The Pulp Sublime: Interview with China Miéville on The Book of Elsewhere
China Miéville and Keanu Reeves | The Book of Elsewhere | Del Rey | July 2024 | 352 pages
During lockdown, like so many others, I tried to get a DnD game going with a few friends. Before our plans inevitably collapsed, I was sent a character sheet for a communist Paladin sworn to the Oath of the Common Man. While there’s no quick way to introduce China Miéville’s oeuvre, this homebrew DnD class returns to me now as a good outline of his disposition and concerns. Beyond his own affinity for TTRPGs, Miéville, like any good paladin, holds “neurotically faithful and unchanging fidelity” to his obsessions, of which theology, Weird Fiction, and Marxism are obvious fixtures.
From the communism-of-the-ruins in Salvage Magazine and the geopolitical noir of The City and the City, to the Alice in Wonderland-esque young adult novel Un Lun Dun, the on-ramps available to Miéville readers are numerous and diverse. And though Miéville is known for jumping genres and straining their conventions, you’re sure to find signs of his “obsessions” in each, alongside a particularly sincere sensibility and a lush vocabulary. So, when his collaboration with, Keanu Reeves – another legendary figure who has had instrumental roles in genre-(re)defining media from The Matrix to Cyberpunk 2077 – was announced earlier this year, fans eagerly wondered: what had stirred Miéville’s return to fiction after more than a decade? What would this collaboration look like? Did this make Reeves a comrade?
An adaptation of Reeves’s comic book series BRZRKR, The Book of Elsewhere follows the journey of Unute (B.), an undying warrior born some 80,000-years ago, who now carries out wet work operations for the US military; in exchange, the government has committed their elite research teams to finding a cure for his immortality. While many narrative beats and characters follow Unute over from the comics, under the collaborative influence of Miéville, The Book of Elsewhere steers readers deeper into the lands of heretical theology, scientific hubris, and Freudian psychoanalysis. Already working with mythological subject matter—demigods, curses, and vengeful spirits—Miéville and Reeves go weirder, introducing an immortal deer-pig hell bent on killing Unute, a starring role in Waiting for Godot, and a brief run-in with Karl Marx.
In early August, I sat down with Miéville to discuss deer-pigs, the art of writing violence, a reevaluation of “post-Seattle” fiction, and what it was like working with Reeves.
[Spoilers ahead]
TT: You’re known for writing across genres and then breaking and reexamining their various tropes and conventions. Given that, I’m interested in how you and Keanu discussed The Book of Elsewhere’s boundaries and how you might start puncturing them.
CM: When I first met Keanu, one of the things that I needed to understand was how tight the parameters were. That isn’t to say it would be a dealbreaker; the question was, could I find interesting ways of working within whatever the parameters were? But what I was not expecting was that his relationship with the parameters was, I won't say loose because they mattered a lot, but extremely elastic. I came in expecting him to say, “We've set out the canon in the comic,” which I'd read and enjoyed, but instead, he said, “Look, I want him to be 80,000 years old, to have a perfect memory, and to meet some version of the following other characters. But beyond that you're not restricted to comic canon.”
One thing we always try and say is, this is not a novel of the BRZRKR comics; this is a version of BRZRKR. One of the things Keanu is doing is creating a BRZRKR-verse. Partly this appealed to me because, having grown up as a nerd, I have a profoundly conflicted relationship to the nerd obsession with canon. On the one hand I understand that desire for safety, and I can indulge in it. You’re playing D&D and you get really into the minutiae and then you complain if the author breaks their own rules. I think this ambivalence is impregnated in a lot of the work that I admire in others, and I suspect in my own soul.
