Of Fantasy & Fiction

“He fermented rebellions,” reads out Mieville,forcing you to think how he manages to bring together monsters and beauty in the same line. Mieville’s diction and his own opinions,during a visit to the city as a part of the Lit Sutra programme of the British Council Library,stokes the decades-old debate around literary fiction and other genres.

“I have always been excited about fantasy as a genre. It’s a challenge to a writer —- the task of making up strange things. The craft of making the unreal sound real,” says Mieville. He goes on to clarify that fantasy writing involves a bit of artful cheat.

“You have characters you can identify with. So,psychologically,they are humans. More like people behind masks,” says Mieville.

The two-time winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction (for Perdido Street Station and Iron Council) however,feels lucky that he has never really felt overwhelmed by the onslaught of literary fiction.

“This debate is almost half a century old now. And to be honest,I am bored of all this,” he admits.

But he explains that writers are not all that divided by genres —- it’s cunning book marketing techniques that try and classify literature and then create a hierarchy in the world.

“It’s a fantastic marketing mechanism that establishes a certain genre as the centre of the universe. Most writers don’t feel that way,” he adds. As a succinct example he cites the case of Amitav Ghosh winning the Arthur C Clarke award.

“The publishers went out of the way to hide the fact that Calcutta Chromosomes won an award given to works of science fiction. As though if people came to know about it,the book’s literary value would be lost,” he laughs.

“I don’t agree with the fact that the highest paradigm of fiction is one which represents the real. Fantasy can actually represent the real better than mimetic fiction,” he says.

You can’t help agree with the creator of the Bas Lag alternative universe. Metaphors often prod you to contemplate on their implications more than the prose which addresses the real directly,does.