Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (Macmillan, 2000, £16.99)

There are many good reasons for attending science fiction and fantasy conventions, but I have to confess that one of the downsides is that I am guaranteed on at least one occasion to have to prevent myself from doing harm to the fantasy writer who, at breakfast, on a panel, at the bar, pronounces with all the slick unction and spurious authority of a snakeoil seller, "Of course, science fiction is just a branch of fantasy."

Because, of course, there is no 'of course' about it. Science fiction and fantasy are both literatures of the imagination, and both are informed by similar genre conventions and even share some of the same tropes, and it is, of course, famously difficult to draw a definitive boundary around either science fiction or fantasy. But there's a major and obvious taxonomic difference between the two which is blurred by those fantasy writers who combine insecurity and ignorance when they attempt to stamp by colonial cooption their bootheel upon the face of science fiction. For while every fantasy story always contains at least one thing which is impossible in the world we know, every science fiction story, however fantastic it may seem, is always rooted in the real world. (Those pedants who at this point start trumpeting about the impossibility of, say, faster-than-light travel, betray their ignorance of both physics and genre conventions: scrupulous sf writers will always explain the particularities, from wormhole to space warp, of their seeming violation of the present (but by no means final) consensus; those less scrupulous will rely on the same genre convention which allows private eyes so much unexplained latitude in mystery novels, namely that devices shared by stories in the same genre do not require an explanation at every appearance.)

The worlds of science fiction, no matter how distorted or exaggerated, are entirely congruent with our own, and the worlds of fantasy are not, which is why, in works of fantasy, there is so much emphasis on maps of imaginary territory, and why the doors and wardrobes and gateways which link the fantastic and the mundane carry so much narrative weight.

Which brings us to China Mieville's second novel, Perdido Street Station, a big, populous, multistranded story in which tropes from science fiction, fantasy and horror are promiscuously blended in a detailed portrait of the underbelly of a teeming, ancient and vast megopolis, New Crobuzon. In particular, as in Jeffry Ford's The Physiognomy, Mi‚ville hangs a good deal of his plot on an invented science which is explored and exploited with scrupulous particularity towards self-coherence. While his approach is the same as those science fiction writers who exploit and extrapolate the outr‚ outer reaches of, say, quantum physics, he begins from a different place, one that is entirely imaginary.

Perdido Street Station then, is not a science fantasy, but a fantasy of science, in which the laws of thaumaturgy supplement those of the ordinary physics. Its anti-hero is the corpulent and unscrupulous Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a kind of freelance scientist who describes himself as:

". . . not a chymist, or a biologist, or a thaumaturge. . . . I think of myself as the main station for all the schools of thought. Like Perdido Street Station. . . . All the trainlines meet there -- Sud Line, Dexter, Verso, Head and Sink Lines; everything has to pass through it. That's like me. That's my job. That's the kind of scientist I am."

Isaac is a rogue genius, a selfish but likeable character preoccupied with completing his unified energy theory and in love with an artist of another race, Lin, who has the body of a woman and a scarab beetle for a head. He's hired by a garuda who has come to the city to find a replacement for the wings which were cut for him as a punishment, and in his obsessive researches into all winged creatures, Isaac obtains a strange larva which hatches into a slake-moth, a kind of psychic vampire which feeds on sentience and exudes a powerful drug.

The slake-moth escapes, kills one of Isaac's associates, and frees more of its kind. Chagrined and horrified by the consequences of his work, Isaac sets out to find and destroy the slake-moths, enlisting a motley group of allies and pitting himself against a conspiracy at the heart of the city's government. The sprawling quest, whose subplots involve an antigovernment newssheet and Lin's commission to produce a sculpture of a very strange gangster, Mr Motley, and evoke the Devil and a Lovecraftian spider god, reaches a climax at the symbolic heart of the city, Perdido Street Station.

Mi‚ville is generous in acknowledging as major influences M. John Harrison's stylish anti-fantasy Viriconium series and Mervyn Peake; like Gormenghast, New Crobuzon is bound by arcane rituals and populated by grotesques and eccentrics. One might also note a homage to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's steampunk novel, The Difference Engine in the shape of an emergent AI based on an analytical engine born of random power and virus and chance in the vast city dump, based on a shopping construct whose mechanisms had slipped, whose gears had faltered and who had been reborn with Constructed Intelligence, a self-creating god which infects the steam-powered robots of the city with the virus of intelligence. And as in The Difference Engine, the unnamed spirit which informs the shape and texture of the novel is that of Charles Dickens, for Mi‚ville's New Crobuzon is a twisted reflection of the swarming vitality of Dickens's London. Just as London's geography is famously influenced by the villages it has incorporated, so New Corbuzon's patchwork is informed by the different races who inhabit it: the slum houses transformed by spittle sculptures and organic cement of Lin's people; the geodesic greenhouse of the cactus people; the slum towerblocks transformed into garuda eyries. But unlike the inclusive tapestries of Dickens, whose narratives embrace people from every stratum of society, Mi‚ville's story inhabits only the depths of its city. Its motif is that of decay, of ooze and slime and rot, and although Isaac's quest encompasses much of the city, it stays mostly at street level (or below): there are few glimpses of those who own and govern the great city.

Nevertheless, New Crobuzon (like the horse, glimpsed in one of its teeming street scenes, whose rear legs have been transformed into steam-driven pistons) is a powerful feat of hybridization, a bustling confluence swarming with humans and strange races, a grotesque inferno evoked by a lush and sensuous prose and a muscular imagination. It's an alternate reality fantasy which promiscuously incorporates images and tropes from gothic shockers, eldritch horrors and steampunk thrillers, a fantasy that, like Isaac's Unified Field Theory, manages to encompass the physical and the occult and harness the energy generated at their interface to make something new, edgy, raw and vital.

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