Diversity, function and dysfunction: Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville (Part I)

 I have been intending to write about China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, as I indicated.  It took some time to gather my thoughts on a sprawling and complex book.  In fact, one post ain't gonna do it.  That means I'll either break the Mieville posts up with some comments on Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace next week, or just delay that one a bit.  However, Perdido Street Station is a fucking great book.  There are flaws in it.  When even the flaws are interesting, though, you've got a really cool book.  I heaped similar praise on Mieville's The City & The City relatively recently, so I think that means I just really dig this guy's books.  Read China Mieville.  Let's get into this.  It'll probably be a two-poster.  And there are two sequels, which I have yet to read.  More fun!

So here's the deal, spoilers abound.  The novel takes place on the world of Bas-Lag, in the city-state of New Crobuzon.  It's a steampunk/magic kind of deal.  Clockwork, steam engines 'n such, with magic.  The government of New Crobuzon is doing research on these things called slake-moths, which are psychic-vampire moth things.  Basically, giant moth things with ever-shifting patterns on their wings.  If you look at their wings, you are entranced, and then they drink all your yummy-yummy thoughts and dreams, leaving your body an empty husk.  If you see their wings in a mirror, or set of mirrors reflected an odd number of times, you're safe.  Even number of reflections?  You're frozen/entranced/fucked.  Anyway, these things are dangerous.  The government shuts down the research, and sells the moths to a gangster-drug dealer, who uses them to produce a new street drug.

What could possibly go wrong?

Here's what goes wrong.  Your main character is a mad scientist, because of course he is.  Isaac (yes!) Grimnebulin.  He's working away in his lab when a "garuda" shows up.  I'll deal with the garuda much more in Part II.  The garuda is Yagharek.  The garuda are bird-men from the desert.  He committed "choice-theft," and got his wings chopped off as punishment.  What is choice-theft?  We'll get to that.  He's a fuckin' rapist.  In the novel, you see him mostly hang back, be passive, dejected and all that, until it's time for him to kick ass, which he does.  But he's a fuckin' rapist piece of shit.

Anyway, he got his wings chopped off, and he wants to fly again, so he went on a quest to find a mad scientist who can help him fly again.  That led him to Isaac.  In the process of doing research, he put out the word.  He wants stuff to study.  Flyin' shit.  Gimme flyin' shit so that I can study it!  Guess what someone gives him?  A grub.  Which... will eventually turn into a slake-mouth.  And when it gets out and loose, it finds its way to the gangster's lair, frees the other slake-moths, and bad shit happens.

So that's what's going on.  Basically.  The short version.  It is far more complicated than that, with the most interesting thing, from my political scientist perspective, being the sense of place.  New Crobuzon, and the construction of New Crobuzon.  New Crobuzon is not precisely "cosmopolitan," as we generally think of the term, but there are a lot of different sentient species living there.  Humans run it, but there are others.  The garuda have their own, little enclave.  There are the khepri.  The khepri are sexually dimorphic, in the following way.  The males are morning-after Gregor Samsas, sans-intelligences.  The females have human bodies, and insect heads.  They object to that description, but whatever.  You can picture it.  The vodyanoi are sort of vaguely humanoid-froglike amphibious blobby things.  There's more, but the khepri, vodyanoi and garuda get the most attention.  Well, there are the slake-moths, there are weird hand-like parasite things, there's a giant inter-dimensional spider, there's the gangster, Mr. Motley...

The novel is sprawling.  It feels like a complete world.

So where I'm going here is somewhere that should be indicated by the title of the post.  Science fiction is generally written as metaphor, and a city-state constructed in this way is a metaphor for the political, social and economic issues of racial and ethnic diversity, immigration, assimilation and the policy challenges of such.  For background, Mieville is a Brit rather than American, for the purposes of thinking through his reasoning.

Anyway, let's consider first the khepri.  The khepri perspective is given largely by Lin, Isaac's girlfriend.  I'll note that I am many years behind the times reading Perdido Street Station (gimme a fuckin' break, I was busy in grad school).  It was published in 2000.  Holy shit, 2000?  My students weren't even born then!  Anyway, Mieville is a far-lefty, and the rules of wokeness have changed the writing process and publication process, but here's the deal.  The metaphor for Isaac and Lin was the interracial relationship, and the prejudices they face.  That is so old at this point that he would get precisely zero wokeness points for it, and instead, Mieville would get excoriated for "fridging" Lin.  She's an artist who gets caught up working for Motley, and badness happens.  Isaac almost rescues his magic khepri dream girl, but then a slake-moth shows up and sucks out most of her brain.  Funny how the rules of wokeness change, right?  Write a book with a look-how-woke-I-am metaphor for interracial relationships, and a couple decades later, you're an asshole for fridging her.

