The City and the City

The City and the City straddles several genres at once, and in doing so, applies the tropes of those genres in liberal doses. First, the novel can be classified as speculative fiction, a broadly defined genre that can encompass many other genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and even history. The underlying element in all of these is a speculative premise, one that doesn’t exist in the real world or perhaps takes an element of realism and exaggerates and twists it for narrative effect. In The City and the City, China Miéville uses the premise of two cities, co-existing side by side and sharing the same physical space to comment on Borders as Social and Arbitrary Constructs and The Capacity to Ignore What Is Forbidden or Uncomfortable. Miéville, who is known for breaking free of strict genre confines, certainly incorporates traditional genre tropes in his novel: the shadowy and ill-defined avatars of Breach, the porous yet rigidly enforced borders, the myth of Orciny, and of course, the cities themselves. The concept of unseeing, of conditioning entire populations to not see people and places with whom they share the same space, is worthy of Kafka or Orwell.