On the other hand, I also grew up with writers like M. John Harrison, whose relationship to nerd culture was deeply internal in that he was writing amazing modernist fantasy and science fiction but was also deeply combative of it and had to some extent that modernist aesthetic of disruption. You have his famous setting—famous among nerds—Viriconium, and then at one point in one of the books the maps change and then the leader of the city says something like “We're no longer called Viriconium.” This is him coolly, with an austere stare, eyeing this notion of lore, saying that's not what this is about. Having that destabilizing relationship to lore is very exciting to me even as it also troubles the geek in me. A little imp of the perverse, I enjoyed the idea of some of the comic bros being like, “You're breaking the rules,” but as soon as you say this is a version, people can relax.
This gave me vastly more freedom. I was delighted. Then it became about, well, you don't want to stray too far, because the whole project is to honor this foundation, but this gave me a lot more leeway. So that's partly why the collaboration was intense at the very beginning and the very end.
TT: One of my favorite additions in this alternate telling of BRZRKR is that of the ancient deer-pig, whose inclusion feels very indicative of your style; made brothers through their immortality, Unute is drawn to this potential comradery, but is wholly incapable of understanding it. Given the Pig’s absence from the comics, what were you looking to draw out through this foil?
CM: The pig came up very early in a discussion between me and Keanu, in fact before we'd actually agreed to work together. We were seeing what our parameters were, and when you have a setting or a character with which some people are going to be familiar, you want to both honor it and also do something new. One of the ways you can do this is to draw attention to something that is very specific about a character, and then undermine it. With the joyful acrobatics of art, you get to have your cake and eat it.
In the case of Unute, he's the only one like him, so almost immediately the question is: well, what if he isn't? Then very quickly from that we went to, maybe it's an animal. Quickly the notion that suggests itself is one of, as you say, this sort of constitutive attraction, repulsion; there's no hatred without love, etc, etc., and vice versa. The conversation very quickly went to hounds, but that's too on the nose and we wanted to be surprising, counterintuitive. Part of the pleasure for me, which I think you could say is a pulp pleasure, is in dignifying intrinsically undignified matter. We wanted it to be a more surprising creature, and I thought, what if it's a creature that is a bit ridiculous but then we treat it with absolute sincerity. What if it's a pig?
Someone said to me, “I'm surprised it wasn't a squid,” because I have a lot of squids and cephalopods and octopuses in my books, and those are my first loves, but I like animals tout court. And I’ve always loved pigs. When we were researching, I quickly found out that I had this idea for a babirusa, partly the aesthetics of it, that extraordinary skull. And then its physical specificity isn’t just a quirk, but it actually becomes relevant in plot and form. I went into a deep dive about the deer-pig’s tusks and the fact that for years the default theory—which all the local people in Sulawesi were saying was bullshit—was totally not true. No one knows why their tusks are the way they are, which is this lovely puncturing of reductive biology.
I like the name deer-pig because it has this polysemy, the dearest pig. Even in English the word pig is sort of intrinsically ridiculous, or has become culturally comedic, so the goal was to impregnate it with a degree of uncanny, so that it ceased quite quickly to just be a joke. There's something about keeping a straight face when you're dealing with pulp; there's a sort of intrinsic absurdity to a lot of this. I hate fiction that apologizes for itself or winks. Sure, we're talking about a pig, have a laugh, but now let's see if we can actually make this emotionally resonant and powerful.
TT: More spoilers here, but a particularly powerful scene this calls to mind is that in which the pig is sharpening its own tusk, drawing these deeper parallels between their mutual death drives.
CM: You know, most of the details about the pig, including the skull in the museum, are true. We're in heavy spoiler territory now, but what you’re talking about is a pig that killed itself slowly by biting into its own skull. The resonance of that, the pathos, the poignancy, is so rich. If you invented that, you would be told off for it being too much. I found that such a moving and powerful image, and it just bled beautifully into a lot of the themes we were dealing with, including Freud and the Freudian way of thinking about the soul. When you set out looking for those resonances, you will always find them. The question is how much you can communicate them and honor them.
TT: The map is something of a fixture in sci-fi and fantasy for worldbuilding purposes, and while we don’t receive one with contour lines and a legend, the Book of Elsewhere as it exists in the text serves as a similar placemaking tool, giving readers some points of reference for Unute’s 80,000-year journey. How did you choose the vignettes that appear throughout the book? What do these choices convey about Unute’s perfect, but often selective, memory?