Anyway, let's talk Lin.  Lin comes from a khepri enclave in New Crobuzon called Creekside.  How did the khepri get to New Crobuzon?  This is actually unclear.  They are immigrants.  Something very, very bad happened.  Ships traveled, and after generations of nobody talking, nobody knows anymore.  But, there are some khepri enclaves, and Lin came from one.  Her mother raised her in a particular khepri religion called "Insect Aspect," which basically means that the Gregors have it right, because they are more pure.  Let the little Gregors run around and have their way, conscious thought is bad, and blah-blah.  They're creepy, and their enclave is not a very healthy community, as you can imagine.  There is a slightly healthier khepri enclave that just tries to worship their old, traditional gods, and have their little, isolated community.  They don't worship non-sentience, but... they don't get out much.  It is isolated and insular, by willful construction.  After leaving Creekside, Lin finds herself there (Kinken), but then she just needs her freedom.

Lin wanted out.  She wanted to be a part of the arts community in New Crobuzon.  So, she left.  This put her in a difficult position, because there are biases against khepri.  They have... insect heads.  Well, the females do.  The males are just dumbass Gregor Samsas.  So, Lin is somewhat limited in her social circles, and all that, but she does go out and build a life and career for herself.  She gets the fuck out.

Where this gets even more interesting is when Lin accompanies Isaac on a trip to the small garuda enclave in New Crobuzon.  Honestly, this is a bit weird because there is a scene when Isaac goes to a circus freak show to see a "garuda," who is actually just a "Remade" prisoner.  Huh?  OK, here's how law and punishment work in New Crobuzon.  Break the law, and steampunk technology/thaumaturgy are used to alter your body in ironic punishment.  Those so altered are the Remade.  At the freak show, Isaac sees a Remade guy with a beak and fake wings, making a living as an obviously fake garuda.  People in New Crobuzon acted like he was an exotic animal that didn't exist in New Crobuzon, but... there's a garuda enclave there?  Really?  Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me.  Regardless, Lin accompanies Isaac to the garuda enclave in one of the slums, and they have a bad time of it.  This is part of Isaac's research plan of studying flyin' shit.  He agreed to help Yagharek fly, and he wants to see some garuda with their wings.  So, he wants to make an offer to have some garuda work with him, fly, let him do some Da Vinci sketches, 'n stuff.  Not dissected, or anything, he's not a sicko, but you know, he wants some help.  For pay.  So he goes to their enclave and makes an offer.

It does not go well.

Several of the garuda want to take Isaac up on his offer.  But they are controlled by their bossman, Charlie.  Charlie is a dick.  He just tells them no, never deal with an outsider, ever, under any circumstances, and he beats the shit out of anyone who starts talking about taking Isaac's offer.

So.  Yeah, the garuda in New Crobuzon are a poor and isolated group.  And they'll never get out, or improve their lot in life.

Anyway, so as Isaac and Lin leave the garuda enclave, Lin tells Isaac that the garuda there face prejudice, so they need Charlie to take care of them, and if she were in their place, she'd listen to Charlie.

Isaac retorts that Lin left two khepri settlements in New Crobuzon.  Lin doesn't really have an answer.

The thing is, Isaac is kind of right.  Lin got out.  She improved her lot in life, because she developed her skills, and made her way.  Then, well, she came across Mr. Motley.  Charlie would have told her not to work for him.  She fuckin' knew better than to work for him, and she did it anyway.  And she paid the price.

There is so much going on here.  Let's start with the observation that Mieville is not writing about structural/systemic racism, or anything like that.  New Crobuzon is filled with straight-up, old fashioned bigotry.  Humans are repulsed by khepri, and some of the other "xenians."

So what do you do?  What keeps the New Crobuzon garuda in New Crobuzon, and specifically, in that enclave?  What keeps the khepri in New Crobuzon, in those enclaves?  The garuda there have it very bad.  A rational, economic response would be, leave or integrate somehow because what's going on there is not working.  "Integrate?"  Well, that can be hard, right?  Even Lin isn't precisely "integrated."  She lives and works in the arts community.  Why?  Well, what community will be most open to a khepri?  First, you've got the politics of the arts community, and second, you have the specialized, biological advantage of a khepri female in creating a certain type of art.  Comparative advantage.  Can she and Isaac enjoy a night on the town, in the open?  Nope.  Because New Crobuzon is fuckin' racist.  But, what she can do is create something more than what she had in either Creekside or Kinken.  And far more than the garuda of New Crobuzon have.

This is not at all the message that Mieville intends.  One of the dramatic events in the novel is when the government of New Crobuzon cracks down on a dockworker's strike, and uses that at least partly as a cover to raid a dissident newspaper press.  There is no ambiguity where Mieville's sympathies lie.  Yet there is a difference, economically, and historically, between the path of employment and entrepreneurship.  Lin's path is the path of entrepreneurship.  That was the path that worked, at least in part because it bypassed the problems of the racism of New Crobuzon.

There is a famous and interesting essay by Thomas Sowell on antisemitism.  Mieville and Sowell are pretty much opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but here's Sowell's argument.  Jews had a difficult problem.  Nobody wanted to hire them or work with them in conventional sectors of the economy, so they had to find economic niches, and those economic niches were niches that were misunderstood or viewed negatively.  Hence antisemitism, but actually, a bias against the middleman that holds across cultures.  Interesting.  The basic point, though, is that if you won't hire me, I need to find a way to make a career.  Entrepreneurship is one way to go.  If you won't hire me and I don't find a way to make a career, I'm just going to stay stuck.

