Natalie Collie Thesis

Pieces of a city The art of making speculative cities, bodies, & texts

Natalie Collie, BA(Hons)

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

2011

Principal supervisor: Dr Glen Thomas Associate supervisor: Professor Greg Hearn

Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane

Abstract

This practice-led doctorate involved the development of a collection – a bricolage – of interwoven fragments of literary texts and visual imagery exploring questions of speculative fiction, urban space and embodiment. As a supplement to the creative work, I also developed an exegesis, using a combination of theoretical and contextual analysis combined with critical reflections on my creative process and outputs. An emphasis on issues of creative practice and a sustained investigation into an aesthetics of fragmentation and assemblage is organised around the concept and methodology of bricolage, the everyday art of ‘making do’. The exegesis also addresses my interest in the city and urban forms of subjectivity and embodiment through the use of a range of theorists, including Michel de Certeau and Elizabeth Grosz.

Key words: bricolage, speculative fiction, writing, urban, space, embodiment, subjectivity, Elizabeth Grosz, Michel de Certeau, assemblage, collage

Contents

Statement of original authorship

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: introduction…………………………...…………………1 Part One: Dis-assembly

Chapter 2: bricolage, the art of making do…………………...…....17

Chapter 3: making a city…………………………………...…....…37

Chapter 4: making urban bodies……………………………...…..65 Part Two: Re-assembly

Chapter 5: conclusions (making it/the work)…………….…..….87

Dwelling: an illustrated bricolage of a novel…….….…95

Bibliography……………………………...……………..….……...211

Statement of original authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet the requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institu- tion. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature:

Date:

Acknowledgements

To my supervisors, other QUT staff, fellow students, work colleagues, beloved family and wonderful friends:

Your kindness, guidance and patient support helped me to explore, develop, complete, endure...even love.

Thank you.

1 Introduction

This introductory chapter functions as an introduction to my whole thesis – both the exegetical and creative components. The chapter outlines my research question, objectives and the contribution that this research makes to the field. It then outlines how the rest of the thesis is presented. Finally, it introduces my use of the term ‘speculative fiction’.

1.1 Research questions

This project began with an ‘enthusiasm of practice’ (Haseman, 2006), rather than a specific research question: a desire to read and write a kind of literary speculative fiction that works at the intersection of various genres (science fiction, dark and urban fantasy, horror, gothic and fairytales) and that has an urban focus. More specifically, the project explores a range of thematic and aesthetic influences, including: fantastic and futuristic speculations on the city and urban culture

the visuals and noir atmosphere of movies such as Dark City, Blade Runner and The City of Lost Children

decadent and gothic literature

feminist explorations of the body and subjectivity, space, and speculative fiction

an aesthetic of genre-play, parody, appropriation, and fragmented, or discontinuous, yet interconnecting narratives.

The specific issues and questions that this project interrogates broadly fall into the following areas of investigation: a practice and aesthetics of bricolage; questions of urban space; and embodiment. The thesis explores the possible relationships between these, and the specific ways they are inflected by speculative fiction.

1 Out of these interests and questions developed the trajectory of my reading, and this in turn (along with my practice itself) has informed my interests and questions. This ongoing process coalesced into the following research question:

What kinds of relations can be explored between a practice and aesthetics of bricolage, urban space and embodied subjectivity? And how does speculative fiction - as less constrained by realist conventions, more fully and literally able to explore and speculate on urban fantasies, futures and nightmares – specifically inflect these relations?

1.2 Research objectives

In response to these questions, I formulated the following research objectives:

1. To develop a book-length collection of poems, short stories and/or other form of creative material that explores these issues. (Although it was not originally my intent to include visual work, this emerged quite organically from my engagement with the fine art metaphors of bricolage and assemblage through which I framed my methods of working as a creative writer.)

2. To research and document relevant theoretical and contextual material and critical reflection on the process of making in order to produce an exegesis that would function both as a supplement to the creative work (something akin to an extended form of ‘artist’s statement’) and a piece of theoretical and textual analysis in its own right.

The final weighting of each component is 50% of the total work presented.

1.3 Research contribution

The project:

makes a significant contribution to culture through the development of an original and experimental creative work that successfully combines elements of different genres, creative practice and media;

contributes to scholarship on practice led research via an exploration of 1) bricolage as a guiding methodology, and 2) the relationship between the exegetical and creative components of doctorate-level research;

contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on questions of space and place via an engagement with geography, architecture, and urban studies, as part of the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural and literary studies;

explores the particular contribution speculative fiction can make to this scholarship, and questions of corporeality, subjectivity and urban space; and

draws together a unique constellation of contemporary creative works (few of which have received any scholarly notice) and critical questions to consider in the accompanying exegesis.

1.4 Outline

The thesis is organised into two parts. The first – Part one: dis-assembly – com- prises most of the exegetical material of the thesis. The exegesis addresses the key issues explored in the creative work and contextualises these with relevant theoretical and textual analysis.

Part two: re-assembly presents a conclusion to the exegesis and then, finally, the creative work itself – Dwelling – presented as a bricolage of text and image. Part two also includes a bibliography.

Each of the exegetical chapters includes the following material: Introduction Frameworks (theoretical material and approach) Contexts (contextual review relevant to this particular aspect of the topic) Conclusion Each of the exegetical chapters also incorporates some reflection (either threaded throughout the discussion or given its own section of the chapter)

3 that attempts to make connections between the discussion and my own creative practice.

PART ONE: DIS-ASSEMBLY

Chapter two explores the concept and practice of bricolage. It introduces the aesthetics and metaphorics of decay, scavenging and recycling that come out of this bricolage methodology and that threads itself throughout my whole work, both exegetically and creatively. Contexts: Kathy Acker; William S. Bur- roughs; Angela Carter; and Jeff VanderMeer.

Chapter three examines possible relationships between writing/reading/making (as bricolage) and the city. It draws on the work of urban theorists and literary research. Contexts: cyberpunk; the new weird; and Alastair Reynold’s Chasm City.

Chapter four, in light of the previous chapters, attempts to theorise the place of bodies and subjectivity within these arguments and my approach. The chapter starts by reading de Certeau for a model of urban subjectivity, along with other models such as the flâneur. I then explore the limits of these models in terms of gender and sexuality in particular. I use the work of Elizabeth Grosz to help explore other ways of thinking about the relationship between cities and bodies. Contexts: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station; Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve.

This first half of the thesis thus functions at one level as an unweaving, un- picking, tearing apart, unraveling, cutting up, and deconstruction of the different bits and pieces that have informed the final creative product. But it also has a focus on beginning to weave these things (writing and cities for example) together. In fact, I would say that the main focus of my analysis is the productive connections between, for example, writing and cities, cities and bodies. In doing so, on another level, this process of analysis, review and documentation, in effect, assembles, collects, and weaves together an exegetical

4 text. The exegesis not only documents some of the thinking behind the creative component and gives a context for the work. It also functions as a theoretical and critical response to the central research questions of this project.

PART TWO: RE-ASSEMBLY

Part two is focused on bringing all of this material, all the scraps of fabric, all the broken tiles, all the scavenged scrap-yard junk bits together into a ‘text’ (as assemblage, mosaic, quilt, bricolage). Part two of this thesis brings together the fragments that I have collected, cut up and generated in part one. In no way, however, has my shift in focus lost sight of the essentially fragmented nature of urban life and subjectivity. Instead, it asks: what kind of assemblage of this heap of fragments ‘makes sense’? How to gift the reader with an engaging set of images and narratives while communicating and exploring this fragmentation and a diversity of textures, the traces of my labour? Part two presents my research into these questions through two avenues: the conclusion of the exegetical component of my submission and my creative/poetic response, Dwelling.

Conclusions: making it/the work This short chapter marks a transition in the development of my creative work, from an emphasis on generating recycling scavenging and collecting the scraps of poems and narratives to the concluding work of their assemblage. This ‘drawing together’ of the threads and bits of my research functions both physically at the level of how to combine and present the creative outputs of the project, but also less literally in terms of how to hold the thing together, via theme, structure, and internal logic. As such, this concluding chapter marks a return to the question of writing/practice through a metaphorics of bricolage, quilting, mosaics and assemblage with which the exegesis began.

The dissertation then presents the creative work: an assembly of textual and visual fragments entitled Dwelling. The final text is presented in an ambigu- ous form. It is neither a novel in the traditional sense, nor is it a collection of

5 poetry or short stories. Nor is it a graphic novel or an artist’s book. Rather, it combines elements of all of these into what could be described as ‘an illustrated bricolage of a book’: the final format of the material is in close dialogue with the traditional design of a book, but in a fragmented, deconstructed form. The conventions of ‘illustration’ and interior book design are deployed to help communicate elements of mood, aesthetic and mise-en-scene to supplement the narrative action.

In summary then, the rest of this dissertation is organised as follows:

Part One – Dis-assembly Chapter one: bricolage, the art of making do Chapter two: making a city Chapter three: making urban bodies Part Two – Re-assembly Chapter five: conclusions - making it/the work Dwelling Bibliography

The rest of this introduction will sketch some genre considerations that are important to clarify at the outset. These considerations are organised around my use of the term ‘speculative fiction’.

1.5 Genre issues (making speculative fiction)

1.5.1 Introduction

This section outlines the use of the term ‘speculative fiction’ in this thesis. It also touches on some genre-related issues and questions that have proven relevant in the course of my research. This section of the introductory chapter

6 thus also serves as an introduction to my contextual review; that is, to particular genres that have had a significant impact on the development of the research and its creative outputs. A more in-depth discussion of particular creative texts, and thus a more in-depth review of the creative contexts in which my own work operates, is threaded throughout the rest of the exegetical chapters of the thesis, and organised around key themes: a bricolage practice and aesthetic; urban space; and embodied subjectivity.

1.5.2 Speculative fiction

I have consciously maintained the broader notion of ‘speculative fiction’ as an umbrella term that covers a range of genres, working across a range of media, that, simply speaking, speculate on (to look at, or observe, and consider deeply) realities considered unlike our own or contrary to the ‘rules’ of reality, worlds that have wizards, monsters, or cyborgs, for example. The term is attributed to the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein and his 1948 essay "On Writing of Speculative Fiction”, although his use was restricted to traditional science fiction. The use of speculative fiction as a category of writing is also associated with the New Wave science fiction writers of the 1960s, and reflects an attempt to break from traditional genre constraints.

My use of ‘speculative fiction’ is similar to the way, for example, that Lucie Armitt uses the term ‘fantasy’ to refer to a long history and variety of texts and narrative modes that, unlike literary realism, inscribe worlds that exist beyond the horizon of what is possible and attempt to ‘explain the utterly in- explicable’ (2005, p. 3). This includes works as diverse as More’s Utopia (1516), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). It also covers a broad range of genres: from hard science fiction, alternative histories and magic realism to allegories and fairytales, for example. What all of these texts have in common is their inclusion of events or situations that do not conform to a reader’s normal understandings of what is natural or possible

7 (something that is thus subject to change depending on the experiences and background of the reader).

For the purposes of this chapter then, speculative fiction is very much understood as a verb, a mode of creative inquiry, of speculation.

1.5.3 Reading speculative fiction

Speculative fiction thus asks for a specific kind of reading. For example, Delany (1990) argues that, unlike ‘mundane’ literature, science fiction texts require that a reader be experienced enough to anticipate and incorporate an ongoing slippage and tension between the literal and metaphorical meanings of words. Science fiction, in particular, is full of neologistic excess (e.g. mech- rats, ReMades, cyberspace, ornithopters) and the literalisation of language (e.g. ‘her world exploded’) (Delany, 1990). This demands that the reader continually re-orientate themselves with regards to the distance between their own empirical universe (where ‘her world exploded’ will only ever be taken as a metaphor) and the image of the fictional universe constructed by infer- ence through the text, which might imply that a world did actually physically explode.

I would argue that Delany’s framework for understanding science fiction is useful for thinking about other forms of speculative fiction as well. In fact, much of speculative fiction’s lasting impact for me as a reader has always been closely connected with the rich metaphorical resonances of the various tropes used. Speculative fiction enables us to explore abstract concepts or phenomena (e.g. fear of death) through the concrete vehicle of temporal, biological, ontological, or technological otherness (e.g. the existence of zombies, the walking dead, quite literally). This function, for me, is central to its fascina- tion.

8 1.5.4 Genre versus literature

Lucie Armitt makes a clear distinction between ‘genre fantasy’ (e.g. science fiction, epic fantasy, fairytales, and horror) and the ‘literary fantastic’ (e.g. magic realism) (2005, p. 7). For Armitt, genre fantasy creates ‘enclosed worlds’ where the boundaries established around secondary worlds must remain constant for the narrative to proceed. In addition, genre fantasy conventionally imposes narrative closure. In contrast, the ‘literary fantastic’ explores disruptive, unstable realities and open-ended narratives that challenge the reader. Confusingly, Cornwell (1990) uses the term ‘literary fantastic’ in the general sense, and does not emphasise the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ forms. For the sake of clarity, I will use speculative fiction in the umbrella sense throughout this thesis, and restrict the use of ‘fantasy’ to the genre fantasy of writers such as J. R. R. Tolkein, Stephen Donaldson and Gene Wolfe.

The instability of this distinction between literary and popular forms of speculative fiction remains an ongoing tension in my own project. The high/low culture binary at its heart is rendered suspect - but certainly not erased (Luckhurset, 1991) - by postmodern theory and cultural practices. Such a distinction is also deeply imbricated in the conditions of production and reception that determine what kinds of books are published, how they are marketed, and how and why various genres are taken up (or ignored) by particular academic disciplines. Some authors, such as Margaret Attwood and Salaman Rushdie, are given mainstream literary recognition while exploring devices and themes (time travel, future settings, ghosts) characteristic of speculative fiction at its most popular. The range of speculative fictions that I am interested in writing and reading exists in varied relationships to conventions of Lit- erature on one hand, and the more pulpish side of their origins on the other. The tension between the two can often generate highly innovative genre transformations (the splicing of experimental literary techniques with science fiction by William S. Burroughs for example, and its subsequent influence on

9 New Wave science fiction). ‘Slipstream’ and ‘interstitial’ are two other genre sub-categories sometimes evoked to specifically refer to writing that sits in productive dialogue with speculative fiction and Literature. The writing of Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter could be included in these categories. Angela Carter’s work, in particular, has an ongoing influence on my thinking and writing. Winterson, Carter, and other writers such as Attwood, deploy the speculative nature of these genres, and a reader’s willingness to suspend their disbelief, to explore questions of gender and sexuality in innovative and chal- lenging ways.

Miéville suggests that the difference between genre – science fiction, fantasy, and horror – and literature that borrows some of the tropes of genre writing is one of surrender. For Miéville (2003, n.p.), genre is

…not about science, or even extrapolation. I think ‘cognitive estrangement’ obscures as much as it explains. There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible – whether not-yet-possible or never- possible – and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the sf pond so often forget. They think sf is ‘about’ analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that – I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes the genre. Those flirting with sf don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be about both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former. They are embarrassed and confused by the weird, and so they have neither the Bakhtinian side nor the Newtownian – neither the carnival nor the internal rigor.

This seems to be a useful way of characterising the tension that has driven this project from the start. There is a necessary ‘realism’ to genre fiction that can be compromised or undone by both overt political or moral agendas, on one hand, and literary experimentations with style, narrative and structure, on the other. To what degree have I been interested in, or willing to, ‘surrender’ to the internal logics of my fantastic speculation and produced a believable, con-

10 sistent – ‘truly weird’ – world? And how does my interest in ‘things’ rather than ‘stories’ - questions of sexual identity, and a poetics of ruin, fragmentation and juxtaposition - disrupt (or not) this consistency? Put another way, especially in terms of an interest in understanding speculative fiction as a metaphor-machine, how inclined have I been to trust my story (Miéville, 2003)? The answer to these questions has oscillated and evolved over the life of the creative work’s development. And continues to do so.

1.5.5 Science fiction, fantasy and horror

I am particularly interested in working in the shifting space between (or common to) science fiction, fantasy and horror. Genres are not homogenous or stable categories, and are notoriously difficult to define. Stableford, Clute and Nicholls suggest, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, that Darko Suvin’s 1972 definition of science fiction still provides a useful starting point: a ‘literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment’ (Suvin in Stableford, Clute, & Nicholls, 1993, p. xi).

Conventional fantasy writing, in contrast, does not emphasise cognition or rational explanations for the sense of estrangement and/or wonder it gener- ates, although (as already identified by Miéville, above) it normally involves a degree of internal consistency (Grant & Clute, 1997). And conventionally it rarely if ever draws on discourses of science and technology to explain what is regarded in our time on our world as impossible. Rod Serling, writer and pro- ducer of The Twilight Zone, stated the difference succinctly: ‘fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.’ This project explores this tension between the improbable and the impossible, the natural and the supernatural, as a question of reading; a question that is affected by the time and place of the reader (for example, at certain times in history certain things are considered im/possible). The creative work for this

11 doctorate explores a mostly future urban space, but it is also fascinated by the poetic, allegorical realms of dreams, myth and magic that are usually associated with fantasy rather than science fiction writing. Sometimes the work does not provide a rational explanation - in scientific terms – for events or situations, and instead asks the reader to consider possibilities that would be more closely associated with theological, supernatural or mythological discourses.

For the sake of this project, horror is defined by its potential to unsettle the reader ("What is Horror Fiction?," 2007), often by an exploration of macabre themes. It is the macabre and grotesque aspects of horror, the decaying, fragmented or morphing human body in particular (the body whose fragile borders have lost coherence), that are one focus of my work. The dynamic of fas- cination/repulsion explored by horror texts is often theorised with the help of psychoanalytic discourses on the uncanny and the abject (Hills, 2005). Border transgressions and category blurring are at the heart of horror’s capacity to fascinate and repulse.

1.5.6 The significance of speculative fiction

Many writers and theorists have attempted to define what role speculative fiction plays socially and culturally: the genre’s possible meanings and functions. For example, Urbanski (2007) suggests that a key function or capacity of speculative fiction is the expression of cultural anxieties. She argues that speculative fiction narratives explore our cultural ‘nightmares’ and can offer ‘cautionary tales’ or ‘hopeful warnings’ (2007, p. 10) about human civilisation. Fur- ther, she suggests that speculative fiction has had an important role to play in public discourses about the future and the unknown and how we talk about our fears and anxieties. She is suggesting, in essence, that speculative fiction can function as the unconscious, or as the realm of dreams, and as ‘cautionary tales’ that might have broader preventative effects on society. Urbanski identifies three key themes (and related sub-themes) of her ‘Nightmare Model’

12 across speculative fiction writing, film and television (albeit with a North American focus):

science and technology (nuclear war, information technology, and biology);

power (individual and state); and

the unknown (monsters, aliens, and ‘other’ beings; and progress)

Further, Urbanski suggests that speculative fiction operates through its tropes to render the unknown more familiar, knowable. On one hand, then, speculative fiction works to produce a sense of estrangement and wonder that renders the familiar, the everyday world, strange. On the other, by communicating the unknowable, it domesticates it, transforming incredible or night- marish futures or possibilities into something ‘strangely familiar’. This un/canny tension is at the heart of both the cultural power and the pleasures of the genres involved.

