'a post-revolutionary society is unthinkable'

‎'...if we take seriously the scale of social and psychic upheaval represented by a revolution, a post-revolutionary society is unthinkable: for someone not born in a post-revolutionary situation, it takes the process of going through a revolution to fully imagine it. To depict it is to diminish it.'

One of the ways to get around the 'so go on then, what is the alternative?' question. But shouldn't we then ask exactly what value to attach to something we cannot describe. How logical is it to believe something unrepresentable is both possible and desirable? Is it worth striving for a society you cannot even IMAGINE clearly?

I did like The City & The City, and Perdido Street Station to an extent. But if this is the sort of thinking that underpins Miéville's fiction, I don't know if it is ever going to affect me that deeply. Unless (to risk repetition) there is a change of heart / crisis of confidence / personal breakdown that takes an axe to his hopes for the restoration of humanity to some prelapsarian social and psychological state.

The City & The City

Michael Moorcock has already said it all, really. A masterful mystery story. A fantastic idea. A very interesting metaphor for city life, for imagined communities, for the barriers ideology places on our vision.

Perfect, you could say.

I'm just not sold on one fundamental world-building point. The Beszel / Ul Qoma delusion is maintained only because "breeches" are brutally punished. And yet the authority that watches the border is human, fallible and has limited resources. The book stresses that most of the work is done by the citizens themselves. I guess I just can't buy that: such a grand counter-factual delusion cannot be maintained under its own steam, and with such a thin coersive policing body. It won't hold together. This would never happen in real life.

And that robs the book of some of its power. What was truly terrifying about 1984 was that every way out of the system you could think of was blocked off. Orwell had thought about his world very carefully, and he convinced me (I should say I read it when I was still quite young) that THIS COULD HAPPEN. It is still the most scary horror story I have ever read.

Back to The City & The City, I wonder if Mieville will come back to this world. There are a lot of questions still unanswered. What is the nature of the "precursor" artifacts? How did the "Cleavage" happen in the first place? Finding out the answers will be very interesting.