Tema IV Gestión y Seguridad de Redes

Clearly, there is no official censorship at play in the contemporary UK where China Miéville and M. John Harrison are writing—no identifiable and arbitrary apparatchiks—yet there are nonetheless discernable limits on what it is possible to think and to say, and certainly there are boundaries—enforced in the fields of academia, publishing, and in critical evaluations of literature through critical reviews and national awards—to what is accepted as ‘worthwhile’ literature, with the fantastic typically relegated to what the Germans would call trivialliteratur

(unless it is deemed to have ‘transcended the genre’; a phrase that says it all). The publishing industry is a powerful gatekeeper; under the cosh of the drive for profit it is seemingly bent on regurgitating ‘what sells’, and is in great part responsible for the volumes of formulaic Tolkienesque that weight the bookshop shelves. Harrison and others have previously commented on how fortunate Miéville was in getting published initially, and how other similarly post-generic authors like Steph Swainston are now able to force their way through the newly-recognisable gap in the market opened by Miéville (see Cramer). More fundamentally, there is a limit on what it is possible to say and have taken as realistic and plausible, rather than fantastic, utopian or ideological. This normative ‘realism’ extends its unified reach across the disciplinary and discursive power-base of domestic politics (the inheritance of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous

‘There Is No Alternative’ and New Labour), international relations (see Booth, for example) and economics, with significant and pernicious influence in structuring contemporary popular culture more generally. This is the capitalist realism of recent fame (Fisher, Capitalist Realism). The expression marks censorship of an insidious cast: not one performed openly by an agency against which to struggle and around which to sneak, contributing an energy of resistance to politically subversive work through a demand for innovation and creativity. Rather, this is unconscious self- censorship, where the effort to ‘write the truth’ is guided by taboos born of a discourse of purity that alleges to demarcate truth and a realistic, mature attitude—rather than power—and where transgression is likely to be seen as immature rather than dangerous or meaningful. In this ideological climate, the effort to imagine differently is neutralised by the sheer weight of ‘realism’ opposing it, resulting in the efflorescence of childish, reactionary and libidinal fantasy that operates much like Adorno’s ‘free time’, in that it provides simple respite from the cruel quantifications of capitalist reality while also being completely defined by it.

This need to escape the weight of capitalist common sense pushes our rebellious truths and their articulation into the realm of fantasy, as the only place with enough freedom to articulate them—the only place that allows “a hard-headed consciousness of capitalist reality” (Bould, “The Dreadful Credibility” 83-4). But along with that comes the difficult need to de- infantilise the fantastic—in a culture in which rationality can only be assigned to means-ends calculations, and imagination untethered to entrepreneurship and profit is precisely the realm of children—to somehow empower it to speak seriously and sincerely, and to a serious and sincere audience: to drag the fantastical away from anaesthetising candyfloss to its powerful potential to reconfigure reality. But equally, using the fantastic allegorically to critique and comment in a one-to-one correspondence with the capitalist realism in play is not enough – it once again guts the fantastic of any autonomy, and ties it back to a direct relation with the world as we are told it

is. At this point, as I noted earlier, I diverge completely from Suvin’s understanding of sf. He claimed in 2013 (“An Approach”) that:

All sf texts are more or less clear parables, whose clarity is strongly responsible for the story’s coherence and significance, so that you can say that here the vehicle becomes secondary, and we can use the false analogy of time travel as long as it doesn’t become the tenor, or the meaning; then we cannot use it.

Here he is mistaken. It is absolutely necessary for the vehicle to ‘become the tenor’—to take on a life of its own, and a logic of its own, because without this the story can only ever fold itself back into the very ideological milieu that it strives to escape, and to reflect upon. Knowledge of the blighted nature of contemporary life is not in short supply—it is precisely knowledge of the situation without a sense of agency to affect it that is responsible for the contemporary aporia memorably pinpointed by Jameson and Zizek and any number of others, in which sheer cynicism allows the capitalist subject to both know the irrationalities of the system and not to act; in which the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.

Against this background, the New Weird—specifically the work of China Miéville, and more broadly, his brand of post-generic fantastic—can be seen as a literature that attempts to return to the world that birthed it through an austere and yet fecund rejection of any split between reality and fantasy. Through a commitment and a dedication to the autonomy and richness of the fantastic, the New Weird is a set of narrative strategies that returns to reality

through the hallucinogenic cornucopia, and particularly through the deployment and valorisation of discourses of impurity against those of purity, discovering in the heart of the fantastic a clearer grasp of lived reality, rather than dwelling in an appearance of reality that cloaks its fantastic and ideological origins. And these qualities inhere to Roadside Picnic, which provides us with a

privileged point of comparison—a similar response to a, mutatis mutandis, similar situational need—that illuminates the historical necessity of the contemporary emergence of the New Weird and the work of Miéville in particular. As this chapter will demonstrate, the Strugatskys developed in Roadside Picnic a particular set of tropes, culminating in what can be described as an impure, grotesque or dialectical realism, and articulating a particular set of interests around possibility, value and utopia. This is a constellation which has been revitalised by its resonance with the needs of the present moment, and which confirms Roadside Picnic as a privileged Ur-text for the New Weird.