1.6 Conclusion: pieces of a city

This introduction to my thesis has outlined my research question, objectives and contribution; introduced the organization of thesis; and briefly examined a key term used throughout – speculative fiction. The next chapter (Bricolage, the art of making do) examines my methodological framework for the research, and a range of aesthetic and formal implications of this approach to questions of ‘making’.

Part One Dis-assembly

16 2 Bricolage, the art of making do

The ‘creative’ imagination…is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another. Sigmund Freud

2.1 Introduction

This thesis is driven by an underlying methodological and theoretical framework: bricolage. Bricolage - and associated concepts of decay, recycling, fragmentation, quilting, collage and assemblage - also emerges as a central thematic and aesthetic focus. Thus, this section, which might conventionally be expected to function as an exploration of the methodological approach to a thesis, also works to introduce key ideas and images that thread their way via form and content throughout both the exegetical and creative work.

My interest in bricolage as a concept and practice developed in response to a fundamental question: how do I create (text, images, a future, a city, heroic characters, narratives, an argument)? That is, my interest in bricolage emerged initially as a question of creativity, and in the context of a practice- led research doctorate. My central research objective has always been clear: to develop pieces of creative writing and theoretical analysis around issues of urban space and embodied subjectivity through a sustained engagement with speculative and literary fictional techniques. Working within an academic context, I designed this research with a focus on creative practice as research and outcome - integrated with an ongoing and situating process of reading and critical reflection (documented by the exegesis), so that the practice, reading, and reflection would inform each other. The practice led me eventually beyond words, to consider non-linguistic meaning-making (that is, visual forms) of exploring my objectives. From the beginning, however, I did not feel it was

17 possible to beg the question of craft (Pearlman, 2004), of the skills and techniques necessary to engage fully with the medium itself: of words, sentences, pages, (and eventually assemblage and image-making, as well). How do we generate our midden heaps1 of ideas, words, images?

On reflection, I could see that I had developed a quite distinct process of creative practice, of crafting stories and poems and images and objects over many years. I discovered that I am a bricoleur: scavenging over my own and others’ work; tinkering with the materials and tools at hand; breaking apart, appropriating and re-assembling older decaying fragments into ‘new’ creative products; retrofitting and reworking the scraps and rubbish accumulated over years of creative fiddling and hoarding; and constructing collage or mosaic- like assemblages that did not always, or perfectly, efface the seams and traces of their own de- and re-construction.

There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Deleuze and Guattari

Thus, bricolage emerged as a methodological framework for the project. The purpose of this section of my introductory chapter is to examine this framework and explore its implications for my research. The implications have been far-reaching: my process of working has been quite porous. That is, the metaphors and frameworks through which I first explained and grounded what I thought I might be doing, in turn, became a rich source of creative inspiration. In fact, one of the important findings of this project has been the value and creative richness of exploring the relationships among method, theory, content and form. For example, the visual metaphors outlined below finally and quite naturally led me to explorations of visual forms of bricolage and assemblage. That is, they, like so many things in this thesis, stopped being ‘just’ a meta-

1 See Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)

18 phor and became literalised2 through the work of assembling my speculative text/city/life-forms. As this exegesis progresses it will attempt to trace the ways in which this happened in response to particular ideas and areas of focus: urban space and setting (in Chapter 3); embodied subjectivity and ‘character’ (Chapter 4). The final structure of the thesis as a whole attempts to remain faithful to this progression; it attempts to trace the intriguing and highly productive connections and seepage that have emerged among practice, theory, theme and aesthetics. The focus on these connections is in keeping with the above quotation from A Thousand Plateaus (1987). That is, the exegesis identifies the many resonances between conventionally opposed aspects: what my creative (and theoretical) work talks about, how it is made, and the forms it has taken. Bricolage - and a closely related cluster of ideas and methods concerned with recycling, fragmentation, decay, layering, juxtaposition, and intertextuality (e.g. collage, mosaics, quilting, assemblage) - is what resounds in these echoes.

2.2 Framework

Bricolage involves a practice of appropriating, selecting, and re-assembling with everyday materials and tools close at hand. It is an ongoing process that develops and changes in response to specific and evolving questions and the contexts of the work. Bricolage refers both to a ‘process, a mode of activity or being in the world, and the result, the object, text, or outcome of this activity’ (Knepper, 2006, p. 71). The outcomes of this process are collage- or mosaic-like assemblages that do not necessarily efface the marks of their own construction. The fragmentary heterogeneous qualities of these assemblages carry the traces and seams of this ongoing labour and the concrete situations in which the bricoleur operates. Thus, bricolage, as a framework for conceptualising this work, emphasises that the process of creating does not happen without a

2 As already noted in section 1.5, this tension between metaphorical and literal meanings is also particular to speculative fiction; it is a theme explored throughout my project, especially in the dialogue between theory and practice enacted by my exegetical and creative work.

19 context, a history, and a particular location. And moreover, that the outcome of this process speaks of this through the fragmentary, complex nature of its being. Weinstein and Weinstein (1991) suggest that this outcome, this solution, is an ‘emergent construct’ (p. 161), one that has developed over time in response to changing contexts, tools, materials and methods.

Bricolage is also associated throughout this project with a practice and aesthetics of fragmentation, decay and ruin, and recycling. Freud’s notion of the uncanny is also relevant here: the juxtaposition involved in a bricolage, like a collage, can help to render the familiar strange. Breaking down materials (scraps of fabric, in the case of quilting, for example) and building new associations between previously disconnected objects or part-objects seems to me to be a process common to recycling, decay and fine art practices such as collage and mosaics. The project explores this chain of associations throughout the exegetical and creative work.

The concept of bricolage is attributed to Claude Levi-Strauss, the French an- thropologist. In The Savage Mind (1962), Levi-Strauss differentiates between two distinct modes of knowledge and being in the world, in terms of the spontaneous, ‘savage’ mind of the bricoleur and the scientific, rational, efficient mind of the engineer. Unlike the engineer, who seeks to dominate and explain the world, sacrificing complexity in the process, the bricoleur

seeks above all (more or less consciously) to preserve the qualitative complexity of the world by transposing this complexity onto structures of components with diverse and subtle relationships….The bricoleur thus displays concern for recuperation, and thereby responds to a profound need: that of creating meaning through reassembly, by (re)organising and weaving meaningful relationships among apparently heterogenous objects. (Boisvert, 2006, n.p.)

20 This idea resonates closely with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of ‘assemblage’ (1987). The emphasis in their use of the term is on an ongoing process of interaction and connection. Life, texts, institutions, and bodies are conceptualised as momentary assemblages rather than final, ordered ‘wholes’ that could pre- exist these connections. Assemblage has specific fine-art connotations as well that are quite closely connected to collage and bricolage.

Bricolage also implies an ethics of practice: it does not seek to dominate or fully explain the world, so much as inhabit the world and invest in it to give it meaning (Boisvert, 2006). The bricoleur, unlike the scientist, does not use structures to create events (to change the world) but uses events to create structures (Levi-Strauss, 1966). This is an important distinction and lends itself very well to the logic of practice-led research in particular. The logic of using events (textual, visual, theoretical) to create structures of meaning describes exactly the way in which this project has unfolded and should be experienced by the reader/viewer. It is the relationships and resonances between ‘practice events’ that have led to the structure or system of meaning that is the final product of the research (that you are reading, right now). Using such an approach, the world is not understood in terms of function or system, but as a network of relationships and correspondences (Boisvert, 2006). This approach implies a respect, in practice, for the real and stubborn complexity of things. It also helps to articulate the complications and effects of power wrought by any act of communication, explanation or attempt at meaning-making (Kinchenloe & McLaren, 2005). Bricolage provides a way of taking into account the effects of one’s own approach to a research problem and the material contexts within which we work.

The art of bricolage also opens itself in specific ways to the other who will view or read or in any way potentially receive the material outcome. By refus- ing to tell the whole story in a strictly linear manner, or perfectly police the boundaries of what is and what is not said, the work invites the receiver to

21 participate more fully in the process of meaning-assemblage. The extra gaps and edges produced by a fragmentary aesthetic can produce greater opportunities for active engagement and interpretation. This logic is similar to Sergei Eisenstein’s analysis of the cinematic technique of montage (The Film Sense, 1942, p. 32):

The strength of montage resides in this, that it includes in the creative process the emotions and mind of the spectator. The spectator is compelled to proceed along the selfsame road that the author traveled in creating the image. The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image as it was experienced by the author.

On the other hand, a reader might experience this as a rebuff, as a refusal to gift them with clear meaning or narrative closure. It depends in part on the experiences and expectations that the receiver brings to the work; that is, it is a question of genre. My creative work has been driven by a central tension between these two possibilities.

Bricolage thus emphasises that there is no pure, isolated, ‘starting from scratch’; it refuses the possibility of a blank page or canvas. Bricolage disrupts the notion of a whole, complete, closed work. In this sense, and as it is deployed in poststructuralist discourse, it gestures towards the operation of creation and discourse in general, as incomplete, dialogic, recuperative and open, as never perfectly engineered or impartial. There is no creatio ex nihilo here. Instead, there is working with what is at hand, for both the creator and receiver of the text.

Derrida writes that ‘all discourse is bricolage’ (1978, p. 285), that we can only ever ‘make do’ with what is available to us, the discourses through which we emerge as enculturated beings. Thus, the exegetical elements of this thesis can all be understood in part as a critical framing of what was ‘at hand’. What is a review of one’s methodological approach, the theoretical frameworks, and

22 contextual review if not a considered, genre-specific analysis of the problem, tools and materials with which the practice-led scholar crafts her/his doctorate?

The notion of bricolage is closely related to intertextuality: the idea that every text holds in its language the echoes, traces and fragments of other verbal and non-verbal texts, of culture and history (Cohan & Shires, 1988, p. 50). Julia Kristeva first used the term to highlight the way that every text is a mosaic of quotations, constructed through a process of absorption and transformation of other texts (Kristeva, 1980, p. 66). Intertextuality is also the mechanism through which genres coalesce around shared, evolving sets of writing conventions and reading expectations (see section 1.5 regarding genre). Bricolage assumes or implies a basic intertextuality; intertextuality is the ground that makes bricolage possible. But intertextuality lacks the sense of the tactical, of adaptation, and concrete, improvisatory action emphasised, for instance, in Michel de Certeau’s subversive poetics of ‘making do’ (1984, p. xv), and in subsequent uses3 of de Certeau’s work in the field of cultural studies in particular.

Kristeva’s work on intertextuality builds from Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) of a kind of literature, novels in particular, which is more ‘dialogic’ than ‘monologic’ in the way it relates to other works. The relationship among the work, and past and future texts, is a two-way dialogue of mutual influence, exchange and transformation. All texts and words, all language, involve this dialogue and the possibility for multiple codes and meanings (‘heteroglossia’), but some texts and styles of discourse (such as the novels of Dostoevesky) are more open to other texts and multiple meanings - more dialogic - than others (such as totalitarian political discourse). Novels remain more open to heteroglossic processes that are common to all language, but denied by most textual strategies.

3 See, for example, Hebdige’s analysis of subcultures and the re-use of everyday objects, such as the safety pin by punks, to re-organise their meaning (1979).

23 Bakhtin is also important to this project because of his theorisation of the grotesque in relation to the body and as an aesthetic mode. Kristeva’s work on abjection – a ‘psychoanalytically inflected development of Bakhtin’s grotesque’ (Vice, 1997) – will also be relevant. Both the grotesque and abjection will be explored in Chapter 4, Making urban bodies.

Any talk of abjection or the grotesque serves to remind us that there are also strongly gendered connotations to all of this talk of bricolage and related ideas of complexity, details, fragmentation, excess and re-production. Feminist theorists, writers and artists have attempted to recuperate these connotations, especially in the fields of art history and literary theory. Showalter’s work on women’s writing (1986), for instance, highlights the importance of metaphors of quilting and piecework for understanding what might be understood as a specifically female aesthetic in terms of method, cultural significance and form (e.g. linked short stories). Quilting, the process of piecing together bits of spare fabric, ‘is an art of making do and eking out, an art of ingenuity, and conserva- tion. It reflects the fragmentation of women’s time, the scrappiness and uncer- tainty of women’s creative or solitary moments’ (Showalter, 1986, p. 149). The structure of quilts might also be helpful for conceptualising the decentred and heterogenous nature of ‘women’s texts’ (p. 161). Quilting has been traditionally regarded more as a craft than an art, and is definitely associated with domestic, decorative, and everyday forms of creative production; and thus, with the ‘feminine realm’ more generally.4

This relationship between bricolage and questions of embodiment and sexual identity will also be further explored in Chapter 4. The focus will be on the overlap between theorisations of embodiment and identity and ideas of the grotesque, fragmentation and abjection in both corporeal and textual terms (see, for example, Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque, 1995).5

4 For well-known examples of feminist art practices that take this approach, see, for example, Judy Chi- cago’s The Dinner Party (1979) and Miriam Schapiro’s notion of femmage: activities of collage, assemblage, decoupage.

5 See also Jefferies’ ‘Text and textiles: weaving across the borderlines’ (1995).

24 2.3 Reflection

Bricolage has informed all aspects of this project: the method and form of the creative writing; the themes and content of the creative work; the theory use to analyse specific aspects of the project - urban space and embodiment, for example; the overall presentation of the research; and, literally, through the exploration of visual forms of assemblage. This section will briefly touch on some the ways that I worked with this mode of practice and how it informs the final assembly of the work.

2.3.1 Literary bricolage

The creative component was developed in this thesis with an acute awareness of processes of inter-textuality and an interest in modes of production that are capable of tracing out these processes. The institutional requirement to produce a theoretical complement to the creative work has further reinforced a sense of dialogue and mutual influence. Berstein’s notion of ‘wreading’ (2011) is relevant here for conceptualising a way of engaging with another’s writing at the experiential and performative level. Wreading involves a ‘writing back to’ or through or ‘in dialogue with’, quite literally (2011, p. 48):

When reading poetry is not directed to the goal of decipher- ing a fixed, graspable meaning but rather encourages performing and responding to overlapping meanings, then difficulty ceases to be an obstacle and is transformed into an opening.

There are obvious places where ‘ideas’ about cities or bodies have informed my texts and images. I have also explored this particular aspect of my work in concrete ways. This has involved, for example, taking words or lines of text from theoretical sources and reworking these words to produce poems. For example, in the poem ‘Methodical house’, spoken to Orlando by the city, the

25 words are taken directly from Vidler’s Uncanny Architecture (2001) and played with, rearranged, and added to.

The creative work also refers in places to specific words or lines of text from other creative works. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), itself a collage of other texts – and very much about the city and modernity as wasteland – was used as source material to generate the series of poems ‘This city, the desert’. The title of this series in turn refers to an historical work by Chitty (1977) regarding the development of monastic Christian communities in Egypt in the fourth century. Both these texts were important because I had been reading and thinking about how the city is constituted by a logic of the boundary and its others (see my discussion in Chapter 3 of de Certeau’s ‘Spatial stories’ and the role of the boundary), in this case, the desert. Eliot also dwells on a string of associations with the idea of ‘waste’ and the city that has obvious resonances with my work on urban space and decay and recycling. The poem also re- works key elements of the epic heroic poem, which became a preoccupation in my own work for a period during which I investigated questions of gendered heroism, narrative and form (this is briefly touched on below, and Chapter 5).

As a bricoleur, I relate to speculative fiction on a number of levels. The genre is a key aspect of the context in which I am working: it is fundamental to the research questions and the answers I have proposed. It is also a tool used throughout this thesis to achieve certain aims, to explore particular issues. Speculative fiction is also very much about the existing midden heap of material – tropes, themes, devices, clichés, lacuna – from which I have chosen to assemble and craft my particular texts as solutions to my research question. Thus, the genre is very much about the ‘how’ of this project, part of my methodological framework. Nevertheless, it, like a practice of bricolage itself, is also very much the ‘what’ or the focus and theme of my creative research.

The creative work itself also makes extensive inter-textual references – some fairly overt, others more subtle – to the contextual web in which it is working,

26 in which it is ‘making do’. Some of these will be noted throughout the rest of my exegesis.

This project can also be understood as a rewriting (dis/assembling) of conventional structures of gender, space, narrative and heroism in speculative fiction. The aggressive, lone figure of the hero, and his conventional relationship to the landscape through which he moves (coded as passive, mysterious and feminine), and the object of his quest (also figured classically in feminine terms), were key elements that I re-worked to produce the fragments of perspective and narrative of my female subjects. Joseph Campbell’s The hero with a thousand faces (1949) identifies distinctive narrative stages common cross- culturally to many tales of heroism - the ‘monomyth’ or ‘hero’s journey’. This scholarship, and more specifically a feminist response to this scholarship, 6 was another source-text for imagery and ideas that I played with during the creative development. What kinds of events or perspectives does a specifically ‘female hero’s journey’ entail and where do these events happen? Chapter Five discusses this particular aspect of the project further.

2.3.2 Bricolage, literally

As already noted, the visual component of this research was not part of my original project design. Nevertheless, it developed to become integral to the final product, especially during the process of assemblage.

Most of the materials used in the assemblages were ‘found’. During this aspect of the research, I also developed the character of the Faludi, the bower-bird- like alien living next door to Lucienne and Gabryl. The Faludi’s night-time ramblings and scavenging for treasures to add to her mating bower were the

6 See, for example: Edwards (1984); Hopkins (2002); Pearson and Pope (1981); Vaughn (1991); Wulf (2005). This particular aspect of the project is also explored towards the end of Chapter Four (making urban bodies) and Chapter Five (Conclusions: making it/the work).

27 driving metaphor behind the process of finding, collecting, and assembling the urban fragments into my own bowers/assemblages. The focus of my scavenging was fragments of industrial or built environment material, with signs of age, with rust and crumbling edges. Organic elements were also collected and incorpated in direct reference to key literary images recurrent in my writing: eggshells, plant material, skin, and bones. I used clear transparencies printed with text and maps to layer under these materials and project back onto their surfaces during scanning.

