Abstract
Abstract:
The hybrid genre of China Miéville’s The City & The City creates a level of liminality in the text (the novel combines elements of detective fiction, science fiction and fantasy), but this is even more true of its setting in a place governed by a system of indistinct, but rigidly enforced, perceptual borders. The novel’s pair of city-states exist in a shared physical space, but their respective inhabitants are separated by the mutual, and at first seemingly fantastical, practice of ‘unseeing’ elements and inhabitants of the other city. These borders allow two fictional city-states with different laws and national identities (Besźel and Ul Qoma) to exist in the same space. This article scrutinizes the way the fantastic is used to complicate interpretation of the text along strictly genrebound lines. The novel’s system of unseeing related to genre (specifically science fiction and fantasy) as a system of borders that functions in a similar way to that found in the novel, bound by perception and enforced by authority.