CM: When we were talking early on, it was delightful to realize how Keanu, Ben and I were all approaching this the same way. We wanted to do something that you couldn’t with the comic, and in a novel you have room for a slower pace, for asides and excurses. That meant having more than one timeline, more than one voice. This lent itself to a modern day historical perspective through Unute’s eyes, and through other people's eyes. And you’ve got three different strands of chapters and, by happy chance in English, we have three different persons in the language, so let's have third person and second person as well.
If you look at the cluster of historical chapters, they're clustered in the last bits of his life. They're not spread out equally because it wasn't about trying to create an equal spread chronologically, it was about trying to create an arc emotionally to push forward the mystery but actually, as much as anything, to create a sense of internal life through others’ eyes. I wanted it to be a spread of genders and a spread of types of people. Crucially, I wanted people who had different relationships to Unute, because he's not a hero and he's not a villain. The one exception to that was, as I'm sure you noticed, the opening and closing chapters are in the same voice, the only voice that repeats twice, the voice of Freud. That was part of my project of honoring the source material—have you read the comics, by the way?
TT: Yes, I just caught up on the latest issue.
CM: You may remember, in the first issue, there is one panel in which we see Unute lying down being psychoanalyzed and it’s clearly Freud behind him. In the comic this is a throwaway joke, and that's not a criticism, that's one of the things you do in a comic book. That, to me, was the way in, because that was the comic saying, even if in a kind of playful, offhand way, that the nature of the soul in general and this person's soul in particular is highly problematic.
I loved the idea that you would have the chutzpah of having this historical moment of meeting Freud and you wouldn't bother going into it. Now we have the space to fill that in. There was an attempt to take seriously aspects of Freud's ways of thinking. There’s so much about memory, violence, dreams, and so on. If you have a character who has a perfect memory, how do you engage with the Freudian idea of memories not being perfect but being about wishful fulfillment?
If you think about a character who can't die, and you think about the death drive and the way it was a revision of Freud's own theories. The idea of Freud coming to the death drive because he spoke to Unute was absurd and so fun, but also takes Freud seriously. That’s the game you can have with pulp—to do ridiculous playful nonsense, but also raise serious issues. I think we’re in a much more open-minded time than we were 30 years ago, but historically there would have been this kind of, you can’t talk about serious stuff because you’re doing a silly tie-in novel. You can feel the palpable surprise in some reviews that a book about an immortal assassin also talks about poetry or the nature of the soul.
TT: In the BRZRKR comics, one thing that’s particularly emphasized is violence. While violence is still very much present in this adaptation, I was struck by your ability to carry these action scenes with punctuation and blank space as much as you did with verbs. What was your writing process like, alternating between these maximalist and minimalist portrayals of violence?
CM: That is lovely to hear, and I'm excited that you responded to it that way. It's an interesting question. In a comic, you can have this pulp sublime of the incredibly violent but very beautifully rendered frame where Unute is, fill in the blanks, punching through a man's chest, whatever. But there are readers for whom the only question of interest in fiction is, what happens next? And to any degree that the writing does not answer that in a straightforward way, the book is failing. I say that without judgment, but that is not the kind of writing, in an action scene that is interesting to me. To some extent it raises the issue of the ontological or epistemological nature of fiction. What is the indivisible unit of time in a narrative story?
Obviously, there's no one answer to this, but if you're like, “And then he drew back his fist and punched and the punch went through the other man's chest and there was a massive explosive spray of blood and it was disgusting but also kind of cool,” that's just going to quickly become ridiculous. Then there's, “He punched harder than any man could punch,” and what you're doing is being a little bit more enigmatic, but you're withholding a certain pulp sublime that I don't think it's ignoble that people want. If you’re going to write a story with action in it, don't pretend that action is beneath you.