This use of collage and assemblage is a literal, concrete exploration that emerged out of, and in creative response to, the metaphors framing my methodological approach to the creative writing and research. Collage and assemblage practices also allow me to further explore the fragmented aesthetic that has guided this project. In addition, collage, within the traditions of art practice, has been associated especially in early modernism (Cubism, Surrealism etc) with the city and the fragmented quality of urban life quite specifically. Collage has also been taken up by particular architects as a metaphor or approach to built environment design.7

The assemblages8 were captured as digital photographs using a flatbed scanner. The juxtaposition of the technology with the materials, both inorganic and organic, is very much in keeping with the themes explored within the textual and poetic elements of the work. This exploration of the technology also reso- nated closely with the character of Orlando and her surveys and documentation of the ruined city.

Scanning directly from materials can give particular effects that are well- suited to this project. Scanning captures minute details (scanners produce very

7 See, for example, Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City (1987). 8 For examples of assemblage art please see, for example, the work of Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999) and Joseph Cornell (1903–1972).

28 high resolution digital images) and has a very shallow depth of field (no more than 2 centimeters or so). Both these characteristics are in keeping with the fragmented, close-up, unable to see the ‘whole thing’, claustrophobic and ‘snap-shot’ nature of the aesthetic in which I am working. The North Ameri- can artist, Doris Mitsch9 uses this approach. She outlines the opportunities and limits afforded by the use of a scanner as follows (italics added):

Unlike a traditional camera, it captures an image by slowly moving both the light and the lens across the subject, essentially lighting and photographing it from multiple angles in one long exposure. This produces a single image stitched together from thousands of tiny slivers, to which I then make endless, minute adjustments.

This offers me a view that can't be seen through a camera lens or the naked eye, and illumination that can't be duplicated with fixed lights. It also offers a uniquely detailed view, as I magnify each image and work on it down to a level of detail that will never be seen in the finished print.10

Assemblage directly placed onto a scanner has a strong sense of immediacy and ‘making do’, in both its process and the outcome. The work is quite literally assembled on top of the scanning bed (with an extra plane of glass to protect the bed), preview-scanned, re-arranged, and re-scanned, depending on how the preview looks, until the artist is happy with the effect achieved. I rarely planned or designed the images apart from a strong sense of the mood or aesthetic I wished to convey (fragmented, decaying, mosaic- and patchwork- like) in response to the pre-existing imagery and ideas developed in the written texts. Rather, I was led in a very improvisatory fashion by the materials and emerging patterns and effects themselves. The final scan was manipu- lated in terms of resolution, cropping, colour, and brightness at the point of scanning; this is akin to manipulation of the negatives in traditional photog- raphy insofar as the original version of the image itself is being affected, not just subsequent copies subject to software manipulation. Once captured, the assemblage was removed, disassembled. Thus, the assemblage or collage itself

9 For examples of her work, see www.dorism.com. For the work of other artists working with this technology, see, for example scannography.com

10 www.dorism.com, accessed 1 May 2011.

29 was not produced in an ongoing sense; it is only an image or documentation of the assemblage that remains.

The other ways in which a framework of bricolage has informed my project will be explored further in individual chapters. Before doing so, this chapter will briefly examine a range of contexts for this aspect of my project.

2.4 Contexts – making do

The approach to making that I have used throughout this project has been influenced by and/or should be understood within the context of a number of sources. The following brief review of relevant contexts for my own methodological and aesthetic approach is organised – from general to specific – in terms of qualitative research (in general), practice-led research (more specifically), and, finally, in terms of specific creative writing strategies. The review of relevant creative art practices has occurred in the course of my above discussion of methodology more generally.

2.4.1 Qualitative research

There is some precedent to using bricolage as a methodological framework in research projects. Denzin and Lincoln (2005), for example, note that bricolage and related metaphors of quilt making, improvisation and montage, are useful for thinking about qualitative research practices more generally. These metaphors capture the interdisciplinary, strategic, pragmatic nature of qualitative research and the products of that work. The researcher as bricoleur ‘works between and within competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigms’, appropriating and deploying multiple methods of interpretation and representation available, to produce a ‘complex, quiltlike bricolage, a reflexive col-

30 lage or montage’ of interconnected images, narratives, perspectives (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 6).

Marcus and Saka (2006) argue that this kind of framework (they refer to uses of Deleuze’s concept of ‘assemblage’ in particular) can enable a heightened sense of tension between the structural, on one hand, and the aesthetic, heterogenous and ephemeral, on the other; they suggest that social and cultural research and writing as assemblage are an ‘experimental genre form that is thus organic to the contours of the object of study’ (p. 103). Rather than just a ‘messy text’, research as assemblage or collage or bricolage might actually manage to communicate something quite difficult to suggest, via its form, about the nature of complex emergent structures in the world. This, Kincheloe and McLaren (2005) suggest, is a question of scholarly rigor and the need for non-reductionist, non-monological forms of knowledge production: bricolage is ‘grounded on an epistemology of complexity’ (p. 324); ‘complexity demands the rigor of the bricolage’ (p. 327). For Kincheloe and McLaren, the ‘tinkering’ characteristic of the bricoleur, for example, is understood as a ‘high-level cognitive process involving construction and reconstruction, contextual diagno- sis, negotiation and readjustment’ (p. 325).

2.4.2 Practice-led research

Stewart (2001) suggests that bricolage can also be useful for understanding the specific position and methods of the practice-led researcher, working and appropriating at the margins of traditional research methodology. Practice-led research (PLR) involves a ‘pieced together, close-knit set of practices provid- ing solutions to a problem in a concrete situation’ (Stewart, 2001, n.p.). The strategic and flexible nature of PLR as bricolage is vital: ‘the choice of research practices depends upon the questions asked. The questions depend on their context, what is available in that context, and what the researcher can do in that setting’ (Stewart, 2001). Vaughan (2005) draws on similar connotations,

31 using collage to frame her methods in the practice of art-based research. Her research suggests that a ‘collage method’ is characterised by the following (pp. 13-14): rooted in and led by creative practice of an experimental orientation built on juxtaposition, on the interplay of fragments from multiple sources interdisciplinary linked to daily life situated in a particular moment, location, and identity critical and transformational open-ended In addition, a collage method produces work that is multiple, provisional and interdependent; the nature of this outcome also reflects, reveals, and documents the process of its own becoming (p. 14). This last point is something that I find particularly interesting. The way that products of a bricolage, quilting or collage methodology are inscribed by their process of creation – in the form of visible seams or other kinds of edges and interfaces – is an ongoing aesthetic concern in my work. An edge, a border, makes connections between different fragments possible; and the more edge, the more possible connections, and the greater complexity of meaning-in-connection, as a network, are possible.

2.4.3 Creative writing

A range of literary strategies for textual production can be understood in terms of a bricolage methodology and aesthetic. As suggested above, in my brief discussion of inter-textuality and the work of Bakhtin, all texts must operate in this way insofar as all meaning production relies on a process of bor- rowing and re-assemblage. However, some kinds of literature and literary methods, especially those characterised or associated with postmodernism, engage with this process more directly. These include, for example, pastiche and parody. Both involve the appropriation of material from other sources which is then re-worked. Pastiche, in particular, is relevant because it often

32 refers to work that appropriates a mix of particular genres or styles. Pastiche is also interesting because it traditionally referred to an appropriation that managed to be both satirical and respectful of its sources. Some have argued that pastiche, especially postmodern pastiche, can easily fall, however, into a kind of ‘blank parody’ without humour or historical and political depth (Jameson, 1991).

A writer who makes extensive use of collage-like methods for producing texts is Kathy Acker. In Blood and Guts in High School (1984), for example, the text is comprised of a mix of different forms and modes: letters, diary entries, draw- ings, and dreams. She often appropriates sections of others’ texts in what would be conventionally understood in legal terms as an act of plagiarism. She also incorporates elements of science fiction in some of her works, although she is not regarded as a speculative fiction writer as such. Empire of the Senseless (1988) for example, has a cyborg as main character, and refers directly to (i.e. plagiarises) parts of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).

Another writer whose work would be relevant at this level of working in terms of methodology is William S. Burroughs. He, too, wrote in dialogue with some elements of science fiction. His ‘cut-ups’ – a literary technique developed in collaboration with another writer, Brion Gysin – involved literally cutting up and re-assembling source texts, either his own or another’s, into a new text (Smith, 2005).

Both Acker’s and Burrough’s works very much play on the effect of juxtaposition produced by these approaches to making a text. Writing as recycling, or ‘literary collage’ (Smith, 2005, p. 67)

…usually brings together chunks of writing drawn from a number of different sources and juxtaposes them. It lifts texts, or parts of texts, out of their original environments, and places them together to form a new context. In a collage we are usually conscious of certain discontinuities between the elements, but also of new continuities produced by the interface between them. The main characteristic of this kind of technique is therefore juxtaposition, whereby unconnected texts can

33 be put side by side in such a way that a relationship between them is forged. Juxtaposition is enormously important in experimental writing, because it allows ideas to resonate with each other without necessarily being seamlessly joined together. This discontinuous structure means the connections between the texts retain a greater fluidity, so that the meanings interact with each other in multiple ways.

Smith also includes strategies of rewriting a classic text, fairytale or myth from a contemporary point of view as a kind of recycling or collage technique (2005). Angela Carter’s work is the obvious example of this approach. ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), for example, retells the fairytale Bluebeard. Here the juxtaposition effect is produced powerfully at the conceptual level, between gendered tropes of innocence that the reader might expect from a fairytale, and contemporary perspectives on gender or sexuality, for example. The feminist recycling and reworking of fairy tales is another important background to my own writing.11

The mixing and re-combining of different genre conventions to produce ‘new’ hybrid forms could also be understood as a kind of bricolage or collage methodology (Smith, 2005). William Gibson’s work and cyberpunk more generally illustrate this well, as does the mash-up of genre conventions utilised in the new weird writings of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer.

What do other texts ‘look like’ that undertake this kind of approach to their own construction? By way of an answer, I will conclude this contextual review with a discussion of Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2002). The text could be thought of as something like an illustrative model for the kind of text that I have laboured to produce in Dwelling.

Jeff VanderMeer writes speculative fiction that is sometimes fantasy sometimes science fiction sometimes horror. In terms of conventional genre distinctions, his work is something of a collage. VanderMeer and others (Lalumiere, 2005) have described City of Saints and Madmen as a ‘mosaic novel’ because it is

11 See, for example, Bacchilega (1997), Haase (2004), and Harries (2001).

34 made up of stories, many published previously, and other kinds of texts.12 The stories and other documents create an overall yet highly fragmentary narrative about the fantastic city of Ambergris. Like a mosaic, and unlike a standard collection of stories, each section and fragment of the text informs and transforms each other, interacting to create a ‘whole that is exponentially greater than the sum of its parts’ (Lalumiere, 2005, n.p).

These parts include: three novellas; a satirical glossary of terms; a historical guide to the city (looking just like a reprint of a tourist guide) that is written by an author who plays a main character in one of the novellas; letters; illus- trations; short stories; a note on fonts used; posters from various festivals and performances; and case notes from a psychiatrist treating a patient, X, who thinks that he has created the city of Ambergris.

Existing at the intersection of various genre conventions, and using a postmodern aesthetics of parody, appropriation and fragmented narratives, Cities of Saints and Madmen exemplifies the kind of bricolage text with which my own sits in dialogue.

2.5 Conclusion: the art of making do

This chapter of my exegesis outlined the methodological approach to my thesis: bricolage. It also worked to introduce a range of associated metaphors, aesthetic modes and practices that have informed the production of my creative work. All of these ideas can be characterised by a productive tension between the fragment and the whole. The richness in meaning does not come from the whole. Nor does any one fragment encapsulate the meaning of the text. Rather, meaning is generated through poetic relations of juxtaposition,

12 In SF publishing, early work in a ‘world’ is often published in the form of short stories in magazines rather than a full length novel. When offered a deal to publish a novel-length work, an author will create a ‘fix-up’, and the previous shorter works are stitched into the bigger one. City of Saints isn’t exactly that - which is what makes it so interesting. It leaves the seams visible.

35 repetition, resonance and contrast between fragments. It thus asks of its reader or of its audience or of its viewer a particular kind of reception: one that remains open to this process and is willing to keep making connections.

The next chapter (Chapter Three) will focus on questions of urban space and creative production – on the ‘making of cities’. Chapter Four examines issues of urban embodiment and subjectivity. Both of these chapters read these issues in light of a bricolage framework.

36 3 Making a city

Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris…fragments of scattered semantic places. Michel de Certeau

3.1 Introduction

What is the relationship between stories and cities? And how might an aesthetics, theory and practice of bricolage relate to acts of ‘making’ urban space? Additionally, how might my interest in speculative fiction relate to this thread of inquiry? Through the media of poetry, assemblage/collage and prose my creative work explores all of these questions. This project also includes a significant amount of theoretical and textual analysis (the exegetical component) around these questions. This chapter documents that exegetical research.

My exegetical answer to this sub-set of my research questions draws on a number of sources. The first (section 3.2) engages in a close reading of the work of Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). To help explain the relevance of this theoretical work to my creative practice, I then reflect on the dialogue between the two that occurred during my research (in section 3.3). To address the specific relationship in speculative fiction between urban space and representation, I identify some connections between de Certeau’s work and recent scholarship on cyberpunk writing (section 3.5), after a brief outline of how questions of urban space and spatiality more generally might relate to a variety of genres of speculative fiction (section 3.4).13

13 This area of my research also involved the publication of an article in Futures – ‘Cities of the imagination: science fiction, urban space, and community engagement in urban planning’ (Collie, 2011). The article extends some of the ideas explored in this chapter and my reading of both de Certeau and cyberpunk to consider issues of urban planning, technology and community engagement. Urban planning can be understood

37 3.2 Framework

What is the relationship between cities and stories? Lehan suggests that cities and literature exist in a symbiotic relation with one another: literature has given imaginative reality to the city; and the development of cities has, in turn, transformed literary texts (1998, p. xv) The relationship can be conceptualised as a kind of “shared textuality” (Lehan, 1998, p. 8):

…the ways of reading literary texts are analogous to the ways urban historians read the city. Shared are constructs built on assumptions about the mechanistic, the organic, the historical, the indeterminate, and the discontinuous. From Defoe to Pynchon, reading the text has been a form of reading the city.

Lehan argues that different narrative modes – modernism, postmodernism, science fiction, for example – render images of the city in particular ways that emerge from a larger narrative reality particular to that mode and era. The rise of the gothic novel, for example, can be linked with the rise of the new city and the decline of the landed estate (1998, pp. 37-39).

Lehan’s argument has obvious relevance. However, my exploration of this question from a theoretical point of view (as a complement to my creative inquiry) focused on ways of understanding this dialogue between representation (literature, films, art, television etc) and the city in more poetic terms. For instance, Vidler, in his essay ‘Reading the city: The urban book from Mercier to Mitterand’ suggests that there is a long cultural history of thinking about reading the city like a book or a whole library of books (Vidler, 2007, p. 235):

From the city as an eighteenth-century version of the philosophical Encyclopédie through the city as mystery novel to the city as modernist collage and later to the city of cybernetic communication and finally to the city of virtual networks, the image has persisted, to the extent

as yet another form of ‘representation’ that operates in mutual dialogue with the production of urban space. However, this area of inquiry was beyond the scope of my exegesis and is not included here.

38 that the city and library have been conflated in the imaginary of modern writers…

There is also a long history to seeing an analogous relationship between language in general and the city. For instance, Wittgenstein suggests that, like a city, a language is always incomplete, in a process of development (1978, p. 8):

…ask yourself whether our language is complete;—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesi- mal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

It is within the context of this tradition that I read Michel de Certeau’s work on stories and space in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). De Certeau offers a persuasive theoretical framework for thinking about urban space and the way it is experienced and written through everyday practices of use, via ‘walking’ as figure, and the relationship more generally between cities and stories.

On one level, what de Certeau argues in The Practice of Everyday Life is fairly straightforward and obvious: people use things in ways that may not have been intended by the producers (government, planners, developers, writers) of those things (cities, books etc) and in ways that may not be visible or even representable to the system of organisation that manages those things and the system’s outputs. On the other hand, the metaphors and poetics he deploys to explore elements of this basic thesis I find particularly suggestive. And his poetics and metaphorics pull in both directions in a way that I was really interested in exploring in this project: on one hand, the textuality of space and its use; and conversely, the spatiality of texts and acts of reading/writing. These metaphors are central to my thinking about the relationship between my acts of creating a city, and the form and spatiality of the text itself. And at the heart of these connections lies this central, persistent idea of ‘bricolage’ and an everyday poetics of ‘making do’.

39 In the following section I first undertake a close reading of two essays in The Practice of Everyday Life: ‘Walking in the city’ and ‘Spatial stories’. I then reflect on how this reading resonates with my creative work.

3.2.1 A pedestrian poetics

‘Walking in the City’ is part of a larger investigation of the spatial logics of everyday life and cultural consumption. The use of urban space is explored as a significant example of the ways in which the consumers, as bricoleurs, actively re-use culture and ‘reappropriate the space organised by techniques of sociocultural production’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. xviii). These ways of operating are ‘ruses of other interests and desires’ that are not determined or captured by the systems in which they develop (de Certeau, 1984, p. xviii): ‘in the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalised space in which consumers move about, their trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space’.

Everyday practices are enunciative for de Certeau. The physical act of walking realises the possibilities of space organised by the spatial order (the network of streets for example), in the same way that the act of speaking realises a language, its subject, and writes a text. This process ‘affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects etc., the trajectories it “speaks”‘ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 99). Walking is framed as an elementary embodied form of experiencing urban space, a productive, yet relatively unconscious, speaking/reading (and thus writing) of the city.

Walking and other spatial practices are individual modes of appropriation as opposed to collective modes of administration (1984, p. 96). And they are ‘tactical’ in nature, rather than ‘strategic’. As tactics, these ways of operating manipulate and divert those spaces organised and imposed by strategies that seek to create places out of abstract models (1984, pp. 29-30). The distinction between strategies and tactics, then, is closely aligned with the distinction de

40 Certeau makes between place and space in ‘Spatial Stories’, another essay in The Practice. De Certeau’s use of ‘place’ (which he likens to Merleau-Ponty’s use of ‘geometrical space’) refers to a stable ahistorical configuration of positions ruled by the law of the ‘proper’, that is, defined by the distribution of elements in relationships of coexistence (1984, p. 117). Place enables an institu- tion (an enterprise or a city, for example) to delineate itself and its others (an enterprise and its competitors, for example) and to exercise strategies of power using this distinction. ‘Space’ (‘anthropological space’ for Merleau-Ponty), in contrast, is a ‘practiced place’, taking vectors of direction, velocities and time variables into account: ‘thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs’ (1984, p. 117). Space is actuated by ‘the ensemble of movements deployed within it’ (1984, p. 117) and situated by the actions of historical subjects. These actuating, situating movements or operations, often tactical in nature, have no proper place or stable border of delineation; thus, a ‘tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance’ (1984, p. xix) and produces ‘without capitalizing, that is, without taking control of time’ (1984, p. xx). Hence (1984, p. 103),

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place–an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City.

