SPECTRE, HAUNTING: On “The Communist Manifesto,” by China Miéville

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville