China Miéville's Dark London - NYTimes.com Apocalypse is in the air. Literally, if we're talking about "Reign of Fire," the post-apocalyptic-cum-medievalist action flick in which flying, fire-breathing dragons have laid waste to the 21st-century world. And why wouldn't we be talking about "Reign of Fire" in the days after China Miéville's rather apocalyptic take on contemporary London appeared in the magazine? The progenitor dragon that sets everything alight - see above, from 1:42 to 3:25 - is a creature of the London underground, and the movie's climactic St. Michael moments take place in the city's charred ruins. Is it any surprise that Miéville happens to be a fan of what he considers an underappreciated movie? (How anyone could not appreciate the awesomeness of Matthew McConaughey in madman-warrior mode - enter Van Zan here, starting at 3:03 - is beyond me. McConaughey, his co-star Christian Bale and Smaug ought to have a contest to see who can spit the hottest fire.) In terms of essayistic inspiration, however, Miéville owes a greater debt to a different sort of visual spectacle, an exhibit that opened last fall at the Tate Modern and closed in January, "John Martin: Apocalypse." Martin was a 19th-century artist who achieved fame for his pictures of epic, and often biblical, destruction (and whose works can be regarded as prefiguring blockbuster movies). One image from the show, called London's Overthrow, by John Martin's brother, Jonathan, even provided Miéville with the name for his Web site. It's where you can read a longer version of the magazine's essay. You can see the Martin picture there, too. Obviously London itself, in the here and now, is Miéville's greatest inspiration. His own moody photographs accompany his essay on his site. And if what he sees and feels is dark and tends toward the apocalyptic, well, he's hardly the first writer to end up in those same shadows - I think the excerpts I put in a previous post from other writers, from other generations, show as much. That doesn't mean that Miéville, despite some of the negative responses his essay produced in the British press (examples here and here), wants to be rid of the place. It is his home. And as he said in one email, after he turned in his essay to the magazine: "I absolutely love London - it's just a bad time for it right now." Here, in excerpts from three of his novels that use London as setting and character, is evidence that both parts of that claim are true. From "King Rat" (1998) The streets were full. It was a Saturday and people were thronging the streets, coming to and from Brixton market, determined on their outward journey and slow on the way back, laden down with cheap, colorful clothes and big fruit. Trains rumbled, competed with the sounds of Soca, Reggae, Rave, Rap, Jungle, House, and the shouting: all the cut-up market rhythm. Rudeboys in outlandish trousers clustered around corners and music shops, touched fists. Shaven-headed men in tight tops and AIDS ribbons made for Brockwell Park or The Brixtonian café. Food wrappers and lost television supplements tugged at ankles. The capricious traffic lights were a bad joke: pedestrians hovered like suicides at the edge of the pavement, launched themselves across at the slightest sign of a gap. The cars made angry noises and sped away, anxious to escape. Impassive, the people watched them pass by. Fabian twisted his wheels through the bodies. The railway bridge passed above him; some way ahead the clocktower told him it was mid-morning. He rode and walked intermittently past the tube station, wheeled his bike across Brixton Road, and again over Acre Lane. There were no crowds here, and no Reggae. Acre Lane stretched out wide. The buildings that contained it were separate, sparse and low. The sky was always very big over Acre Lane. He realized that he had defeated the city. He crouched on the roof (of what building he did not know) and looked out over London at an angle from which the city was never meant to be seen. He had defeated the conspiracy of architecture, the tyranny by which the buildings that women and men had built had taken control of them, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements. These monolithic products of human hands had turned on their creators, and defeated them with common sense, quietly installed themselves as rulers. They were as insubordinate as Frankenstein's monster, but they had waged a more subtle campaign, a war of position more effective by far. Saul kicked carelessly off and stalked across the roofs and walls of London. Saul crossed the river under Tower Bridge. He swung like an ape along the girders which festooned its underside, convoluted thickets of vast wires and pipes. In the middle, just at the point where the bridge could split and open for tall ships, he stopped and hung by his hands, swaying slightly. The sky was taken from him; the great mass of the bridge above him was all he could see at eye-level and above. At the very edge of his sight, buildings appeared again over the river. But for the most part the city was inverted and refracted in the Thames, a sinuous shattered mirror. Lights glinted on the water, dark shapes punctuated with hundreds of points of light, the towers of the city, the far-off lights of the South Bank Centre, far more real for him then than their counterparts in the air above. He stared down at the city below his feet. It was an illusion. The shimmering motion of the lights he saw was not the real city. They were part of it, to be sure, a necessary part . . . but the beautiful lights, so much more lively than those above them, were a simulacrum. They merely painted the surface tension. Below that thin veneer the water was still filthy, still dangerous and cold. Saul held onto that. He resisted the poetics of the city. Saul was along amidst the rubble and the scaffolding. He stood in the center of a wide ruined landscape, a blitzed corner of London that hid behind hoardings, in easy earshot of Edgware Road. A forty-foot by forty-foot square, carpeted in crushed brick and old stone and surrounded by the backs of buildings. On one edge of the square a rough wooden fence hid the street that flanked the site, and above the fence towered the old brick walls of ancient shops and houses. Saul looked up at them. On that side the windows were surrounded by large wooden frames, rotting but ornate, designed to be seen. On all other sides the walls that enclosed him were vulnerable. They constituted the buildings" underbellies, soft underneath the aesthetic carapace. Out of sight of their facades, he was ringed by great flat expanses of brick, windows that split at random down featureless walls. Seen from behind, caught unawares, the functionality of the city was exposed. This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as the city. It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. But the city did not like to be found out. Even as he saw it clearly for the product it was, Saul felt it square up against him. The city and he faced each other. He saw London from an angle against which it had no front, at a time when its guard was down. He had felt this before, when he had left King Rat, when he had known that he had slipped the city's bonds; and he had known then that he had made of it an enemy. The windows which loomed over him reminded him of that. From "Un Lun Dun" (2007) "Abcities have existed at least as long as the cities," it said. Each dreams the other. There are ways to get between the two, and a few people do, though very few know the truth. This is where the most energetic of London's discards come, and in exchange London takes a few of our ideas - clothes, the waterwheel, the undernet. Mostly such swaps are beneficial, or harmless. Mostly. Mortar and Lectern were staring intently at Zanna. "Back in your old queen's time," the book said, "London filled up with factories, and all of them had chimneys. In houses they burnt coal. And the factories were burning everything, and letting off smoke from chemicals and poisons. And the crematoria, and the railways, and the power stations, all added their own effluvia. "Their own what?" said Zanna. "Muck," said Lectern. "Add all that to the valley fog, and what you get's a smoke stew," the book went on. So thick they called it pea soup. Yellow-brown and sitting on the city like a stinking dog. It used to get into people's lungs. It could kill them. That's what smog is. "As I was about to explain," said the book testily. As I was saying, At first, it was just a dirty cloud. Nasty but brainless as a stump. But then something happened. There were so many chemicals swilling around in it that they reacted together. The gases and liquid vapor and brick dust and bone dust and acids and alkalis, fired through by lightning, heated up and cooled down, tickled by electric wires and stirred up by the wind - they reacted together and made an enormous, diffuse cloud-brain. The smog started to think. And that's when it became the Smog. . . . It knew it would be safer if Londoners thought it was just dirty fog, so it kept its new brain to itself. From "Kraken" (2010) Any moment called now is always full of possibilities. At times of excess might-bes, London sensitives occasionally had to lie down in the dark. Some were prone to nausea brought on by a surfeit of apocalypse. Endsick, they called it, and at moments of planetary conjuncture, calendrical bad luck or mooncalf births, its sufferers would moan and puke, struck down by the side effects of revelations in which they had no faith. Right then it was swings and roundabouts. On the one hand, such attacks were getting rarer. After years of being martyrs to somebody else's martyrs, the end sick had never been so free of the trouble. On the other hand, this was because the very proliferations, the drunkenness of an unclosed universe that had always played merry hell with their inner ear, was collapsing. And something was replacing it. Instead of all those maybes, underlying them all, approaching dimly and with gathering speed, was something simple and absolutely final. What was this queasiness that had come in in place of the other queasiness, the sensitives wondered? What was this new discomfort, this new cold illness? Oh, right, they began to realize. That's what it is. It's fear. Animals were afraid, too. Rats went to ground. Seagulls went back to the sea. London foxes rutted in a terrified hormonal swill, and their adrenalin made them good quarries for the secret urban haunts. For most Londoners, all this was so far visible only in an epidemic of birdlime, the guano of terror, as pigeons began to shit themselves. Shops were covered. A plague of ennui afflicted London's manic prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that ever since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity into sentience, an obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time. No, they didn't really know what that meant, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out. Word got around. It does that. A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. There'd be all those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there'd be quite contrary tendencies.... Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, buy all means - London had its social bandits - but that was fact. There are many millions of Londoners, and the very great majority know nothing of the other map land, the city of knacks and heresies. Those people's millions of everydays are no more everyday than those of the magicians. The scale of the visible city dwarfs that of the mostly-unseen, and that unseen place is not the only place where there are amazing things. At that moment, however, the drama was in the less-travelled metropolis. Nothing changed for Londoners but for the onset of a wave of depression and anger, a bad intimation. That was not good and not nothing, certainly. But for those who lived in the city's minority articulation things were growing daily more dangerous. The strike paralyzed large sections of the occult industry. The economy of gods and monsters was stagnating. The journals of the secretive places - The Chelsea Picayune, Thames" Unwater Notes, The London Evening Standard (not that one: the other, older paper of the same title) - were full of foreboding at millennial signs. Drug use reached record levels. Smack and Charlie, narcotics that user-mages squabbled with the knackless over in the mainstream capital; and more arcane fixes, the sweepings from key lines and certain time-crushed places, the buzz of choice for dust-junkies, addicts of collapse and history, high on entropy. Inferior supply grew to meet demand, product ground up and adulterated by impatience, rather than genuine sortable ruins.