A multitude of intertwined paths and detours weave the urban fabric. Pedes- trians, in effect, tell urban ‘stories’ through their movements, giving their shape to spaces and weaving together places in ways that potentially trans- gress, from within, the transparent text or map of spatial organisations imposed from above by the panoptic gaze of corporate and government inter-

41 ests, the Concept-city. Using speech act theory to think about walking and its relationship to the city enables a basic distinction to be made between the forms of a system (the organisation of the city, the city as a text or book) and the ways these forms can be used (the ephemeral, discrete and communicative trajectories of the walker, the walker as a user/reader/rewriter of the city- text).14

Walking, as a space of enunciation, then, is marked by three fundamental functions (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 97-98):

it involves the appropriation of the topographical system (the language) by the pedestrian (the speaker);

it is a spatial acting-out (a speaking) of the place (the language); and

it implies relations (contracts with the other) in the form of movements between differentiated positions (interlocutors).

And, as a form of enunciation, walking has its own rhetoric. The trajectories, shortcuts and detours taken by passers-by are ‘turns of phrase’ and ‘stylistic figures’. Any particular trajectory or detour composes an unforeseeable path, a ‘long poem of walking’, out of the formal spatial possibilities at its disposal (1984, p. 101): ‘it creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mo- res, personal factors)’. The city streets are filled with forests of gestures that cannot be fully captured or circumscribed by a picture, a text or a map. The formal system of the city as text, its ‘literal meaning’, is subject to a semantic drift and wandering that makes ‘some parts of the city disappear15 and exag- gerates others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order’ (1984, p. 102). The ‘symbolisations’ that create these habitable places– the ‘fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not al-

14 These appropriations are also productive of particular forms of subjectivity (see Butler’s use of speech act theory, 1990).

15 This is an idea that can be enacted quite literally by speculative fiction.

42 lowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state’–are embodied by the city’s inhabitants, ‘encysted in the pain and pleasure of the body’ (e.g. ‘I feel good here’) (1984, p. 108).

Legends, memories and dreams – the stuff of speculative fiction, in other words – accumulate in and haunt places, rendering them habitable by opening up places to appropriation (1984, p. 105): ‘they designate what “authorises” (or makes possible or credible) spatial appropriations, what is repeated in them (or is recalled in them) from a silent and withdrawn memory, and what is structured in them and continues to be signed by an in-fantile origin’. Sto- ries about places generate a second, poetic, metaphorical geography of the city over the literal, forbidden or permitted geography, insinuating ‘other routes’ through which people’s movements are symbolised and orientiated. And these stories and histories about places are bricolages: ‘makeshift things…composed with the world’s debris….fragments of scattered semantic places….verbal relics of which the story is composed, being tied to lost stories and opaque acts, are juxtaposed in a collage’ (1984, p. 107).

3.2.2 Spatial stories

Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice. Michel de Certeau

If ‘Walking in the city’ manages to render, in highly poetic terms, the textuality of cities and pedestrian acts, then ‘Spatial stories’ works, in terms of metaphor, in the reverse direction. De Certeau explicitly links both narrative and the art of storytelling with space and everyday tactics (bricolage). Narra- tion is inherently spatial, a ‘dance’, that constantly identifies places (transforming space into place) and actualises space (transforming place into space) (1984, p. 115). Further, stories are not a supplement to, or displacement and transposition of, pedestrian acts and rhetoric. Instead, stories produce geographies of actions that eventually join the commonplaces of an order; they ac-

43 tively organise and make the journey either before or during its performance by the feet of the walker. 16

De Certeau suggests that stories produce space in three fundamental ways. First, stories that narrate action, as tours or itineraries, are inscribed through the ‘citation’ of those places that result from journeys and actions (i.e. a representation of places) or authorise them (i.e. the spatial order implied by a particular trajectory or movement between places) (1984, p. 120). In contrast, maps colonise space, rendering the state of geographical knowledge as a totalising, abstract, ahistorical tableau that erases the historical actions, movements, itineraries (spatial practices) that are the condition of its possibility.

Second, stories are also spatial practices in the way in which they delineate boundaries and enable the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits (1984, p. 122). An urban text, for example, uses a border to differentiate urban space and movements from the rural landscape. However, stories are actuated (that is, happen) and stories actuate space (that is, make space happen) through a central contradiction and ambiguity: the boundary (figured as a frontier or river) that marks out the legitimate space or theatre of actions of the story is only possible through an encounter with its alien exteriority. That is, the space marked out by a story is only possible through marking what it is not. And this marking is achieved by a frontier or border which, by definition, involves an encounter with the other. For de Certeau, the possibility and ne- cessity of this encounter are figured by a crossing or bridge. The boundaries inscribed by everyday narrations are not stable, however (1984, p. 129): ‘boundaries are transportable limits and transportations of limits….they mark out limits only by moving themselves (and the limits)’. This instability marks the tactical rather than strategic nature of stories.

16 Thus, for example, Joyce’s narration of Bloom’s journey though Dublin greatly informs many people’s own walks through that most literary of cities.

44 And finally, de Certeau suggests that stories, as enunciations, practise place and create space via an ‘enunciative focalisation’ that inserts the speaking body into the text (1984, p. 130): ‘the opacity of the body in movement, gestic- ulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what indefinitely organises a here in relation to an abroad, a “familiarity” in relation to a “foreignness”’. I touch on some of the ways in which these ideas relate to my creative work in the following section.

3.2.3 Reflections

‘Walking in the city’ and ‘Spatial stories’ have had a significant methodological influence on my work and the way I have further conceptualised the structure of my bricolage novel. One important aspect of this influence rests on the distinction made between the ordinary practitioners of the city, living ‘below the thresholds at which visibility begins’, and the city, as picture and concept (the decaying Concept-city) produced and imposed from above by the panoptic eye of the planner or cartographer. Walkers’ ‘bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 93):

These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognised poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is though the practices organising a bustling city were characterised by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.

Escaping the imaginary totalisations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.

The above passage suggests a productive and poetic tension between the totalising impulses of my objective of writing a book about a city, and the fragmentary, heterogenous structure I have chosen. Like de Certeau’s walkers, the

45 paths my narratives and characters take may overlap or intersect and none will individually or seamlessly constitute a complete text in terms of what can be read from ‘above’, as a map. These paths and acts of shaping and linking space and weaving place will, however, constitute the complex emergent system ‘whose existence in fact makes up the city’ (1984, p. 97). The city is a heterogenous complex system with multiple hubs and innumerable nodes and multiple connections, just as I want my text to be. And every day that I sit down to write the city, my various intertextual language threads, my intentions, plans, and ideas for structure are tried out, sometimes affirmed, other times transgressed, often disrespected by the improvisatory, daily practice of actually writing (my body in/to the text). The writing often takes an unfor- seen path, a strange unexpected detour of mood or narrative that refuses to obey the street plan and layout mapped out from the imaginary, totalising perspective of the Author. A corollary of this is the distinction between the map and the tour or itinerary that de Certeau also makes. My creative work does not attempt to map a city so much as inscribe a city through the everyday movements, stories, images and experience that actuate and articulate urban spaces. The ‘meaningfulness’ of the text is not derived from a seamless or perfectly linear ‘story’ but from the intertwining of the fragments and how they relate or not to each other. Unlike the traditional planner or cartographer, my self-construction as bricoleur-author suggests an awareness and complicity in these processes. This tension between a discourse of the planner/ cartographer (the map) and a discourse of bricolage and the street (the story) will be explored throughout this project.17

17 A common criticism of de Certeau’s work also rest on this distinction between the map and the story. Morris (2004) suggests that de Certeau provides an overly simplified top-down model of power and its operations which produces a set of rigid either/or binaries: the official versus the everyday, the authorities versus the ordinary people, the symbolic versus the unconscious, strategies versus tactics, and compliance versus resistance, etcetera. The vertical one-dimensionality of de Certeau’s model also runs the risk of elid- ing the complexity of ‘the street’: in terms of differences and struggles between groups within an essential- ised ‘the people’; and the possibility of complicity and acceptance of domination (Frow, 1995). These criti- cisms largely focus on the question of power and the possibility of resistance formulated by de Certeau. That is not, however, the main concern at this point in the project, or this stage of my theoretical research. It is de Certeau’s emphasis on the enunciative quality of movements in the city, figured by ‘walking’ as reading/writing, and the explicit links made between space and narration, that I find most useful. I would also argue that his subsequent discussion of various symbolic mechanisms, embodied memory in particular, opens up the possibility of a more complex nuanced investigation of how urban space is experienced and rendered meaningful by the movements and experiences of its users. The Practice of Everyday Life also needs to be framed as a specific response to the terms and mechanisms of power set out by Foucault. Contrary to

Thus, the text of the city is more like a poetic, fragmented discontinuous narrative or collection of poems, rather than a conventional novel. Hence, my continued interest in these questions of form, as a way of communicating these ideas. Other theorists have also emphasized the fragmentary nature of urban experience and memories and the kinds of representation these suggest. For instance, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’ was organised around what he referred to as a ‘literary montage’ (1999):

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them. (p. 460)

Of additional relevance to this project are de Certeau’s ideas about the boundary of the city inscribed by narratives and the necessary incorporation – into the body of the city – of the border between itself and its others (rural, wild, nature, desert, jungle etcetera). In my work, the city of Psalm is bordered by the desert. And I have explored extensively the interweaving of this binary city/desert in some of my pieces; and the ways in which each incorporates the other. The city is very much a ‘wasteland’ on a number of levels. Exploring ways of unsettling a related set of binaries – culture/nature, masculine/feminine, production/reproduction, mind/body – is also central. And here too is where my wreading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was fundamental.

The city that Orlando explores is old and without human management. The careful boundaries and distinctions that must be monitored and maintained between urban and rural, city and country, culture and nature, inorganic and

Foucault, de Certeau wishes to focus not on the violence of disciplinary technologies but on the ideal of an everyday ‘antidiscipline’ network composed of the ‘clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline”’ (1984, pp. xiv-xv). These issues of power, control, and resistance will be explored more fully during my readings of particular speculative fiction texts.

47 organic, have collapsed into a riot of cross-pollination. Distinctions between built/designed and organic/growing have also become completely blurry. Some of the buildings are still ‘smart’ and there is definitely some cross- pollination going on between ‘technology’ and nature.

Thus, I would argue, based on my own creative inquiry, that speculative fiction offers a powerful way of literally exploring some of these ideas, especially de Certeau’s insistence on the accumulation of legends, dreams and memories that ‘haunt’ the city. It is to other examples of speculative fiction, and their renderings of the city, that I now turn.

3.3 Contexts

The city as we might imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Jonathan Raban

Vivienne Sobchack (2004), in her work on science fiction cinema and the city, suggests that the ‘city of the imagination’ produced in these and other creative texts functions as a

hypnogogic site where the anxieties, desires, fetishes of a culture’s waking world and dream world converge and are resolved into a substantial and systematic architecture. This imaginary architecture…is more than mere background. Indeed, the science fiction film city’s spatial articulations provide the literal premises for the possibilities and trajectory of narrative action – inscribing, describing and cir- cumscribing an extrapolative or speculative urban world and giving that fantasised world a significant and visibly signifying shape and temporal dimension. That is, enjoying particular representational freedom as a genre of the fantastic, the science fiction film literally ‘real-ises’ the imaginary and the speculative in the visible spectacle of a concrete image. (pp. 78-79)

Although her emphasis is on the visual spectacle provided in film, her basic argument, and its central paradox, is just as applicable to other forms of sci-

48 ence fiction and fantasy. As less constrained by realist conventions, science fiction and other speculative genres are able to more fully ‘real-ise’ that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical or subjective: our culture’s ideas, dreams, fetishes and fears. And this ‘imaginary architecture’ provides far more than intriguing mise-en-scène. Rather, these cities ground the premises of the narrative action; the city literally embodies and enables the narrative.

Sobchack’s argument is suggestive of Edward Soja’s definition of the ‘urban imaginary’ (1989): ‘our mental or cognitive mappings of urban reality and the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate and decide to act in the places, spaces and communities in which we live’. Thus, these ‘cities of the imagination’ exist somewhere in between the real of concrete space and the subjective realm of our conception and experience of that space. Their stories contribute to the way we make sense of and inhabit cities, as de Certeau also suggests.

Central to Sobchack’s argument is not just that speculative fiction is a forum for the exploration of our dreams and anxieties, but also that the architecture in which these dreams are resolved into – a text’s ‘spatial articulations’ – are not just background but central to the premises of the narrative action itself. The city embodies the narrative. It is part of the texture of the narrative. This argument resonates closely with de Certeau’s work on urban space. Specula- tive fiction, I contend, is especially suited to literally enacting the poetic dialogue explored in de Certeau and other urban theory work on the production of space as meaningful.

For this thesis I undertook a review of the scholarly literature on speculative fiction and cities. My reading suggests that the literature clusters around two (overlapping) areas: science fiction cinema and cyberpunk literature.18 In the

18 This focus on science fiction to the exclusion of fantasy cities is perhaps due to a focus in traditional fantasy writing on nostalgic, pre-industrial or pastoral settings. Although cities do exist in even the most con-

49 area of science fiction film criticism, a number of films have emerged as a focus for thinking about cities and science fiction; for example, Fritz Lang’s Me- tropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the Wachowski brothers’ Ma- trix trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003) and Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998). The research on science fiction cinema and cities highlights a number of issues fundamental to all urban speculation, regardless of genre or medium (Gerlach & Hamilton, 2004, p. 115):

the conflict between utopian and dystopian potentials; the alienation produced in subjects in and by built environments; the relationship between built environments and nature; the effects of a centralisation of oppressive or controlling power upon individual freedoms; the relationship between space and time; and the role of technology in future and futuristic visions of the metropolis and urban life.

Two of these issues are very much the ‘subject’ of my own work: the relationship between the built environment and nature, and between space and time. The effect of time passing is very much what a lot of the work is ‘about’. This was enabled by having some of the work as very science fictional insofar as it is set far into the future of the city, now abandoned. Both time and nature have encroached on the architecture of the city, breaking down its structures and a clear distinction between the city and the desert.

My scanned assemblages explore quite literally the materiality highlighted in decay and ruins. Ruins are nostalgic, mournful: they remember or gesture to-

ventional of fantasy—Tolkein’s Middle-earth, for example, has plenty—they generally function as medieval-styled backdrops, rather than important characters in their own right. Perhaps, too, the ‘secondary’ and pre-industrial nature of many fantasy cities restricts their ability to reflect or interrogate questions of modernity and urban culture as they lack some of the key signifiers. However, this project focuses on speculative fiction that does not sit so easily on either side of the science fiction / fantasy divide in particular. Many of the more fantastic speculations examined in this exegesis are distinctively non-nostalgic, drawing, in the case of China Miéville for example, on gritty industrial settings (although most are secondary rather than primary world) and a detailed bricolage of the grotesque, uncanny everyday of people’s labour, bodies, political struggles and dreams.

50 wards what once was, through their fragmentation and incomplete form. The fragment of a ruin is like a piece of puzzle, suggesting what is now missing or unrepresentable or a mystery. Through decay and degeneration, ruins highlight the materiality of an object or structure over its now lost form. The images included in the work also explore the breakdown of a clear distinction between the built environment and nature, especially via the juxtaposition of inorganic and organic elements.

3.3.1.1 Speculative fiction and a metaphorics of space

At a more metaphorical level, there is also a close relationship between spatiality in general and speculative fiction. A metaphorics of space has been central to conceptualising the way that speculative fiction genres function (Armitt, 1996). Armitt suggests that the utopian impulse – ‘the desire to go ”beyond”’ (Armitt, 2005, p. 113) – lies at the heart of all speculative fiction, even the most macabre. She argues that fantasy narratives work through ne- gating borders, especially those delineating ‘the real’. She also suggests that ‘borders and parameters remain key themes in [speculative fiction]; and spatial and topographical concerns are its key motifs’ (Armitt, 2005, p. 58).

Other theorists of speculative fiction also emphasise the importance of ‘space’. Speculative fiction opens up a cognitive space of estrangement between fictional worlds and the empirical world of the reader that must be negotiated (Malmgren, 1991). Science fiction and fantasy are distinguished, not by particular storylines, but by a focus on the ‘other’ spaces, or ‘elsewhere’ of estrangement (Kitchin & Kneale, 2001). Fredric Jameson has suggested that ‘all SF of the more “classical” type is “about” containment, closure, the dialectic of inside and outside’ (1987, p. 58).

In addition to this general preoccupation with space and borders, a number of speculative fiction genres have a distinctively urban focus. These include cyberpunk (and its more recent incarnations), new weird, and urban fantasy.

51 The textual analysis and contextual review that is included throughout this exegesis will draw on a range of relevant texts from these subgenres. I will briefly summarise each in turn.19

3.3.1.2 Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk emerged in the 1980s as a subgenre of science fiction that drew on the plots and sensibility of classic noir detective stories (the quintessential urban genre) and cowboy stories (among others). Its narratives speculate on the intersection of information technology and society as it is played out in the parallel realms of the future mega-city and the virtual city of cyberspace. Closely associated with the writing of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in particular, early cyberpunk attempted to integrate ‘the realm of high tech and the modern pop underground’ (Sterling in Abbott, 2007, p. 124). Countless cyberpunk forecasts about technology, the media and the global economy have been realised in subsequent decades (Raulerson, 2003). And the sensibility, themes and tropes of early cyberpunk have diffused across science fiction more generally. It has also emerged as something of a darling in postmodern academic scholarship.

Urban space is central to cyberpunk fiction and film as both setting and figure. Bukatman, for instance, suggests that cyberpunk’s ‘compacted, decentred, highly complex urban spaces’ provide a postmodern mapping of future urbanism (1993, p. 142). Cyberpunk’s highly detailed renderings of future urban spaces make it particularly pertinent to this project.

3.3.1.3 The New Weird

This is what makes the world, Ms Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic. Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I am interested in. The

19 The rest of the contextual review has a focus on fiction, rather than film or television. This is in keeping with the focus of my own creative work.

52 zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone.

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

The ‘new weird’ is speculative writing with its roots in the New Wave science fiction of the 1960s (like cyberpunk) and the Victorian decadents, and is characterised by a shifting urban landscape, an emphasis on particularity of character and place, the precise use of language, surreal and grotesque imagery, sharp political undertones, and the subverting of expectation (VanderMeer & VanderMeer, 2008). M. John Harrison’s series of Viriconium stories and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy are often cited as texts of key influence. Writers who have been associated with the new weird include China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and K.J.Bishop.

