Cheryl: Yes, that’s one of the problems I have with Wolfe. I would love to nominate his books for awards, but each individual book is generally only understandable within the wider context of the series.
China: I’m trying not to do that.
Cheryl: King Rat begins with the hero arriving in London on a train. Perdido is named after a railway station. Are trains something of a passion for you?
China: It is more railway architecture. What it is, basically, is that I spent a lot of my youth at skyline level on a train coming in and out of London. You have the towers and chimneys poking up around you, and that is very, very impressive.
Cheryl: Politics is clearly a very important part of your life.
China: I’m a member of the Socialist Alliance: an actual, genuine Trotskyist.
Cheryl: I noticed that your group of left-wing intellectuals in Perdido had a distinct New Labour feel to them. Lots of concern and posturing but not a lot of commitment: very Tony Blair.
China: Well there’s no point in being coy about it. As a writer you are in this Bohemian milieu which has some very wonderful things about it, but does have this very abstract relationship with politics. All leftist writers and artists for the last 150 years have had to mediate that. I think that is why a lot of leftist artists are attracted to anarchism, because it is a more individualist philosophy. For myself, I try to put up something of a firewall between my writing and my political career.
Cheryl: I notice also that in Ken MacLeod’s books the revolution is often rather romantic, whereas in Perdido the vodyanoi strike was brutally crushed and people died nastily.
China: Just because you are a leftist writer doesn’t mean that you have to be into propaganda. I would never try to convince someone of socialism through my novels. It would probably make a very bad novel, and a very bad case of socialism. Nevertheless, you do want to have some sort of political texture to the books.
I think that if, as a leftist, you write about how the revolution succeeds gloriously then it is extremely hard to not get all Maoist and write stuff like, “Onwards for the Glorious Vodyanoi Strike!”, you know. I think there are writers who have done it well—Banks for example. But I’m not good at it, so what I do is give the books a political texture that is quite realistic, cynical, and brutal. I would love to write an upbeat, positive political novel, and as soon as I think I am up to it I will, but not yet.
Cheryl: Then of course you have the problem of what happens after the workers have won.
China: I have had some long conversations with a friend about this. You know in Star Wars there were originally supposed to be nine films, but they dropped the plans for the three sequels. What do you write about after the rebels have won? Are you going to have three films about running crèches?
Cheryl: Or in which Luke Skywalker becomes a dictator?
China: Very few of the great socialist writers have spent a lot of time writing about the post-revolutionary state, and they have got a lot of flak for that, but I do think it is very hard to do.
Cheryl: One aspect of Perdido that is very clearly painted is the difference in culture between the various races that inhabit New Crobuzon. You describe how the cactus-people have created a ghetto to live in, and how the mingling of races has affected the cultures of the khepri and the city-dwelling garuda.
China: One of the things about genre fantasy that I loathe is that race becomes a pigeonhole for a character type. Your elf is kind of deft and mysterious, and your dwarf is always grumpy but the salt of the earth, and it becomes a way of defining character rather than actually dealing with culture.
What I wanted to do with Perdido was have a book in which the characters were much more malleable and culturally mediated. And what that meant was that cultures would not be distinct hermetic balloons, they were going to taint each other. And also, very importantly, that individuals of all races, not just humans, could reject their culture, could feel at odds with their culture, but are still going be to defined by it in some way.
Cheryl: Which is just what happens to your heroine, Lin.
China: Lin’s relationship with her culture is very important in the book. She doesn’t fit in with traditional khepri culture that she has abandoned, but she can’t fit in with human culture either because of her khepri upbringing. She is discomforted in both of them. And that’s an attempt to write a bit more realistically about culture than some other genre writers.
Cheryl: I think that is something that is long overdue.
China: Another thing that is very important here is stereotyping. One of the things that is dangerous about genre fantasy and science fiction is that ethnic stereotyping is true. It is absolutely the case that trolls are stupid and bad and like to smash things up. What I have tried to do in Perdido is have an idea of culture that is both constraining and enabling, but doesn’t describe you in cold genetic terms.
I have also tried to show that when expected cultural behaviour breaks down the ideology of stereotyping tries to maintain itself. That’s what racism does. The vodyanoi in the book have a culture that tends to make them quite surly and grumpy to the outside eye. But that isn’t a necessary part of their genetic make-up, and when the humans find a vodyanoi who is not like that they tend to say, “all vodyanoi are grumpy except my mate so-and-so.” That is a standard racist line. The way that stereotyping tries to negotiate its own patent untruth fascinates me.
Cheryl: One thing that particularly fascinated me about the book, and I was disappointed that you didn’t spend more time on it, was the garuda philosophy. The free garuda in the Cymek desert have this militant attitude to personal responsibility to go along with their personal freedom. It sounded like something that libertarians should read.
China: It was very important to me. One of the things that angers me about politics is the way that the individual has been claimed for the right. I accept that the right has this notion of the individual as an abstract political entity, and I accept that some leftists have a quite vulgar notion of the individual being unimportant. But I think that individuals are very important. And by individuals I mean real people that understand their own nature, not as an abstract, but as something that exists within a social matrix. With the garuda I tried to come up with a society that was radically communist, and because of its communism treats the individual with great seriousness and respect. I didn’t write a lot about it at the time because, as I have said, it is very difficult to write about radically different societies, but I hope to come back to it at a later time.
Cheryl: I hope you do come back to it. I find that sort of imaginative approach to political thought very refreshing.
China: When I first started the book the core of it was not the narrative arc that you see now, but the political arc created by the garuda character, Yagharek. I was interested in the notion of a crime that was unthinkable to a member of another society. That Isaac could just not get his head round what Yagharek had done wrong. What could possibly be so bad that they would cut off his wings?
Cheryl: The area of politics in the book where I didn’t quite follow the argument was the cyborgization. You have two areas there: the cyborg cult, and the cyborgization of criminals.
China: I wasn’t particularly conscious of playing with themes in those sections. With the Remade, the punishment by cyborgization, that was partially to do with my love of grotesquerie. I was trying to think of a really horrible punishment. The political edge to it was about the way that in our society criminals are violently pathologized. I was trying to show how we make criminals into creatures of horror, regardless of what they have done or why they did it.
Cheryl: And the crime lord, Motley, who really is evil, has made himself into a monster.
China: As for the cyborg cult, I’m very sceptical about religion so I tried to create a religion that seemed plausible but was actually kind of mad.
Cheryl: The one area of the book that is quite mystical is the vodyanoi watercraeft. That actually sounds like they are doing magic, whereas everything else seems at best alchemical, if not plainly scientific.