The City & the City

"Yeah, I wavered on whether The City and The City was science fiction or fantasy or… it’s one of those books where you just don’t even know what genre it is. This book messed with my brain so much. There’s a murder investigation and there are two cities that exist side by side, overlapping each other. Their relationship is unclear right at the beginning: they occupy the same geographical space, theoretically in Eastern Europe, but they are two different cities by custom and law. If something comes from one city into the other, it’s called breaching. And breaching is considered a crime worse than murder. There’s a moment we arrive at the scene of the initial crime, where the detective looks up, and sees through into the other city. Then he has to unsee the person that was there. It’s so unsettling. The nature of the crime is such that we have to involve detectives from both cities, so they are working in parallel, and having to make decisions about which city they’re in at any given moment. It’s so twisty on so many different levels. I remember that there was language for it. The Twin Cities are composed of ‘crosshatched,’ ‘alter,’ and ‘total’ areas. Total areas are just one city. Alter areas are totally in the other city. And then, in between those areas, are cross hatches, which would have different names depending on which city you lived in."

"There’s a phrase I once heard, ‘every story has one buy.’ There’s one totally ridiculous thing that readers have to buy into. The author doesn’t usually get more than one buy, and their story and their world have to be internally consistent with that one ridiculous thing. In The City & the City there is a supernatural force that comes in and yanks people out of reality if they break the rules of the mutually agreed upon imperception of the overlapping cities. It’s completely ridiculous, but Miéville builds the entire world around it and it’s internally consistent. The basic idea is that you’ve got these two warring factions within a city. It’s been decades, maybe hundreds of years, but at some point the two different factions within the city had a treaty and they agreed to coexist and continue living in the same city. But they agreed to never, never pay attention to each other. So the citizens are part of the same physical world, but they live in two different perceptual worlds. They share the same roads, they live in the same buildings, but they have all agreed not to pay attention to each other. That active not-paying-attention is actually active. If you’re driving down a road and you have to swerve around a car that belongs to a citizen of the other faction, you cannot reflect upon, or even think about, why you just swerved round. You have to trick yourself into thinking that you moved out of the way not to actively avoid something, but just because. Actively noticing that you had to avoid the citizen from the other city is, in itself, noticing a citizen from the other city and that will call down upon you this supernatural force that will punish you for having paid attention to them. The overarching narrative of the story is a murder committed in one part of the city, in this one faction. A detective from the other faction has to try and investigate this murder — in a place that he’s not even allowed to pay attention to. It’s amazing. For me, it’s a very impressive reflection on how we perceive the world around us. It’s a little tricky. I wrote a paper for a literary conference on this book and whether or not you could ‘unsee.’ It was interesting going into a science-fiction conference as a neuroscientist and trying to teach people the neurological mechanisms of attention. The best analogy I could give is from the point of view of hearing and language. We know, in mammals at least, that our auditory cortex — the part of our brain that first receives information from the ear about the sounds that you hear — is organised tonotopically. High frequency tones enter the auditory cortex in one part and then, as the frequencies get lower and lower, they are represented progressively further forward. That’s part of the way we think the brain decodes sounds: the neurones that represent those sounds — or the brain cells that respond to those sounds coming in — prefer different parts of the brain. So, if you take a rat, and you raise it in an environment where one tone or one frequency is overrepresented and you have a look at what happens in that rat’s brain, at its auditory cortex, the amount of brain dedicated to representing that frequency is way higher than in a rat that is raised in a normal environment. So the brains of animals raised in environments with different kinds of perceptual statistics develop in response to that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Some people have followed up on this to see if it is true that one of the reasons that native English speakers can’t hear tonal differences in Chinese is because our brains can’t hear them. Similarly, let’s say you play the guitar. You pick the strings with your right hand and you fret with the left hand. The amount of brain area devoted to your left finger movements is much larger. In The City & the City they really don’t notice each other anymore and I would argue this isn’t actually horribly crazy or out of line with how we know the brain works. If you’re raised in a culture where you’ve been trained to not notice people wearing certain colours and dressing in certain ways and walking in certain ways — which is how they identify one another in the book — then you might lose the ability to actually pay attention to them or see them. We wouldn’t really ever have a way to test this. In reality, I don’t think that that is how the brain works. That is the buy in the book. All these things I’ve been talking about are fundamental low-level sensory processes, like hearing and movement, which are different from more cognitive processes like attention and memory. But it’s still in line, generally, with what we know."