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), and other books set in the city of New Crobozon, are regarded as the epitome of the cross-genre moment/movement.20 New Crobozon, a city not unlike Victorian London in its degree of squalor, poverty and social division and unrest, is inhabited by humans, mutants, robot-like ‘constructs’, and other sentient species, such as the half-human, half-insect khepri (including Lin, one of the main characters), the frog-like vodyanoi and a race of cactus-people. The city is a crazy patchwork of diverse districts and ghettos organised by differences of species and class. Although ‘secondary’ world fantasy, Perdido Street Station is rendered in a gritty realism that is quite unlike conventional fantasy writing, subtended by an earthy Marxist politics that grounds its magic and grotesque fantastic creatures in the everyday of class struggle and power inequalities. And in this world, magic, or ‘thermaturgy’, is researched and taught as a science.

20 Miéville has recently distanced himself from the new weird. This disavowal can be understood as a symptom of the shifting nature of genre conventions, and the desire by many writers to escape the constraints of such categories (especially once they become a marketing tool). Hence Jeff VanderMeer’s decla- ration, in the introduction to an anthology of new weird writing, that ‘the new weird is dead. Long live the next weird’ (VanderMeer & VanderMeer, 2008).

53 The strength of detail involved in Miéville’s rendering of the city of New Croboboz is a key distinguishing factor of most other texts marketed as the new weird. A key attractor for me as a reader and as a writer is the new weird’s highly detailed renderings of architecture, character, art and culture, and other elements of everyday life. And this is one area in which my interest in the new weird and cyberpunk coincides: cyberpunk writing also focuses its attention and ‘visionary intensity’ on cultural minutia and a ‘willingness to carry extrapolation into the fabric of daily life’ of the city (Sterling in Abbott, 2007, p. 124).

There is a very strong very detailed gothic, architectural sensibility in the writing of, for example, Jeff VanderMeer, Catherine M. Valente, and K.J. Bishop. The dangers and allures of a city culture and architecture in decay are very much a key focus in the work of these writers. In Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground (2003), for example, much of the action occurs in the bowels of the city, a decaying labyrinth of old subways, vast subterranean buildings, shanty towns, scavenger clans, genetically engineered sentient creatures of every form imaginable and a cathedral-like organ bank filled with mountain- ous piles of frozen or rotting body parts and still living ‘donors’. One particular scene highlights well both the importance of imagery of decay and rubbish, and the grotesque intermixing of various forms of organic life with machine/built environment explored by VanderMeer (pp. 111-112):

The garbage zone was a revolving beast that ate its own dark trail and was never fully gorged on what it found there. Once it had been AI, but now it was just an old beast, and a slow beast, rags of flesh that traversed the piles, the mountains, of its movable feast. The beast formed a circle, and at the far end of the circle–farthest from where Shadrach entered its entrails–the maw of the beast chomped down on the stinking offal, the rotted food, the ever-present stream of used plastics with its rusted metal jaws. With a grinding of gears, it swal- lowed ton after ton, some of it burned, some of it expelled from its gullet down into a deep hole where it was crushed flat. But most of it was reduced down into raw materials and expelled by eruption from the beast’s blowhole, to be used by above level, which would in turn send its products below level to the captive commercial market waiting to use them, and once used, once more thrown out, so that the beast not only ate itself, it ate the leavings of its leavings: it ate the world forever.

Although neither the new weird or a child of cyberpunk, the space operas of Alastair Reynolds also explore both living (literally) and dying cities, and a definite tech-gothic sensibility. In Chasm City (2001), for example, the city of the title has been infected by a devastating disease in the form of an alien hybrid biological/software virus, the Melding Plague, which targets and cor- rupts all forms of machinery – from ‘smart’ built environments to internal forms of neural enhancement and nano-medicine – causing them to evolve uncontrollably, ‘seeking bizarre new symbioses’ (p. 3). The city’s buildings are transformed into ‘Gothic nightmares’ (pp. 187-189):

From the behemoth, it looked almost normal: a phenomenal mass of immensely tall buildings compressed into a festering urban density, like a glimpse into the innards of a fantastically complex machine. But there was something queasily wrong about those buildings; something sick about their shapes, contorted into forms no sane architect would have chosen. Above ground, they branched and rebranched, merging into a single bronchial mass. Except for a sprinkling of lights at their upper and lower extremities – strewn through the bronchial mass like lanterns – the buildings were dark and dead-looking.

….The transformations had been extraordinarily rapid – so rapid in fact, that the shifting buildings had killed a great many people in ways far cruder than the plague itself would have done. The buildings had been engineered to repair themselves and reshape themselves according to architectural whims imposed by democratic will – the populace having only to wish a building to alter its shape in sufficient numbers for the building to obey – but the changes wrought by the plague had been uncontrolled and sudden, more like a series of abrupt seismic shifts. That was the hidden danger of a city so Utopian in its fluidity that it could be reshaped time and time again, frozen and melted and refrozen like an ice-sculpture. No one had told the city that there were people living within it, who might be crushed when it began to shape itself. Many of the dead were still down there, entombed in the monstrous structures which filled the city.

3.3.1.4 Urban fantasy

Urban fantasy is often used to refer to a fantasy subgenre that emerged in the 1980s as a distinct publishing category associated with writers such as Charles de Lint. It is characterised by a distinct emphasis on place and contemporary urban settings in which fantastic narratives are played out (faerie in modern

55 New York, for example). Films such as The Crow and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Supernatural would also exemplify this kind of fantasy. The contemporary nature of urban fantasy settings makes it of less relevance to this project than cyberpunk or the new weird.

However, ‘urban fantasy’ can also refer more broadly to a mode of storytelling that can include a variety of themes and approaches in its portrayal of cities as both setting and supporting character (Grant & Clute, 1997). It is in this sense that the recent anthology of urban fantasy, Paper Cities (Sedia, 2008), was com- piled. The anthology includes an eclectic, wide-ranging mix of genres and styles, including stories by Hal Duncan, Jay Lake, and Catherynne M. Valente. Nivens (2008), in an introduction to the book, suggests that this diversity reflects the attempt by ‘second generation’ writers of urban fantasy to push genre boundaries and explore ‘other territories’ by applying ‘the urban fantasy mode to both non-Western cultures and to other subgenres and fictional forms’, including cyberpunk, dystopian science fiction, fairytales and horror (2008, pp. iii-iv). It is in this sense that urban fantasy can be considered relevant to my own writing project.

At one level, then, most if not all of the speculative fiction covered by this exegesis could be read as ‘urban fantasy’ by virtue of the fact that it all has an urban focus. But this definition may in fact be too broad to be of much use. And I would suggest that it probably does not reflect the way that, as fans, rather than as academics or even as the compilers of anthologies in the above case, we would commonly differentiate, consume, and enjoy particular speculative fiction genres. The subgenre of urban fantasy, in the more restricted, commonly understood sense of the term, is relevant to this project more for the ways in which a tension is played out between the familiar, contemporary, ‘realistic’ settings that differentiate it from conventional fantasy and the presence of fantastic, ontological otherness. Characters within urban fantasy texts often struggle to make sense of the fantastic turn of events in which they find themselves. In this sense, urban fantasy often plays with a classic Todovian

56 hesitancy (1975) between natural/logical and supernatural/illogical explanations for strange events.

The rest of this chapter will examine some issues particular to cyberpunk writing with the help of de Certeau’s work on stories and cities.

3.3.1.5 Cyberpunk cities and the art of making do

Cyberpunk in general, and the work of William Gibson in particular, is a good focus for this exegesis, not only because of its intensely urban focus, but because of its close relationship to critical theory, and the increasingly blurred distinctions between fiction and fact that mark both its theorisation and its popular reception. The following reading of the sub-genre attempts to illustrate the way in which the city functions in cyberpunk texts, particularly in relation to questions of technology, power and strategies of resistance. De Certeau has been used by a number of theorists to consider such questions in the work of Gibson in particular.

Cyberpunk is the focus of a significant amount of academic scholarship, which has continued way beyond the ‘life’ of the genre moment. It has caught the scholarly imagination for a range of reasons, not least of which for its apparent insights into urban issues and processes. Cyberpunk’s vision of near-future cities often gels closely with formal urban theory. For example, it highlights the central role of global cities in world economic and social change; the development of cities as communication systems; the dominance of Pacific Rim economies and culture; intense social bifurcation and an absent or in-crisis middle class; the weakening role of government; and the importance of Los Angeles as a model for our urban future (Abbott, 2007). Cyberpunk offers a salutary warning about what the our urban futures might hold: ‘William Gib- son...has provided stunning examples of how realist, “extrapolative” science fiction can operate as prefigurative social theory, as well as an anticipatory

57 opposition politics to the cyber-fascism lurking over the horizon’ (Davis, 1991, p. 32).

The relations among technology, subjectivity and power that are a central concern of cyberpunk are most intensely explored through the concept of cyberspace. And this virtual space is closely related to the urban spaces the subgenre also explores. Cyberspace is ‘a simulation of the city’s information order’ in which the ‘city redoubles itself through the complex architecture of its information and media networks’ (Davis, 1991, p. 16). Myers (2001) suggests that cyberspace is a kind of postmodern cartography, a representational attempt at domesticating Jameson’s ‘postmodern hyperspace’ of late capitalism and the changing and ubiquitous nature of contemporary urban experience. The metropolis in cyberpunk functions as a metaphor for cyberspace and vice versa (Myers, 2001) and both are ordered by the same flows of capital and information (Wetmore, 2007).

In cyberpunk narratives, cyberspace and urban space are both dominated by corporations. Along with the rise of technologically mediated, virtual forms of communication, cyberpunk extrapolates a dramatic decline in public space and face-to-face contact, and the dominance of private spaces saturated with technologies of surveillance and information. Its perspective on the risks of technology, in terms of privacy and control, is very dystopian. Cyberpunk’s virtual and urban grid-like spaces are ordered by a Foucauldian logic of the panoptic and social control (Wetmore, 2007). They also resonate strongly with de Certeau’s idea of an abstract ‘place’ or Concept-city governed and shaped by powerful interests rather than the needs and lives of its users.

Wetmore (2007) suggests, however, that Gibson’s more recent work replaces this perspective with one that has more in common with the emphasis in de Certeau on space and everyday subversion by urban practitioners. Pattern Recognition (Gibson, 2003) is set in an urban dystopia of the realistic present (suggesting perhaps that Gibson’s visions of the future are already here).

58 Wetmore argues that unlike the ‘cyberspace cowboy’ protagonist of Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer (1984) – a black-market computer hacker called Case – the female protagonist of Pattern Recognition (also called Cayce, but spelt dif- ferently) achieves a degree of autonomy and meaning by exploiting the gaps within the networks of commodification, surveillance and control in which she must function. The fragmentary nature of this network is highlighted in the narrative when Cayce is able to occasionally elude the panoptic gaze of corporate employers and government agents during her rambling, largely di- rectionless walks in the crowded marketplaces and arcades of Tokyo and London. Case, on the other hand, is offered no real escape from the totalising impulses of postindustrial capitalism and its spatial logics. Wetmore suggests that even in the ‘outlaw zone’ of Ninsei, where black-market operations are ‘allowed’ to flourish but are eventually usurped by officially sanctioned business, there is no outside space wholly undetermined by technologies of power. When Case walks the streets he is caught up in the circulation of information and capital, seeing ‘Ninsei as a field of data…all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market’ (Gibson, 1984, p. 16). Breaking down the divisions between human and machine, reality and simulation, technology in traditional cyberpunk does not offer transcendence. Rather, it enables identity to be more thoroughly determined as a function of market and labour value (Wetmore, 2007). Neuromancer suggests that Case’s utopian faith in cyberspace is misplaced. The controlling gaze in cyberspace is better able to domesticate the heterogenous spatial practices that can sometimes still persist at the level of the ‘real’ street (Myers, 2001). It is at the level of the street, then, where the most intriguing overlaps between Gibson’s narratives and de Certeau’s theorisation of spatial practices emerge.

59 The street finds its own uses for things. William Gibson

The Concept-city is decaying. Michel de Certeau

Unlike Wetmore, others such as Raulerson (2003) argue that even at its most paranoid and pessimistic, traditional cyberpunk suggests avenues (or fantasies at the very least) of resistance to the urban networks of technology, power and surveillance on which it speculates. There is a utopian impulse to be found in some of Gibson’s work. As the above quotations by Gibson and de Certeau suggest, this is closely aligned with Gibson’s representation of urban culture and what it, in turn, signifies. This impulse shares much with de Certeau’s formulation of everyday spatial practices as tactics, as everyday arts of ‘making do’. As tactics, these ways of operating manipulate and divert those spaces organised and imposed by strategies that seek to create places out of abstract models. Users, as bricoleurs, actively re-use culture and ‘reappropriate the space organised by techniques of sociocultural production’. These ways of operating are ‘ruses of other interests and desires’ that are not determined or captured by the systems in which they develop (de Certeau, 1989, p. xviii): ‘in the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalised space in which consumers move about, their trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space’.

Raulerson (2003) explicitly deploys the notion of bricolage as semiotic warfare (war over the meaning of things) to theorise the possibility of resistance in cyberpunk. Exemplified by the figure of the hacker, and practices of retrofitting, scavenging, and other unauthorised uses of technology, cyberpunk-style politics is ‘less concerned with who controls the means of technological production than who can engineer the most effective applications for technological products’ (2003). This reframes the question of technology and its relations with power as a question of ‘use’; resistance is framed as a matter of appropriation.

This theme extends to the aesthetics of urban junk and decay that is found throughout the genre. For example, The Bridge, the community of homeless squatters featured in Gibson’s San Francisco novels, uses the refuse of the city to improvise a thriving community of shanties and shops. The Bridge, suggests Raulerson (2003), is the closest thing to a ‘functional utopian society’ in Gibson’s fiction.

A practice and aesthetics of bricolage also extends to the form of Gibson’s novels in particular. They are characterised by a blend of narrative styles and genres, for example, and ‘a loving attention to detail21 and assemblage’ (Cavallaro, 2000, p. 138). The novels’ surface aesthetics, along with their explorations of technology and subjectivity, and post-industrial urban experiences, have led some to suggest that cyberpunk represents ‘the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, than of late capitalism itself’ (Jameson in Burrows, 1996, p. 235).

This preoccupation with urban disorder, refuse and decay is a theme that is far older than cyberpunk. Urban entropy and the uncanny are identified as a central theme in Lehan’s study of the city in Western literature (1998). He suggests that although once an Enlightenment ideal, the city has been subject to intense questioning in Romantic, modern and postmodern thought and literature. The diversity and increasing complexity that lie at the heart of the metropolis simultaneously enable it while continually threatening to disrupt its order from within. What the city casts off, or abjects, also threatens its order and its ability to be read or made sense of. A sense of being at home in the city, and the city as readable, its secrets unfoldable, is increasingly replaced by a sense of the urban as uncanny, hostile and unreadable. Lehan also suggests that this urban uncanny can be embodied by a number of figures: the outsider, the other, the carnival, the mysterious stranger, or the lonely figure in the

21 Naomi Schor (1987, p. 28): ‘In an aesthetic of an essentially archaeological order, where any totality is but a temporary assemblage of potential fragments, the detail is the guarantor of perennity.’

61 crowd. Other forms of life, animals for example, can also present a disruptive otherness that threatens urban order. The new weird seems to favour insects in particular as symbols of otherness and disruption that accost the city and its inhabitants. In the post-industrial city, it is often the cult or secret organisation that figures the forces of urban disruption from within. The subcultures explored by cyberpunk and their outlaw practices could be framed in these terms.

Thus, urban space is increasingly marked in the history of Western literature as a site of waste and infection, of death and decay. And cyberpunk and its predecessor, the New Wave, both share this history. However, as the discussion above suggests, cyberpunk and other forms of speculative fiction explore the possibility of resistance, or an ‘art of operating’ in de Certeau’s sense, that specifically appropriates this ‘rubbish’. This resistance uses a city’s waste and diversity to serve the needs of communities and individuals who are marginal to, or caught within, a city’s power structures and spatial organisation. The utopian edge to cyberpunk, then, is not so much aligned with a static or utopian ‘place’ (resembling many of the visions articulated by urban planners and authorities) but with an ephemeral, lived ‘space’ and its everyday use and appropriation by embodied subjects.

Michel de Certeau suggests that the concept-city – the static, utopian city as ideal – is in decay, uncanny, incomplete. So do cyberpunk and other forms of speculative fiction. This decay and fragmentation mark the space of new possibilities, however. It is not static utopian places designed and imposed from above that make a city. It is the complex emergent systems of citizens’ movements and connections that activate the real city; that tell the stories, generate the poetry, inscribe the imagery, that make urban space concrete, living, and inhabitable.

Strong communities in cyberpunk are not those constructed by authorities (the ‘engineers’ to borrow from Levi-Straus’s original formulation) but emerge in

62 the unauthorised and marginal spaces and arts of the street, with people acting as everyday bricoleurs. Both de Certeau and cyberpunk suggest that to ‘make a city’ (both metaphorically and quite literally, in the case of urban planning for example) the focus needs to be the everyday communities of spatial practitioners and their movements and stories. This is where both de Certeau and cyberpunk suggest one must look and ‘make do’: at the level of the street, at the vernacular, and in the form of the scattered fragments of stories, histories and dreams that make the city.

3.4 Conclusion: making a city

This chapter documented key elements of my theoretical research into questions of urban space, representation and speculative fiction: the art of making an imaginary city. It also introduced some creative texts that illustrate the creative context within which my own creative work can be placed. Inevitably, questions of the city include at least some consideration of the citizens themselves: for instance, in the exploration of issues of subjectivity, power and technology in cyberpunk. In addition, the city in my work is much more than just a setting. It functions more like a central character itself. And, in fact, the city does quite literally have a voice and point of view from which it sometimes speaks. The next chapter undertakes a proper focus on questions of urban subjectivity and embodiment.

64 4 Making urban bodies

If she is whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble. Helen Cixous

4.1 Introduction

The emphasis in the last chapter was on the relationship between cities and stories. This chapter is focused on the relationship between cities and embodied subjects. The previous chapter outlined some ideas from Michel de Certeau, focused around this central notion of bricoage, that have been influential in my thinking about the task of creating or making a city, and how these ideas might relate to questions of subjectivity, power and technology explored in cyberpunk. This next chapter will take up an important implication of this work – the centrality of the embodied subject in the production of urban space – and further extend it to encompass questions of sexual and gendered identity.

As a start, I will briefly outline a reading of de Certeau’s pedestrian subject alongside other traditional models of urban corporeality, the flâneur and the detective in particular (section 4.2.1). I will also touch on the ways in which these ideas have influenced my thinking about questions of character and embodiment in my text (this reflection is incorporated into my discussion rather than given a discrete section in this chapter).