But how do you depict action while honoring the polysemy and seriousness and interestingness of language and its specificity as opposed to visual art? There are ways of approximating some of the effects of dislocation and drama and sublime and horror within the form and pace of language and the rhythm, as well as the facticity embedded in the descriptions. Now, these are always going to be failures because you're not comparing like with like. A broken-up paragraph is not someone being punched in the chest. But what you might be able to do is kind of fail in an exciting way.
If at the end of a fight scene you couldn't say who shot whom, in what order, and what happened to who, but you do feel your heart is racing a little bit because you were suddenly darting through the pages, that means that the form itself is trying to transmit a little bit of this. As a reader and as a writer, neither a blow-by-blow nor an offhanded gesture interest me very much about those scenes.
TT: Speaking to style, you’ve previously described yours as “post-Seattle fiction”, in reference to the 1999 WTO protests. Since reading that description, I’ve been eager to hear more of your thoughts on this style and how it may have changed over the last two and a half decades.
CM: I remember that very well, that post-Seattle stuff, and I would defend elements of that formulation, or I would at least explain them as not purely tendentious. Any description of tendencies always exaggerates, but broadly speaking, there was an opening up of fantastic genre fiction, and a breaking away from certain high fantasy paradigms. There was more of a general interest in alternative traditions.
In a mediated way, cultural moments—which are always fuzzy sets—are reflections of what we would now call vibes, and it's very easy to sneer at the idea of vibes, but I think it’s a real category that Marxists mock at our own peril. This is destructive feeling, this is fucking Raymond Williams stuff, and I think partly that's to do with the politics and the economics and political economy and geopolitics and imperialism at the moment—yada, yada, yada.
All of which said, I said that a quarter of a century ago, and I'm not particularly interested in the business of laughing at my earlier self, but that doesn't mean that lots of things I said weren't wrong or hugely exaggerated. There’s something poignant to me now about that because it was so clearly an expression of an aspiration. It was doing something of which I am now much more carefully skeptical than I was at the time, which is the conflation of aesthetic production with politics. If I saw someone else say this now, I would try and respectfully say that I think I am detecting a political hankering in what you are expressing at your aesthetic druthers.
This is overwhelmingly an expression of many years of defeat on the Left and why I have very little time for the endless articles on the politics of the MCU or whatever— not that I'm opposed to political readings of text. I love this shit! What I'm saying is a lot of this is about a hankering to get it right. This is politics by proxy, and it is just an expression of weakness.
We talk a lot about parasociality with creators, and I think it's a useful category, but I think we also have parasociality with texts. We're in an era where people want to be friends with their favorite films. And if you're a leftist, then you also want to be comrades with your favorite videogame or whatever. This is so heartbreaking. It's never going to work, and it's not the way art works. There is a line to be teased between a political read of historical and artistic tendencies and diagnosing the kind of utopian and radical strands within them.
When I hear that very young man say, “this is post-Seattle fiction”, I think maybe for you—me—you were feeling politically buoyed up for one of the rare moments in your life. And that's great and real, but don't make pronouncements about aesthetic movements in such a reductive, unmediated way regarding politics and culture. That would be my loving comradely corrective to early me.
TT: Okay, final question: If Keanu is destined to play Unute in the cinematic adaptation, who would you want to play?
China: Oh! I should make one thing clear because there's a bit of confusion about this online. If there is indeed a film of BRZRKR—which I hope there is—it won't be a film of this book. The film would be another version of BRZRKR. If they do make that, and if I got the call to be in it, I think it would be really fun to be someone who is brutally killed by Unute. Someone who gets their chest punched through or gets their arms ripped off and then their head smacked off with their arm or something like that. I mean, I think that would be in the spirit of the piece, no less than ruminations on the Freudian death drive.
TT: You as some dissident that gets this hit squad called in on them.
China: Love it! Love it—yeah, yeah, let's have me carrying out some appalling act of imperialist black ops only to be wiped out. Something like that.