This was written for a short story course in university. —Ed.
It’s been a long while since I last read China Miéville with any seriousness, more than eight or nine years prior to this writing. I’d become infatuated with his style after coming into contact with his first Bas Lag novel, Perdido Street Station. The follow-up, The Scar, is one of my all-time favorite books. I even once gifted a signed hardcover of the tale to my father for Christmas. I don’t know if he’s ever read it, but the last time I was home I spied it resting in one of the webbed side-pockets of the living room sofa.
I attempted to read The Kraken, purchasing the book in an airport while enroute to Tokyo in 2011, and it felt that the work was the product of another writer altogether. Perhaps the changes that time wrought on Mr. Miéville’s style were no longer compatible with my literary palette; whatever the case I never saw fit to finish the book. I ended up donating it to a thrift store.
This short story, however, reminds me of why I first fell in love with the author’s cryptic fiction. It’s a brilliant little piece told in first person, regarding the discovery of a packet of mis-mailed documents. While the fragments never provide a complete correspondence, we readers are left to decipher their meaning along with Miéville, and the conclusions we’re afforded are as fantastic as anything he could have committed to page himself.
The Reports detail the discovery of Viae Farae, or “feral streets”, and give rise to the idea that the streets that lace the cities of the world together have their own motives, politics, and are very much living things. What Miéville does with this short story is give his readers a fertile plot upon which to sow their own seeds.
2016.01.04