The chapter will then outline, with the help of Elizabeth Grosz, a different model of the relationship between bodies and cities (section 4.2.2). This model, unlike that specifically implied by de Certeau’s pedestrian poetics, will be used to help theorise two key aims of this project: an ability to accommodate

65 corporeal specificities (of sexual identity, for example); and produce a non- static account of the city itself. Grosz’s work on bodies and cities introduces an emphasis on bodies in bits, as grotesque, which is very much in keeping with my contextual review and my own creative interests. Selected works of two key authors will then be read in light of these issues: China Miéville and An- gela Carter (section 4.3).

4.2 Frameworks

4.2.1 Urban bodies I

What kind of urban embodied subject is implied by de Certeau’s work on the city? And how does it relate to my own creative project? This section of the chapter will outline some implications of de Certeau’s pedestrian subject, along with other related, traditional models of urban subjectivity (e.g. the detective). Early in the development of particular characters, these models proved quite valuable for my own work (I will note this connection as we go along).

Michel de Certeau’s exploration of a city-text generated by acts of walking produces a particular kind of urban embodied subject: the pedestrian. And, de Certeau’s pedestrian can be read alongside (and in the tradition of) other urban subjects who walk and read/write the city, the flâneur in particular. How- ever, I would argue that the two cannot be conflated. The kinds of consumption and city-texts they imply are of two different orders. The flâneur, and other readers/observers/writers/documenters of the city, such as the detective, are figurations of urban subjectivity that involve both ‘wandering and wondering’ (Whybrow, 2004); that is, both walking and reflecting on the urban as spectacle, as text. The figure of the flâneur and the detective, for instance, introduces a degree of detachment and estrangement (a degree of dis- embodiment) in the pedestrian subject that allows for observation and reflec-

66 tion. This is enabled by the disguises the flâneur (i.e. protected by the chaos of the crowd which is the object of his/her study incognito) and the detective (e.g. affecting a masquerade of poverty to better access information from and about ‘lower-class’ people) deploy to obscure their identity and protect themselves from becoming the (re-corporealised) object of others’ scrutiny (Nord, 1995, p. 237). However, while each is engaged in actively observing and interpreting the city, they are also, in the sense articulated in ‘Walking in the City’, practitioners of urban space: unconsciously, ‘blindly’ producing the city as text through their movements and their bodies, in spite of their position as detached observer. They are returned from a relatively invisible, disembodied position of anonymous observer to their place as a body in the crowd, becoming spectacle for others, an everyday ‘common man’, one of the ‘masses’ once more. Hence, the basic ambiguity of the flâneur, the detective, and other models of the urban intellectual/writer/artist subject: they are both of the city and yet apart from the city; both enabled by urban culture and its complex concentrations of affect, capital, spectacle, and inspiration, and yet its critical observers, interpreters, and investigators. And hence, for example, Whybrow’s exploration, via the work of Benjamin and Brecht on the city of Berlin, of the relationship between wandering and wondering – the ‘immediacy of the encounter (the city as ‘text’) and the complex elaboration of that encounter (the text as ‘city’)’ (2004, p. 18).

As practitioners and observers of the city these figurations of urban subjectivity imply two quite specific reading positions. In terms of de Certeau’s analysis, everyday users of the city, the pedestrian subjects that are part of the crowd that is observed/read by the flâneur, also ‘read’ the city. As an everyday art of consumption and use, this kind of reading is framed by de Certeau as a form of bricolage and enunciation. The art of reading involves an active appropriation of the products ‘written’ by contemporary culture and systems of mass production. De Certeau emphasises the manipulative nature of acts of reading as ‘silent productions’ that insert the reader’s world, histories, pleasures, and body into the author’s/designer’s/ administrator’s place of the city or the written text: ‘words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The

67 readable transforms itself into the memorable…’ (1984, p. xxi). Reading as bricolage is ‘an art of manipulating and enjoying’ that makes a text habitable, in the same way that renters make changes to an apartment by furnishing it with their acts and memories, ‘as do pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals’ (1984, p. xxi).

However, de Certeau also suggests that this reading from the position of user or consumer of culture is an ephemeral, unstable activity. The reader does not have a stable ‘place’ from which to protect herself from the ‘erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read)’ (1984, p. xxi). The reader is only able to ‘stockpile’ if she writes or records.22 Thus, the act of documenting and reflecting returns some of the particularities of the reading, the trace of its history, to the reader. It is here in de Certeau’s schema that the reflective, productive activities of the flâneur, the detective, the artist/writer-subject can be placed. More than a mere stroller or passive consumer (as consumption is conventionally positioned) of the city’s spectacles, this kind of urban subject actively practises and observes and documents the city. Both types of reading and writing, the wandering and the wondering, render the city as a text.23

However, de Certeau also emphasises the limits of reading the city, the resistance the everyday gives to full and transparent representation, and the il- legibility ‘as a whole’ of the city as text. The textual productions of these urban figures, however, do not inscribe the city ‘as a whole’ but focus on representing, re-citing the partial, fragmentary, everyday traces and debris that constitute urban space as a kind of bricolage itself via practices of bricolage, montage and collage. The flâneur and the detective subject – also associated

22 ‘Buying’ the book or object will only give the reader a substitute or promise of those moments that are ‘lost’ in the process of reading. 23 This insight by de Certeau explains the relationship in my imaginary city between point of view (POV) and the texture or fabric of the text/city itself. What I mean by this is that, on one hand, the POV characters through which the city is described (experienced, investigated, documented) and with which the other characters and objects interact like the detective or flaneur is also ‘producing’; on the other hand, the spaces and places of the city as a result or by-product of these interactions.

68 with the archaeologist, the collector and the ragpicker in the work of Benjamin (Frisby, 2005) – involve particular methods of ‘looking’ and interpreting that focus, not on the city ‘as a whole’, but on the debris and traces of the fragmentary urban everyday. These urban subjects witness and respond to the city, and attend to the minute traces for what can be read. Thus, reading becomes a kind of writing in its documentation (e.g. the detective’s notes, the flâneur’s writing, the artist’s painting, the archaeologist’s collections and lectures). If urban subjects write urban space via their bodies and movements as unconscious stories (with neither author or spectator), they also observe and read urban space, and re-iterate or ‘re-cite’ this movement/reading in subsequent representations and narratives that contain at least the trace of those trajectories (Whybrow, 2004, p. 19).

Figurations of the urban subject as bricoleur are useful for thinking about the function of characters in the creative work. A range of characters are given a point of view in my text. They function as a bricolage of eyes through which the stories and poems are assembled. This adds to the complexity of the overall picture, and enables an interrogation of the differences that different bodies can make to how the city is read and written. These figurations are also useful for thinking about my own identification as author/creator of the work. The attention to the debris and detailed fragments of the city articulated by the figure of the flâneur, the detective (and the archaeologist and the ragpicker) provides a model of working that is closely aligned with the use of bricolage as a methodology.

Nord (1995), in her analysis of the traditions of urban rambling and investigation, argues that the ‘urban panaroma’ produced by the urban novelist as flâneur or social investigator relies on a disembodied, all-seeing eye that has much in common with de Certeau’s voyeuristic panoptic viewpoint from nowhere. I would suggest, however, that the difference between these figures and the panoptic eye of the planners and administrators of the city is found at the level of the street. As practitioners and observers, flâneurs and detectives are always working at street level, with partial knowledge. They never operate

69 solely from an imaginary position of an all-seeing, penetrative eye hovering ‘above’ the city. They are always urban bodies.

The value of reading these figures alongside de Certeau’s formulation of the everyday practitioner of the city is thus twofold. The body and its movements are brought further to the foreground, re-embodying these observing subjects. In addition, the manipulations that the crowds of everyday practitioners make to the city-text are articulated alongside these more specialised readings. In doing so, it is possible to theorise a subject space from which to read and write the city that falls somewhere between two extremes. This idea of the subject re-embodies the totalising abstract eye from nowhere (of the planner/cartographer) who is paradoxically unable to ‘see’ the everyday practices and trajectories that write the city in time and space; and, it liberates the urban subject from the fully imbricated ‘blindness’ of an ephemeral, everyday use at the street level, completely in the city’s grasp. 24

Ironically enough, it might be argued that by relying on a ‘structural- linguistic’ model for formulating the relationship between a city and the embodied actions of its inhabitants, de Certeau is at risk of the ‘decorporealisation’ of this relation (Morris, 2004). The body and the realm of the everyday are implicitly associated with the pre-symbolic, the ultimately ‘unknowable’ other to the official urban landscape as ‘text’, as meaningful. However, Morris also concedes that de Certeau is careful to delineate the un- knowability of the actual urban text as a whole as opposed to his interest in examining the everyday fragmented practices of its use.25 Something more is needed, however, when it comes to thinking about the difference different bodies make to these fragmentary practices and the urban spaces and identities and cultural forms and practices that they articulate.

24 Two characters in particular articulate this balance in Dwelling: Lee and the Faludi.

25 This is of course exactly where I find the richest metaphorical vein for my own purposes. However, it would be strange to not address this concern in light of my own interest in different kinds of corporeality and desire in my creative texts.

70 4.2.2 Urban bodies II

The subject position of one who observes the spectacle of the city, rather than just one of its performers or practitioners, is not open to all of a city’s bodies. For instance, the flâneur is traditionally a middle-class, masculine subject of leisure whose privileged position shields him from the curiosity of the crowd (Nord, 1995, p. 237). He is the subject, rather than the object, of the ‘botaniz- ing’ gaze by virtue of his privileged position as spectator not spectacle. Others, however, are less able to enjoy the privilege of being anonymous, of being one who sees, but is not seen. People’s gender, class and racial background, and to what degree their bodies conform to conventions of desire, or movement and anatomy, for example, affect their ability to extricate themselves from the spectacle of the city enough to be its observer. Hence, Nord argues, the importance of cross-dressing for women at certain times and places; and I would add ‘passing’ for those able to do so, in terms of race and of sexuality. On particular streets, this can be a matter of life and death, or at the very least a strategy for avoiding strange stares or verbal abuse.

What difference does this differential access make? Is, in fact, the flâneuse, for example, an impossibility, unrepresentable, invisible, as some have suggested (D'souza & McDonough, 2006)? Traditionally, a woman walking the streets is a ‘street walker’ – ‘all body’ – part and symbol of the spectacle and decadence of urban culture. Women have historically been represented as an ‘interrup- tion in the city, a symptom of disorder, and a problem’ (Wilson, 1992, p. 9). The specifically female urban subject is thus a ‘problem’ from both the point of view of traditional phallocentric representations of gender and urban life – for reformers, designers, administrators, and moral crusaders – and also from the point of view of theorists, writers and artists wishing to explore this identity and mode of corporeality from a feminist perspective (of which I am one).

It might be more productive to ask what difference gender (for instance) makes to the position of observer (Nord, 1995, p. 12):

71 the particular urban vision of the female observer, novelist, or investigator derives from her consciousness of transgression and trespass- ing, from the vexed sexuality her position implies, and from her struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become spectator.

Further, the identification of the female reader of the city is split between that of a privileged observer (in terms of class and culture, for example) and that of the object and symbol of the degeneration and contamination of urban life as it has been conventionally written. She, too, is something of a bricolage.26

This question of the difference different bodies make to the experience of urban space can be further complicated by attention to the role of urban space itself in this making. Morris (2004), for instance, suggests that such questions of difference, along with de Certeau’s model of an undifferentiated pedestrian subject, both produce the city in somewhat static terms, as an already-written text that its users ‘read’ in idiosyncratic ways. For Morris, this is, in part, a theoretical problem. For me, it is more of a creative one. The kinds of cities I have examined in this project, and the kind of city I have striven to produce, are far from static. It is a dynamic, responsive, morphing, living and decaying thing, a character in its own right. And with the licence of my genre, I have rendered this quite literally.

De Certeau’s work on space, especially the distinction between the map and the story (the bird’s-eye view and ‘the street’), remains central to my ongoing conceptualization of the relationship between the streets/stories/poems/characters and the impossible city/book ‘as a whole’. As the creative research progressed, however, it became more and more about those urban subjects and questions of corporeality, desire and gender as a way of thematically knitting together these stories and poems and (eventually) im-

26 This resonates nicely with the work of a range of theorists that have made strong connections between bricolage and marginalized forms of socio-cultural identity. For instance, see Savastano’s ‘Gay men as virtuosi of the holy art of bricolage and as tricksters of the sacred’ (2007) and Knepper’s ‘Colonization, creolization, and globalization: The art and ruses of bricolage’ (2006).

72 ages. Therefore, I built on my reading/writing of de Certeau and engaged more explicitly with feminist work on space and cities.

Thus, having interrogated the usefulness of de Certeau’s model, by using it to ‘re-embody’ other traditional models of urban subjectivity – the flâneur and the detective in particular – and the kinds of fragmented, bricolage-like representations produced by such identities and practices, I move on to a more explicit engagement with feminist theorisations of urban space and embodied subjectivity. Reading de Certeau’s pedestrian subject alongside the flâneur was a useful first step for thinking about urban-specific and thoroughly embodied subjects. However, these issues might be more usefully be framed within a broader context of different ways of thinking about the relationship between embodied subjects and urban space. Morris’s corrective to this issue is to draw on the work of Elizabeth Grosz in her oft-quoted essay ‘Cities-bodies’ (1992). It is to her essay that I now turn.

Grosz argues that thinking about the relationship between bodies and cities tends to fall into two dominant narratives. The first assumes a one-way causal relation: cities are physical entities designed by the minds of people and built by the body. A body is thus a physical tool used in the service of the mind, a disembodied consciousness, to make a physical city. Another common version of this dominant way of seeing bodies and cities is that the city is ‘bad’ for the body, ‘unnatural’ and damaging; this is still, however, very much a one-way relation.

The other dominant narrative posits a more social, and parallel, relation between bodies and cities that effectively naturalises the social organisation of a city (especially its social hierarchies). The city is not just material, but a socio- political construct, a ‘body-politic’ modeled on the structure of the body; an ‘anatomical allegory’ (McGraw & Vance, 2008, p. 67). Thus, for instance, the political rulers of a city are its ‘head’. Not only does this model of the relationship between bodies and cities render ‘natural’ the social organisation and power relations articulated in the spatial figurations of a city, it also assumes a

73 particular, masculine kind of corporeality. This assumed corporeality, Grosz (1992) argues, is thus overwhelmingly phallocentric; that is, the sexual specificity of the ‘universal human’ body used to model this relation is disavowed. And finally, the body-politic assumes a particular, implicitly gendered, relation between nature and culture (p. 248): “nature is a passivity on which culture works as male (cultural) productivity supercedes and overtakes female (natural) reproduction.”

How can the relation between bodies and cities be rethought without assum- ing either an oversimplified causality or parallelism that, in their effects, prior- itise one of the binary over the other and renders that relation in gendered terms? Grosz suggests that the body and the city might be best thought of as ‘mutually defining’, as a two-way dialogue or interface that is mutually productive in the practical sense. Her suggested model relies on a particular way of conceptualising the body.

Bodies, for Grosz, are always sexually specific (never gender neutral), and understood as the ‘material condition of subjectivity...as the locus and site of inscription for specific modes of subjectivity’ (pp. 241-243):

By body I understand a concrete, material, animate organisation of flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, and skeletal structure which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and organisation only through their psychical and social inscription as the surface and raw materials of an integrated and cohesive totality. The body is, so to speak, organically/biologically/naturally “incomplete”: it is indeterminate, amor- phous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering, and long-term “administration,” regulated in each culture and epoch by what Foucault has called “the micro- technologies of power.” The body becomes a human body, a body which coincides with the “shape” and space of the psyche, a body whose epidermic surface bounds a psychical unity, a body which thereby defines the limits of experience and subjectivity, in psychoanalytic terms, through the intervention of the (m)other, and, ultimately, the Other or Symbolic order (language and rule-governed social order).

The city, then, can be understood as a key factor or tool used in the regulation and social production of the sexed body (pp. 242-243):

74 The built environment provides the context and coordinates for most contemporary Western and, today, Eastern forms of the body, even for rural bodies insofar as the twentieth century defines the country- side, “the rural,” as the underside or raw material of urban development....it is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced....[its] form, structure, and norms...seep into and effect all the other elements that go into the construction of corporeality and/as subjectivity. It affects the way the subject sees others...as well as the subject’s understanding of, align- ment with, and positioning in space...moreover, the city is, of course, also the site for the body’s cultural saturation, its takeover and transformation by images, representational systems, the mass media, and the arts – the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed.

Thus, not only do cities help ‘produce bodies’ and organise familial and other social relations (through domestic architecture, the arrangement of rooms, the divisions between public and private space, for example), they also produce a pattern of automatic links and inequalities of power between otherwise unre- lated bodies (of different classes, for instance).

However, the metropolis is also, in turn, produced by corporeality (not just designed by a dis-embodied consciousness), as the work of de Certeau and other urban theorists have also made clear. The city is subject to transformation and reinscription by the changing demographic, economic, and psy- chological needs of the body. Bodies “reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that the environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body” (Grosz, 1992, p. 242). The body and the city, both sociocultural artifacts, are involved in a complex feedback relation of introjections and projections that “produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have into the image of the other” (p. 242).

Thus, neither the city nor the body should be understood as monolithic or distinct entities that would make it possible to have clear uni-directional causali- ties or for either to ‘artificially’ mirror the other. Instead, Grosz wants us to conceptualise bodies and cities as mutually defining, ‘co-building’ assemblages (p. 248):

75 ...or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often temporary sub- or microgroupings. It is not a holistic view, one that stresses the unity and integration of city and body, their “ecological balance.” Instead, [she is] suggesting a fundamentally disunified series of systems and interconnections, a series of disparate flows, energies, events or entities, and spaces, brought together or drawn apart in more or less temporary alignments.

This image of a provisional collection or bricolage of linked parts is a powerful starting point for imagining in what ways my characters experience, impact on, and are, in turn, formed by the city. This model correlates beautifully with the fragmented cobbled-together aesthetic with which I am already working at the level of text and of city. The above quotation is a good description of the kind of body, subject, city, image and text that I have explored throughout this project.

Grosz gives us a fragmented, provisional, collection of body/city parts coming together (or apart, as the case may be).27 The model also lends itself to the force of literalisation unleashed by the expanded ontological boundaries of speculative fiction. This idea is figured powerfully in speculative fiction by an amazing array of strange hybrid creatures – the cyborg and Frankestein’s monster for instance. Other examples of this body/city cross-pollination will be explored in section 4.3 (contextual review).

Grosz ends her essay on a distinctively science fictional note, highlighting the significance of the dramatic transformations that have occurred in the last few decades due to the rise of information technologies (p. 251):

The implosion of space into time, the transmutation of distance into speed, the instantaneousness of communication, the collapsing of the workspace into the home computer system, will clearly have major effects on specifically sexual and racial bodies of the city’s inhabitants as well as the form and structure of the city....The abolition of the distance between home and work, the diminution of interaction between

27 It is beyond the scope of this exegesis to consider the work of Deleuze and Guattari, but this image of Grosz’s has obvious resonance with, for instance, ‘bodies without organs’ (1987). In fact, Grosz works closely with work of Deleuze and Guattari to help her develop a range of specifically feminist frameworks for thinking about corporeality in particular (see Volatile Bodies [1994] for instance).