So what do you do?  Is it merely true that the garuda of New Crobuzon are permanently fucked?  They have no choice but to let Charlie keep beating the shit out of them if they try to leave the squalor of their slum?  Creekside is the creepiest fuckin' thing around.  Kinken is a bit better, but goin' nowhere.  Do you want to slave away on the docks and get beaten down when you try to strike, like the vodyanoi?

Well you know what?  This isn't Mieville's intended answer, but economically, the best option in New Crobuzon is entrepreneurship.  Lin was, well, not fine because New Crobuzon if fuckin' racist, but making a life until she did a thing she knew she shouldn't do-- work for Motley.  What if she hadn't?  She'd have continued along with her life.  Well, not quite, because Isaac got messed up in some bad shit, but she wouldn't have gotten brain-sucked by a psychic vampire moth.

Kids, don't get mixed up with psychic vampire moths!  How many times do we have to tell you this?!

Anyway, so that's New Crobuzon.  That's a fucking racist city-state characterized by a lot of diversity.  What happens when you crank down the racism?  By several orders of magnitude?  And don't give me this shit about how it is always and forever 1920, and no progress is ever made, blah-blah.  Steven Pinker has a great term for this:  progressophobia.  Try this thought experiment.  Imagine a black person from the actual Jim Crow era, seeing the world as it is today.  Give that person a choice:  the world of the past, or the world today.  Do you really think that person from the Jim Crow era would say, "you know, I can't tell a difference.  Looks the same to me.  I'm good here.  No progress has been made from my time to yours!"  Really?  I mean, I don't want to type, "wake up, sheeple," but seriously.

So think about what happens when we crank back that racism dial.  Is there still racism?  Yup.  There is individual-level racism.  There are institutions and rules with disparate impacts.  All that.  But this ain't New Crobuzon.  What do you do?

Mieville's answer actually comes to some degree from the garuda outside New Crobuzon.  I think that's going to require another post.  His unintentional answer within New Crobuzon is Lin.  Except for her monumental fuck-up of working for Motley.

Get out!  Get out of that situation, and build a skill-set and a life through entrepreneurialism, and it is fascinating that an avowed socialist like Mieville somehow accidentally wrote this.  In an attempt to write an indictment of not only racism, but to some degree, capitalism (we'll get to the garuda), his unintentional solution was still individual entrepreneurialism.

Lin looked at Creekside and said no.  She moved to the slightly more moderate khepri settlement in Kinken and said better, but still no.  So she left, and built her own life, her own career, through entrepreneurialism.  If we can call a career in the arts that.

Kids, major in something more financially responsible!  Just sayin'.  I mean, I obviously love the arts, but have a back-up plan, at least.

New Crobuzon itself?  There is not much to defend here.  The place is racist, a toxic waste dump, the government is corrupt as shit, and we could interpret it as a sort of funhouse mirror capitalist system.  After all, there is not much in the way of regulation, social safety net, or anything like that.  So, the indictment is in many ways an indictment of capitalism itself, and Mieville's response here would be, to some extent, that the problem is actually New Crobuzon.  Not Kinken, not the garuda enclave, not the cactacae dome... New Crobuzon.  And, yeah.

But you know what?  At the individual level, you still need to make a choice.  What do you do?  What do you want, and hence what do you do?  And for the dystopian structure of New Crobuzon, entrepreneurialism is still a better path than hangin' around Kinken spitting out a statue of an old khepri god because tradition!  Even though nobody even remembers those traditions.

That's not to say that entrepreneurship is the only answer or always the answer or intrinsically the best answer.  That kind of simplistic thinking leads people down the path to a lot of failures too!  You'll note, for example, that I am not an entrepreneur, so I obviously do not believe that this is the one, true path.  Yet if you believe that all other avenues are closed, it is an answer to the question, what do you do?  And it is an intrinsically better answer than hangin' around doin' nothing.  It got Lin out, and if she had done what she knew was smart, she'd have been better off.

I wonder how pissed off China Mieville would be that I am heaping praise on his novel, and giving it such a capitalist spin.  Still, I am also an unabashed individualist, which means I have a somewhat different view from the garuda of the Cymek desert.  But that's a whole, different post.  This is a sprawling novel.  (And there are two more, which I have yet to read.)

Anyway, I think that'll do it for the morning.  This book is fucking awesome, which I say knowing that if Mieville read my comments, he'd probably get very angry at me, but fuck it.  Read the book.  There will be another post on the political philosophy of the garuda, which is a whole other can o' worms (get it?  worms?  bird-people?), but I'll either take a break and do A Desolation Called Peace next week, or just go straight through and tackle Martine two weeks hence.  I dunno.  Still, read this damned book.  It's good.

Will Ray, "I Hate My Day Job," from Mojo Blues.