Yesterday I caught a very brief trailer for what looks like a forthcoming Beeb adaptation of China Mieville’s The City and The City. This is a murder mystery set in a fictional eastern European country, and the Amazon review of it declares that stylistically it resembles Raymond Chandler and Orwell’s 1984, amongst other classic authors. Mieville’s an SF author, so it’s no surprise that this not going to be a straightforward thriller, but involves weirdness.
I’ve got a feeling that the book won at least one SF fiction award, though I could be wrong. Mieville himself is actually very left. He edited a book on Marxism and Science Fiction, which I found in the Cheltenham branch of Waterstone’s a couple of years ago. He and the late, great Ian M. Banks also gave a very interesting interview to the small press SF/genre fiction magazine The Edge back in the 1990s, where they made it very plain that they disliked the Tories and had absolute contempt for New Labour for their cuts to the welfare state.
Some of the attempts the Beeb has made in recent years to do proper SF or Fantasy dramas have been rather disappointing. But this could be worth watching.
Tags: '1984', 'The City and The City', BBC, China Mieville, Conservatives, Cuts, Fantasy, George Orwell, Ian M. Banks, marxism, New Labour, Raymond Chandler, Science Fiction, The Edge, Welfare State
March 18, 2018 at 9:37 am |
Woo-hoo! The City & The City is a magnificent book (I think it won an Arthur C. Clarke Award). China Miéville is also a founding editor of Salvage “edited and written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those committed to radical change, sick of capitalism and its sadisms, and sick too of the Left’s bad faith and bullshit … Salvage strives for a habitable Left, one that deserves to survive” http://salvage.zone/about/
March 18, 2018 at 11:24 am |
Thanks for this, Mike – very useful and interesting indeed!
March 19, 2018 at 1:53 pm |
I think the book won the Arthur C Clarke award a few years back.
March 19, 2018 at 3:30 pm |
Hi Chris – You’re the second person to tell me this, so I think you’re right.