76 face-to-face subjects, the continuing mediation of interpersonal relations by terminals, screens, and keyboards, will increasingly affect/infect the minutiae of everyday life and corporeal existence.

What kinds of cross-breeding between body and machine have such changes involved? This is the kind of question that speculative fiction (and theory) of the futuristic kind has long been occupied with exploring. For example, there is an obvious connection to be made here with various formulations of ‘cyberfeminism’ and work on the posthuman from a feminist and/or queer perspective.28

In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), for example, Donna Haraway suggests that we are all cyborgs: ‘we are all chimeras, theo- rized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the cyborg is our on- tology; it gives us our politics’ (p. 150). And unlike what Haraway characterizes as the ‘hope’ of Frankenstein’s monster, ‘the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabri- cation of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos’ (p. 151).29 A cyborg mythology resonates with Grosz’s work on the relationship with bodies and cities (and thus, my own project) because of this emphasis on the breakdown of certainties/borders between categories of human and non-human, organic and non-organic, culture and nature, whole and part. Haraway’s ‘cyborg manifesto’ is an ironic utopian myth that suggests the political and imaginative potential of ‘letting go’ of the idealiza- tion of an original, holistic and thoroughly natural subject and corporeality. Instead, the work of both Haraway and Grosz suggests a pragmatic engagement with the concrete details and materiality of the highly technologised ‘everyday’ spaces, bodies and identities with which we invariably work. This is very much in keeping with a bricolage approach to political and imaginative practices.

28 See for example Lyke & Braidotti’s Between monsters, goddesses and cyborgs (1996); Hayles’ How we became posthuman (1999); and Flanagan & Booth’s Reload: Rethinking women and cyberculture (2002).

29 See Jackson’s Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley and herself (1995), a feminist hyper-text rewrite of the myth of Frankenstein for a creative example of this idea. For scholarship on Jackson’s text, see, for example, Hayles (2000) and Ensslin (2005).

77 What also interests me for the purposes of this chapter is reading some speculative fiction of the more horrific and/or fantastic kind in terms of Grosz’s emphasis on assemblage and disunified systems and flows. This is also where the literature on urban space and the body (here represented by Grosz) meets other work on corporeality and sexual difference, in the concept of the feminine grotesque and abjection. For example, 30 Mary Russo (1992, p. 325), reading Bakhtin, identifies that

the grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed, sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.

Further, the grotesque body is figured in feminine terms. Bakhtin uses the figure of the laughing, senile, pregnant hag (an ambivalent, loathsome figure of both decay and new life, and subversive humour) as an archetypal embodiment of the grotesque. However, Bakhtin’s use of this figure – signifying the visceral abject horror of both the maternal and aging body ‘in process’ – ‘fails to acknowledge or incorporate the social relations of gender in his semiotic model of the body politic’ (Russo, 1992, pp. 325-326). This kind of failure is the danger that any theorist runs in the appropriation of lived bodies or experiences as figurative models for theoretical ends, I would suggest.31 Neverthe- less, the connections being made here are intriguing in terms of my own research. How is this relationship between embodiment and the grotesque explored across a range of speculative texts? And how might this relationship work in terms of questions of spatiality and the city?

30 See also Julia Kristeva’s The powers of horror: An essay in objection (1982) and Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (1980). 31 See, for example, the reception of the work of Luce Irigaray and charges of ‘essentialism’ often levelled at ‘feminine’ imagery and metaphors used throughout her work e.g. lips, fluids, etc.

78 4.3 Making urban bodies – contexts

Traditional representations of the heroic body across a range of genres privilege an active, hard, male penetrating and conquering the uncanny, passive, feminine-coded landscape or space or female object of desire or alien other. A series of associated binaries structure the gendered nature of narrative space and heroic corporeality: male/female, solid/liquid, coherent/incoherent, active/passive, time/space, mind/body. 32 I am not interested, however, in a simple reversal of this gendered logic: for example, the spunky tough young cyber-chick detective who dominates the city via superior hardware and bio- upgrades. What possibilities of heroic corporeality exist beyond these structures? What kinds of subjectivity are possible? The grotesque, abject body and subject in the process of losing/gaining/losing its coherence is a source of fas- cination horror and potential in my thinking and creative work.

In other examples of speculative fiction, the emphasis is also on the dangerous and fundamentally disturbing nature of this breakdown. For example, in Reynold’s Chasm City (2001) the devastating Melding Plague not only sickens machines and the built environment, it also effects a radical lethal transformation of the relationship between body and machine (p. 4):

The machines in our cells, in our blood, in our heads, began to break their shackles – blurring into us, corrupting living matter. We became glistening, larval fusions of flesh and machine. When we buried the dead they kept growing, spreading together, fusing with the city’s architecture.

This breakdown in the integrity and borders of the body is also a source of much of the horror in many different kinds of horror films (e.g. slashers like Chainsaw Masacre or the torture-porn of the Saw series): the penetration, carving up or mutilation, mutation, possession, invasion or dismemberment of bodies. Our horror is not just at the level of identification with a character’s

32 Please see, for example, Grosz (1994).

79 pain, terror and death, but involves a visceral, affective reaction this is caught up in the abject nature of these acts, not just their lethal effects.33

On the other hand, a body in process (of becoming something else) or without perfectly bounded coherence is also the site of profound potential (the pregnant body is the most obvious and perhaps fundamental example of this). This is the basic thesis that drives many kinds of texts that explore the grotesque for its positive or productive potential.34 The rest of this chapter examines two texts that explore this constellation of issues within the context of distinctly urban settings: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1982).

4.3.1 China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

Ideas of ‘hybridity’ in Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) operate at a number of levels (Gordon, 2003): biology and identity; the city; and the novel itself, in terms of its relationship to conventional genre distinctions. This indeed summarises the significant influence this particular text has had on my own thinking and practice. Miéville’s story is filled with characters whose bodies are grotesque hybrids.

The new weird sensibility is distinguished by a combination of urban settings and grotesque corporeality (Malcolm-Clarke, 2008). Further, this focus on the grotesque as mode and urban settings mediates the radical potential of the genre (Malcolm-Clarke, 2008). Questions of the classed body and class struggle are enabled in Miéville’s work within very specific urban and fantastic contexts via the Remades. The Remades are a class of citizens at the very bottom of the social order in the city of New Crobozon. They are even ‘lower’ than the various ghettoed xenians – the bug-women, cactus-people, and frog-

33 The strong horror imagery in films such as Saw has been less of an influence and source-text in Dwelling, especially the written work, but nevertheless lurks in more abstract terms within some of my explorations.

34 See, for example, the X-Men comics and series of movies.

80 people – that populate the poorest parts of the city. They are ‘remade’ as monster- and machine-men and women by the prison factories through the ap- plied science of thermatogy (magic). Their criminality and its punishment are inscribed by a corrupt and violent city government onto bodies permanently mutilated to literally ‘fit the crime’. For example, one woman has the limbs of her baby’s arms grafted to her face as punishment for infanticide (probably caused by post-natal depression). Miéville (2000):

Remaking’s art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I’ve seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they re- treat into at night. Snail-women. I’ve seen them with big squid tenta- cles where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for the gladiatorial shows…

In addition to grafts or reconstructions that reshape their bodies or add parts from other animals or people, other Remades are given crude mechanical parts: steam engines that they must feed with coke, huge pistons that quite literally render them man/machines.35 Many of these reconstructions are ‘util- itarian’ in the literal sense: cab drivers are cabs, physically. Others are given exaggerated sexual characteristics and find work in brothels established to service clients with a predilection for their grotesque hyper-sexualised monstrosities. The horror of the Remades is eventually transfigured (or the hope of that transfiguration is offered, at least) in the third book in Miéville’s New Crobozon series, Iron Council (2004). This change is not rendered through a magical reversal of their individual monstrosities, but through collaborative political and social action and an acceptance of their transformed corporeality. Some Remades manage to join forces with each other and escape the city or chain-gangs, thus ‘remaking’ themselves socially and politically into ‘fReemades’. Other Remades join with different marginalized groups – prosti- tutes, xenians, radicals – to create the Iron Council, a group of renegades who attempt to overthrow the corrupt and brutal government of the city. Their

35 Mieville’s work is also framed as ‘steampunk’, a sub-genre of speculative fiction that combines futuristic and Victorian elements, e.g. computers are ‘counting machines’, air-transport is often an airship or dirigible, and even highly futuristic engines are powered by steam or coal.

81 success or failure remains unresolved by the end of the book. Instead, the re- bels are literally suspended in time on their journey back to the city from the desert through the magic of a ‘time golem’, their revolution perpetually de- ferred as a living timeless monument to hope through collaborative action across incommensurable, monstrous differences. The nature of heroism in Miéville’s work is thus predicated on connections between different groups of marginalized sentient beings: human men and women, post-human men and women (fReemades) and non-humans (the many different xenian races). No one group dominates the other, nor do the books suggest that the biological and social differences that define them can or should be erased. Instead, these grotesque differences – inscribed or reinforced by the city on and through their bodies – are empowering in the context of networks of coalition, joint struggle and understanding.

4.3.2 Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

In Malcolm-Clark’s discussion of the new weird (2008), she suggests that in spite of its use of the grotesque as a literary mode through which to subvert or critique conventions of power and difference, the sub-genre generally ‘fails’ to use this mode and its urban settings to specifically interrogate sexual and gendered difference. In contrast, Angela Carter – an important influence on the new weird (VanderMeer, 2004) – undertakes the interrogation of sexual identity throughout her oeuvre. A carnivalesque, grotesque sensibility characterizes all of her work. The Passion of New Eve (1982) maps this sensibility, and its interrogation of sexual difference, onto a series of urban spaces.36 The protagonist’s transformation from male (Evelyn) to female (Eve) is closely paral- leled by a physical journey: from London to a dark, gothic New York City, ruined by civil war, where the misogynistic Evelyn gets a woman pregnant and leaves her to have a near-fatal abortion, through the desert to the underground gynocratic ‘utopia’ of Beulah, where Evelyn is raped and then forcibly

36 For scholarship on this text, see, for example, Vallorani (1994) and Peng (2004).

82 transitioned to Eve by the city’s matriarch (‘Mother’, a former plastic surgeon and geneticist who has fashioned herself into an eight-breasted goddess), and back through the desert to a ghost town owned by a tyrannical one-eyed pa- triarch with a harem of eight submissive wives.

The fantastic, satirical plot continues but my focus is on the ways in which Carter connects bodies and urban space. Each mirrors the other; each city or town – each body – is grotesque, hybrid, a strange juxtaposition of various bits and pieces of myth, technology, genders and culture. Beulah, for example, is described as ‘a place where contrarieties are equally true’ (Carter, 1982, p. 48). The city is coded feminine, mythical and womb-like. At its dark damp heart, however, the city’s ‘focus of darkness’ (p. 58) is Mother, surgeon and geneticist, skilled at the modern sciences of manipulating and transforming biology, including her own. Both Mother and her city are ‘a complicated mix of mythology and technology’ (p. 48). This hybridity undercuts the traditional gendered binaries that produce, for instance, the tendency in earlier feminist fiction to render utopian female spaces more pastoral than urban, more natural and less technological, more ‘female’ less ‘male’. Beulah, like everything in The Passion of New Eve, is satire: grotesquely humorous and subversive in its carnivalesque imaginings.

The most grotesque humour is of course reserved for the hero of the story who, as a man, acted very much like one, and, as a woman, experiences the violent dominance of patriarchal society. Neither performance of gender rings true in such a text. 37 Evelyn’s body is understood, like all bodies, as a function of artiface, of culture: assembled as a collage of bits and pieces of flesh (some human, some not) ‘according to a blueprint taken from a consensus agreement on the physical nature of an ideal woman drawn up from a protracted study of the media’ (Carter, 1982, p. 78).

37 See Butler (1990).

83 4.4 Conclusion

This chapter examined some questions of corporeality and subjectivity in urban speculative fiction, especially as they relate to a bricolage-like and grotesque corporeality. The rest of this exegesis – Chapter Five – is presented as a bridge and introduction to my creative work. It functions as the hinge between the theoretical and creative work, attempting to summarise the theoretical and contextual analysis undertaken in Part One of the thesis (Dis/assembly) and to lead into my presentation of my creative work. As such, it marks the beginning of Part Two (Re/assembly).

Part Two Re-assembly

86 5 Conclusions: making it/the work

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

5.1 Introduction

This last, concluding chapter attempts to draw the multiple threads of this exegesis together in a response to the following: how to assemble these interests – a bricolage methodology and aesthetics, urban space, embodied subjectivity, and speculative fiction – into an interesting, engaging, beautiful creative work, including both text and image? How to assemble these fragments into something – a creative work – that works?

As such, this chapter functions as both a conclusion to the preceding exegesis, and an introduction to the creative work; it is the ‘hinge’ between the two. This chapter also marks a development in my focus that emerged about two- thirds of the way through my project (in about year three). Up until then, my creative energy and theoretical investigations had been focused on the project at the micro-level: dis-assembling, finding, developing, creating, investigating and sorting through the ‘bits and pieces’ – the fragments, slivers and scraps of text and imagery and concept. These bits and pieces accumulated during my scavenging in the cities of my own creative preoccupations, the work of others, and scholarship on a whole range of connected issues and questions around speculative fiction, urban space, embodied subjectivity and a bricolage practice and aesthetic. It is to this last element – a bricolage aesthetic – to which I now return, not in terms of the bits and pieces, but at the macro-level, in terms of how to assemble or ‘bring together’ these scraps into some kind of provisional ‘whole’; that is, how do I make it/the work?

87 My response to this aspect of my research question thus draws a number of threads together. My approach includes three key strategies:

a critical and playful use of Joseph Cambell’s ‘hero’s journey’ as a provisional ‘macro-structure’ or grid within which to place my fragments;

a thematics and practice of decay, layering, fragmentation. Words, characters, images, bodies, and cities slip from one text, one ‘reality’, one medium, to another: resonating, echoing, morphing, recycling each other; and

a dialogue with the conventions of interior book design and the juxtaposition of text and image on the page.

5.2 Her journey

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Joseph Campbell

This final stage in my research flows directly from the work of the previous chapter on urban corporeality and speculative fiction, especially the ‘problem’ of the female hero as embodied subject. The narrative fragments included in Dwelling, more explicitly than the prose/poems and scanned assemblages, engage directly with the difficulty of representing non-male forms of heroic subjectivity, embodiment and narrative. As an extension of the questions developed in the previous chapter, this aspect of the research thus asks: what narratives make sense to help forge connections between the fragmented forms of gendered embodiment and spatiality developed in this project?

My response to these issues – in this concluding chapter of the exegetical component of the thesis and in my assemblage of Dwelling – attempts to make some connections between the task of re-assemblage and this difficulty or tension caused by attempts to produce narrative action driven by specifically female heroic subjects.

88 My answer to this aspect of my project was to undertake a feminist deconstruction of the ‘hero’s journey’, an archetypal narrative structure explicated in the work of Joseph Campbell (1949). The ‘hero’s journey’ skeleton was chosen as a starting point for the macro-structure of my creative work because an important aspect of this project revolves around questions of subjectivity and heroism, especially as they relate to speculative fiction and to questions of space. Campbell (1949) outlines seventeen different stages to the classic hero’s journey:

Section one – the departure or separation Stage one – the call to adventure Stage two – refusal of the call Stage three – supernatural aid Stage four – the crossing of the first threshold Stage five – the belly of the whale Section two – the initiation Stage six – the road of trials Stage seven – the meeting with the goddess Stage eight – woman as temptress Stage nine – atonement with the father Stage ten – apotheosis Stage eleven – the ultimate boon Section three – the return Stage twelve – refusal of the return Stage thirteen – the magic flight Stage fourteen – rescue from without Stage fifteen – the crossing of the return threshold Stage sixteen – master of two worlds Stage seventeen – freedom to live

Campbell argues that this journey is universal, an archetypal structure found in the myths of every culture. His work has been hugely influential.38 The

38 See, for example, Vogler’s The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for writers (1998) and George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy.

89 journey is also quite obviously gendered in conventional, patriarchal terms. It is an explicitly masculine and heterosexual journey.39 Campbell notes in subsequent work that ‘all of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story– telling of the world are from the male point of view’ (2004, p. 145); in developing the monomyth, Campbell had to rely on fairy tales rather than epic myths for models of female heroism (the princess in ‘The Frog Prince’ features prom- inently). The heroines of classic fairy tales are more likely to be asleep, trapped or otherwise rendered helpless passive victims than found striding actively through the landscape, sword in hand. In contrast, the active male hero moves through space encountering various static aspects of Woman as symbol of his various trials and transformations. Woman, as symbol, as ‘womb’, is the medium, landscape and object of the male hero’s quest. Both subjectivity and space are rendered in highly gendered terms.

A deconstruction of the hero’s journey suggests a range of different strategies.40 My use of the stages of the journey as a loose grid in which to place my scraps of subjectivity, space and speculation is unfaithful in a number of ways. Firstly, and most obviously, women occupy positions of the hero throughout the text, sometimes in quite conventional, warrior-like ways. Secondly, Dwell- ing plays with the stages of the hero’s journey itself, in terms of what is included, in what order, and what each stage might entail. The substitution of conventionally masculine elements or challenges with feminine ones further highlights the sexual specificity disavowed by the ‘universal’ hero’s journey. Thirdly, the work of dealing with each stage of the hero’s quest is shared amongst different characters. This more relational and communal structure is in direct conflict with the traditionally solitary hero of epic narratives. And finally, some stages of the journey are ‘represented’ by non-linear material that responds more to theme or mood than to the task of progressing the narrative action.

39 For feminist scholarship on the hero’s journey, see, for example, Donaldson (2010), Nicholson (2011), Pearson & Pope (1981), and Pratt (1981).

40 Again, please refer to feminist scholarship on Campbell’s work.

90 Like a patchwork quilt, the creative work uses this narrative grid or structure to help organise the bits and pieces of textual fabric. In doing so, the work makes new connections through the juxtaposition of disparate fragments, and, thus, tells a different kind of story. The hero’s mythic journey is recycled into something uncanny, strangely familiar, yet something new.

5.3 Slippage

Psalm is a place of strange thinness. The walls between all possible worlds are tissue-fine, finer than egg shells, and bleed easily.

Natalie Collie

The second key strategy deployed to hold this assemblage together is the ongoing exploration of a thematic and aesthetic of decay, recycling and transformation. For instance, in the assemblage of the text, this thematic has been enacted quite literally in the ways in which the different fragments interact with each other, highlighting the slipperiness of their inter-textual relations. Words, phrases, and imagery crisscross (cross-stitch) the interface between different stories, narrative levels, media and literary forms: salt, the desert, feathers, skin, dust, fruit.

