Miéville shows an obsession here with combination. He is like some chemical engineer fiddling with different methods of synthesis between two dyes. In his left hand he holds the city of Besźel, in his right the city of Ul Qoma. What chimerae will he conjure in trying to wed the two? Will the ripples of each city combine constructively and result in a tidal wave? Or will they meet destructively and result in something far stranger—a conspicuous and eerie calm where we expect a sonic boom?

Perhaps it’s unsurprising to say that this book, and indeed any book with an ampersand in its title, is a book of dichotomies. But then, our world is one of dichotomies. Walt Whitman is one of many authors to sum up our innate tendency toward self-contradiction far better than I could: “I contain multitudes.” So, like us, our cities are sometimes doomed to be so many two-headed babies matriculating in jars, sometimes growing with expansive zeal and sometimes stunted like neuromas coiling in on themselves, snakes eating their own tails infinitely but with no outward expanision.

In Miéville’s role as grand unholy combiner he shows a devotion to the idea of what gets created in the zones of intersection between the things he combines. This book is one of moiré patterns—optical illusions wherein our brain not only perceives new patterns from the combination of two similar images, but actually can’t focus on the original images once these new implied patterns emerge. Just so Miéville when he brings two cities together to occupy the same geographic space. He knows that this combination will create interstitial space, “crosshatches” on the map of urban overlay. He creates schools of thought like my favorite of his many coined terms “dopplurbanology,” but also knows that in these interstitial conflicting regions things like extremist political factions, shadow governments, and paramilitary organizations will be drawn like doomed spaceships into a black hole. He defines a bipartite world by the regions of overlap and when he creates these almost unknowable regions he sets up the boundary conditions of his simulated world.

Out at the edge of sense and reason is where phenomena can begin to interact. Ideas can bubble and ferment and inform our everyday world. It’s in the zones of intersection and “grosstopological” confusion that we learn the truly weird shit like how light particles can become waves and light waves can become particles. They can be neither. Both. Miéville uses the term “superposition” and invokes Erwin Schrödinger to assist in his descriptions of Besźel/Ul Qoma. This is no accident. Especially not for a man trying to set a detective on a path of discovery in a world that is so often called Lovecraftian. Especially when we consider H.P. Lovecraft’s understanding of the numinous nature of our universe inaugurated by our quantum experiments at the borders of what could be called “sense” or “reason.”

In his efforts to enmesh these two cities Miéville can’t help spilling the paint can onto the drafting table and of course enmeshing this fictitious world with our own. Some very nonfiction ideas/people that get name dropped in The City & the City are: Chuck Palahniuk, East/West Berlin, the dotcom boom, and (to the delight of sickos like me) Slavoj Žižek. The world within tC&tC is one that is so perfectly similar to ours but phase shifted just one or two degrees out of sync. Enough that we begin to see moiré effects emerging at the boundaries of where Miéville’s world intersects with our own.

This book was released in 2009 and almost certainly written during the height of the 2008 Recession/sub-prime mortgage driven housing crisis/Occupy Wall Street and in the fledgling first steps of the post-Iraq War modern state of hypersurveillance. Miéville’s world in this book is one where internet connections are frustratingly slow, human rights are easily suspended under the auspices of arbitrary “terrorism” charges, and secret police are invoked like Lovecraftian Old Gods or Faustian Mephistopheleses. Bureaucracies flash freeze into crystallized polymer branches formed instantly when the right combination of factors appear. Here Miéville owes much to (and rightfully acknowledges) Franz Kafka—who is the prototype not only of the banal horror of unknowable bureaucracy but also of the “just barely not our Earth” literary fiction setting.

So we have a new set of chemical substrates that Miéville sets on his lab bench ready to combine. Beakers and flasks of H.P. Lovecraft, Franz Kafka, Raymond Chandler, Alfred Kubin, Bruno Schulz, and oh why not let’s add the Ccru into the mix. Because between texts lies the new text waiting to be exposed. Miéville doesn’t just combine fiction and reality, he mixes sources of literature in the hopes of digging up some new philosopher’s stone out of the intertextual soil and humus. It’s this synthesis of literary worlds that might, just outside of hope, result in some tool that could help decode our own world.

Like the worlds of Miéville’s influences, but also beyond them and purely out of our own world there are things in The City & the City like corporate oversight into police activity. Government-backed far-right nationalist crime. Cities dying under the weight of their own corrupt decay. As we gaze at blood running down the rain soaked pavement we’re left to wonder, does the intensity of this urban putrefaction signal conspiracy? Can we take a sheer lack of anything good or sensible to be evidence that there must be some Gnostic demiurge sitting just behind the curtain casting shadows into our cave? Maybe hoping so is strangely more optimistic than giving into Kafka’s nihilistic all-too-human banality of evil. But then this book emerged from the interstices of ‘08 and Wikileaks. Miéville knows that there are moments where evil is not so conveniently banal. Sometimes the door opens just a crack and we see the tentacles that lie just beyond.

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