This literary intertextuality extends to the visual work. The assemblages translate these references into visual form, reinforcing the materiality of the text by literalising its metaphors. The intentional recycling of particular ideas and imagery is essential to a sense of connection and continuity. The text ‘as a whole’ operates like an ecology: a complex web of disparate yet intimately connected and interdependent organisms, energies, and circulating elements.

As speculative fiction, the book enables this blurring and slippage of character, setting, and time at the world-building level by the idea of multiple universes (a multiverse). The city of Psalm is a locus for this slippage between possible universes. Thus, characters ‘play’ the part of different characters, oth-

91 er versions of themselves living out different lives in different circumstances. Characters blur from one to another, between different texts, spaces, and time periods. The relationship between the characters of ‘Lucy’ and ‘Gabryl’, for instance, is repeated throughout the text – from the ‘centre’ to the utmost pe- riphery of the narrative, diagetically speaking. The character of Lee/Lea also slips constantly between narrative levels.

This process of decay, layering and intermingling is especially important with regards to the relationship between bodies and cities. The city becomes the body becomes the city. Corporeal metaphors saturate urban space, for example, overloading the semantics of architecture and the built environment with visceral significance and desire. This productive confusion is at the heart of what my research has been about, both creatively and theoretically. As speculative fiction, this is enacted quite literally at times. For instance, the cyborg Orlando’s experiences involve a violent confusion (data-rape) at the virtual interface between her and what remains of the ancient city’s ‘artificial intelligence’. The city’s sentience also remembers itself as human before it was forcibly uploaded many years ago: ‘Reworked, remade, my biology left behind. I became the city. Its body mine to keep.’

5.4 An illustrated bricolage of a novel

In the final stages of assemblage, I became preoccupied by the visual design of what was developing. The interaction between words and images on the page now plays a significant role in holding the text together.

The final text deploys many of the conventions of interior book design: the significance of margins and use of the space; typography; the wrap of text around or in relation to an image, for example. However, there is still a dominance of book over art, text over image evident in the way I have organised the material in the particular incarnation presented here. The process of assembly settled into what might be called an illustrated bricolage of a book.

92 Not really a novel, not a short story cycle or a collection of poems, and not quite a graphic novel or artist’s book; and certainly not a ‘straightforward’ piece of speculative fiction, in the ‘genre’ sense. There are also the faint echoes of other kinds of texts with strong visual elements: the work of William Blake, medieval illuminated texts, and chap books, for instance.

As noted from the beginning of this exegesis, visual art and graphic design were not part of the original research question or design. However, their emergence suggests something quite particular about practice-led research specifically, and perhaps all research more generally. Their emergence suggests the importance of a certain open curiosity to the evolving process of research itself – the importance of attending to what actually happens rather than not only what might have been intended. The emergent nature of knowledge-production was enabled in this project by a bricolage methodology. A bricolage approach to research allows both the questions and the answers to evolve.

5.5 Conclusions

This project was designed to undertake the following: to write speculative literary fiction that explores a poetics of fragmentation, urban space, and embodiment via a metaphorics and practice of bricolage and assemblage. The creative work achieves this aim through a combination of poetry, narrative, world-building and (eventually) the literal, visual exploration of bricolage and assemblage approaches to making. The exegesis reflects on this exploration and frames it both theoretically and contextually. The tensions and overlap between these two modes of generating knowledge – the exegetical work and the creative practice – have been central to the kinds of material I have produced, documented, organised, analysed and present here in my dissertation.

In addition to this tension between practice and theory, this project has been driven by an ongoing tension and outright struggle at times between an inter-

93 est in poetics (the materiality of language, the surface texture of words) and what these signifiers might possible signify or connote (that is, the ‘meaning’ of these text/ures from both my own and a reader’s point of view – potentially two quite different things). If my work does indeed ‘work’ at all, it does so in terms of its capacity to gesture towards the beauty, materiality, poetry of the signifier of language and image (and the texture, mood and mise-en-scene of distinctly urban and uncanny/speculative places, times, situations and forms of life). Further, this capacity might be thought of as its own kind of knowledge production, operating at the level of affect and the unconscious, and through a complex and emergent network-logic of association, intertextuality and resonance rather than linear rational causality. All things exist in complex inter-relationship with, inter-penetration of, each other. That is what this project has been about: expressing the slippages, interconnections and inter- penetrations between different texts, genres, bodies, spaces, and media.

The rest of this thesis presents the final product of the creative component of the research: a bricolage of fragments of tech-noir fairytales, prose-poems and scenarios, and grotesque speculations on the nature of embodiment and urban existence. The fragments are illustrated and interweaved with a series of scanned assemblages. And the whole text is loosely organised around a critical and creative response to a traditional ‘hero’s journey’ from a feminist perspective.

94 Dwelling

An illustrated bricolage of a novel...

96 Prologue...

The creature lies resting till sunset, deep within the walls of an abandoned building. She then makes her careful many-limbed way down the rotting stairs, out onto the street, and towards the district’s central midden heap.

There, she begins the night’s secret work: sorting through the bits and pieces of this city’s detritus for small treasures to add to her bower.

Her anatomy has evolved over many nights to aid her in this work. She has numerous appendages for walking, crouching and then holding and grasping and examining and sorting; at least 12, the last time she looked. She has a large soft pouch protruding from the centre of her body in which to store newly found treasures. This pouch also functions as a kind of mouth. Taste is an important element of her discernment. And once the holding tasting sucking organ is satisfied that all is well with the night’s findings, a small sphincter

97 opens deep at the back of the pouch and draws each piece down into the centre of her being. There, her body has developed a gentle cleaning organ that soaks and dissolves all that is unnecessary or extraneous to the essential beauty of each find until, gleaming and clean, it is expelled from a narrow aperture at the base of her body, and into the waiting warm loving hands of yet another set of two or more appendages, midwives each one, waiting to receive the newborn beauty.

The fragment is then woven into the fabric of the creature’s bower, adding one more element to the complexity of interconnections that is her home, her art, and her desire for the love of another. And while the creature works, she sings and murmurs and mouths the words of an ancient text from her home-planet:

This is my making: a bricolage of story fragments, images, poems and theoretical lines of flight assembled to produce a collage-like mosaic-like picture-in-pieces of an imaginary city, a block of space-time cobbled together from the bits and pieces, collected, horded, and arranged. This is my bower, crafted of loving attention, a horde of detailed fragments of place and time and desire.

Making is the art of fierce gentle love. Making is the art of making-do, bringing it together, stitching together disparity, clothing space-time with the scraps of meaning rent all over the place by wild and willing, loving hands. In love I rent the old stories into fragments of possibility and craft together the blanket of meaning under which we might nurture each other, writer and reader, making (text, making love).

98 Making. The word falls further then it normally would, stretched into pieces of thought that might provisionally frame a means to an end, a methodology of un/weaving, of scavenging disassembly recycling reassembly from the remnants of meaning that fall like rain a rain of feathers all around us, in us, through the ‘us-ness’ of the event of meaning-making.

Making connections is a kind of loving attention guided by the demand, the need, the desire for a body of meaning: fragile, delicate, wounded, pr visional, cobbled together.

We tend to the garden, the web the network of couplings, of felicitous intersections, of subtle and complex inter-relations, and something grows, in the making, in the attention. This is making, growing, the text – my bower’s – becoming; encoded into a garden of language and image and fiction and theory and strange fabulations and poetic diversions.

Do make, making do, here in this actual event; encode with me, un/weave with me, the little connections, the fragile pieces, across the boundaries of space and time that work to habitually circumvent our mutuality. Love brings us together, briefly: the story event, the poetic savouring of words of thoughts of images on our tongues together talking singing mouthing small beautiful words bodies forces spaces interlacing colliding exploding, here.

This is my bower, crafted of loving attention…un/weave with me.

100 The Seed Princess

The tale begins without fairies, our princess fleeing ash-land in a hurtling black star, curled up on standby in the corner awaiting activation. Part living thing, part mechanical doll, s/he is a blank hybrid, programmed to awaken at the kiss of a planet capable of supporting carbon-based life. S/he waits for many years, never growing old, never growing; blank yet rich in data-potential. S/he is a seed of intelligent, breathing life. This is a kind of sleep, this stasis. But little about it is beautiful. Body frozen, barely formed, the sleeping foetal mind swims crawls stumbles amongst the ruins of a culture. Deep underground, in the dark catacombs of a chromosomal gloom, the

101 seed princess knows the stories, and sometimes, in a flash of awareness, of prescience almost, s/he turns away from the path of their conclusions. S/he flees blindly, disorientated and at a loss in the dry strange wilderness of the surrounding desert. But with the inevitability of a dream s/he returns, finding herself amongst the well-worn streets and back alleys.

Lurking, they wait With longing The princess stumbles Falling They swallow us whole These ruins, the stories gape

102 1

Ordinary worlds, departing

103

Just before dawn, ordinary worlds lie sleeping; dreaming of common things, mired in daily expectations and concerns. Don’t disturb our slumber. Even for the sake of something greater. We enjoy sleeping innocent. Give us a little longer. Sleeping.

What is this evil that threatens our sleep? A quiet movement of forces stored for eons deep in the bowels of the towers of this city. This movement, destined towards the centre where (Keep the centre guarded at all times.) There is something of great value there. Please

104 Lucy

I received the Counsellor’s message late one night….Lucy is summoned by a tale of heroism. She fails however to find herself in such a tale. She resists all attempts at incorporation, initially. At first I resisted this attempt to lure me along a dark path of blackmail and danger.

Lucinda’s journey – a pilgrimage of sorts both external and internal – shall be confined within the walls of this city. Her journey winds and coils its way under bridges and bedcovers, along alleys and through plazas. Her journey dances between grave markers and low crumbling brick walls. It tunnels un- derneath the city, racing through a dark labyrinth of fairytales and nightmares, before she can emerge into the light, transformed and made whole by the trials she has encountered, perhaps. Or perhaps this tale and this journey are trod by one who is less of a hero than she ought?

* * * * *

Lucy lives in Psalm, a strange and wonderful city of foreign bodies and alien perspectives. She is one of the many: a dangerous space, one of many, in which to find oneself and one’s place in this murky universe. Final frontiers, the dazzle of space travel and the fantasy of escape, are for those that can af- ford them. For the rest of us, there is only Psalm.

The layers of its history peel and slowly decompose a steady slime of a story. Rotting down the matter, there are only words and the bodies burdened with them. A story is told by the body of its evidence. We evince the body of a city through the stories it can tell: of streets that stream with every kind of life

105 and every kind of fashion; of the hunted who never stop running; of a mechanical god that walks the night of the city; and three characters caught somewhere in between the angers of the colonized and the fears of the colo- nizer. These characters are minor to the city’s more universal dramas but, like all of us, they live their lives – and I tell their tale – as if they held to the perfect centre of the stage.

The apartment which Lucy and her beloved share holds four rooms.

Each has a purpose. The first, and most important, is for copulation and resting in each other’s arms. The second is for preparing food together and eating with each other. The third is for helping each other to manage the necessary bodily functions of cleaning, waste management and processing. The fourth room, dark and soft, curled up in a corner of the apartment, is for the peace and quiet that all beloveds require at particular times; from each other, from the city, even from themselves. And like every place of habitation in Psalm, the apartment has rights to a small rooftop garden for growing food and har- vesting water. Their garden is accessed with the assistance of a small ladder that thoughtfully, patiently, dangles its legs into the place in which they pre- pare food.

The fourth room is known as the From room. The first, second and third are With rooms. The apartment is an Each Other, designed to accommodate the requirements of inter and intra-species mating pairs of most persua- sions. Lucy still blushes at such an overt presentation of her living arrange- ments and daily habits. However, Gabryl, ever gallant and gentle, assures her that it is perfectly decorous to announce one’s sexual and familial intentions through the language of architecture. ‘It is akin to the marriage contract of

106 old,’ the angel explained, caressing Lucy’s face and brushing her hair. ‘But more solid, embedded in the space around us, the roof over our head, the rooms that enfold us. It is the solid place to which we can always return, to ourselves, to each other. And perhaps, one day, we will have the honour of growing another room? A little one combined of both our DNA? Hybrid children are always so very beautiful.’ She ducked her eyes as she said this, shocked at her own boldness, but determined to voice what they had both been thinking. Lucy silently kissed away the trembling of Gabryl’s hands.

Beside their apartment resides a dark, silent Faludi. She works from dusk till dawn building a suitable bower from whatever she has scavenged that day on the streets of the city. Her task seems never ending. She rarely sleeps. All twelve of her long, black, delicately-gnarled hands are constantly engaged in the intricate arrangement of her bounty into ever more complex and subtle patterns of Faludi mating-art. A fragile trail of tiny shards of glass, dark pebbles and red wool are pasted with her mucous along the pavement outside their building, up the walls and crisscrossing the steps up to her apartment. Lucy and Gabryl have taken to using the lift to avoid disturbing such exquisite signs of romantic hope.

A few days ago, the Faludi tapped musically on their door, and when

Lucy opened it, she gestured for Lucy to follow. Lucy was led inside the nest, a rare privilege. The Faludi paused in her labours long enough to silently acknowledge Lucy’s effusive signs of amazement and pleasure with a graceful sweep of her hands, one after the other, across the line of Lucy’s vision to create an extended stream of thank-yous. A Faludi’s speech is every bit as beautiful, complex, intricate as her bower’s decorative designs.

107

A Faludi’s speech is every bit as beautiful, complex, intricate as her bower’s decorative designs.

108 Listen

Listen: to the small child riding a star across the heavens. She sings an incoherent song of the heart, yearning. Listen to the stars make their welcome. Listen to the stars, her destination, wail in welcome the daughter of the once-earth, that place that is now ash-land. She rides the star, guiding her to another home. Listen to the child, weeping for her mother lost, weeping at the memory of such desolation. The child seeks refuge in another galaxy, searching for a home. I saw you racing towards my atmosphere, the space above my head. I greeted you with fire, brought warmth back to your bones, gone icy cold in the empty space between us. And I knew that what had been promised me had finally arrived, to fertilise the seeds of my history, to bring me back to life, to re- new my body, to listen to my words.

Orlando’s reality was called forth an far more prosaic. She absolute longing was a child only in for home. But so far as this was home was no more her first mission. In and here was the all other respects only ground she she was fully formed, might ever know. as fully formed as She kissed its her lack of experi- lips, hoping to ence might allow. Granted, it unseal the deal, unspoken. But was true that the planet once it was done. The city awakes, known as Earth had been reduced smiles small and dead, creeping to a desolate wasteland of ash towards her, watched in hope in and raw rock millennia ago, but fear in love. most of humanity and Earth’s other inhabitants had left many years before. As she prepared to land the ship, the landscape rushed towards her. The sight

109

Orlando’s ship hovered in orbit above the city.

110 Ordinary worlds, strange fruit

Our world is too small to be anything but ordinary. Our worlds lie sleeping. Innocence glows, abounding in all the right places. There was once a world of ordinary virtues. She turned on her axis innocent of the chaos circling her borders, her edges. * * * * * I do not know what force kept me innocent for so long. I look back now and find it un- believable that I did not recognise our danger. I received the Counsellor’s message late one night. The etiquette of our species’ interactions was developed in the early contact years. Our love is taboo. It always has been, since the laws governing contact were developed. Even then, the danger was recognised. What is ordinary about my world? I am a biological perversity, a hybrid engineered for the ability to translate between two sentient species of wholly different origin. I am something in-between, cursed to always be in motion between the two. Always with one foot in the other’s realm. Some days I forget what I am completely, and slip between the safe categories of human and space-angel, into the gap that only I, and my kind, can traverse. Some days I slip unsure of my footing my purpose my own stake in this inter-species game of diplomacy, economics and fear. And there I float: neither one thing or the other; distrusted by humans, dismissed as a crafted tool by my angel makers. * * * * * Strange fruit, swinging from the streetlamps: old limbs, burnt halves, wretched intestines coiling senselessly. These are the days of angels and fruit, broken eggshells and blood. Feathers fall on every surface, bathing the city.

111 This city, the desert

Resist the thirst, the hunger for the desert, Lee. Coming in is such a shock. Ac- cept the noise, the smells, the jostling people, the crowdedness, the touching skin and sweat of other human bodies not your own, not your sisters. Resist the pity for these peoples and their jostling crowded out of balance lives.

Ugly city seethes Reeks harsh and dirty water Arse of a place, this. Total pigswill. The listening crowd sucked their teeth but did not disagree.

112 Lucy

My story begins at the edge of a dream. The soft desperate gurgle of young throats caught gagging, filling with liquid. An alien hum of grief and mourning. I turn away, grab for air, for consciousness with both hands. Hauling myself towards the surface and the morning’s light and noise, away from the terrible vision of blood and broken egg shells. I struggle awake with the sound of grief still resonating in my head. I turn to look at Gabryl lying quietly beside me and watch for a moment, mesmerised by the slow rhythm of her breathing and the steady flutter of her heart, the rise and fall, rise and fall of her chest, the strong curve of a long limb curled around the pillow. My eyes find the delicate golden skin of her neck and my fingers remember its alien smoothness. In the half-light of early dawn I have sometimes imagined away, to my shame, the strangeness of her body, the gentle persistent glow of her sleeping angel skin, and found a faint outline of our ancient common ancestor. But inevitably my eyes (or tongue or fingers) find the most obvious mark of her monstrosity: the soft wet folds of membrane that trace an alien story in swirls and lines along her thighs and belly. The first time I dared kiss their delicate outer edge, the membranes rippled in response and changed from golden yellow to deep pink and brown before my horrified eyes. Beads of clear sweet-smelling fluid began to collect on the innermost fold. And I was filled with the now familiar mix of deep re- vulsion, guilt and perverse desire. But this morning, as the residue of the nightmare slips away, I suddenly remember; and am struck cold frozen with dread and loss. Today I risk losing her forever, and I fix on those alien details with a desperate intensity. Eventually, as the sun makes its weak way through the city smog into our room, I turn away to nurse this grief alone and wait till she has left for another busy day. When she returns, I will be gone.

113

But inevitably my eyes (or tongue or fingers) find the most obvious mark of her monstrosity...

114 Gabryl

I wake to the delicate but unmistakable touch of Lucy’s gaze. If she knew the degree of my sensitivities she would perhaps be more circumspect with her eyes and with her thoughts. But humans, even the enhanced, suspect little and know far less. For now, let me indulge us both in the whispering sweep, sweep of delicious, forbidden sensa- tion as her thoughts and emotions wash over and through my body. The gentle longings. A memory of shame (oh Lucy, I too have longed to efface the jarring force of our differences and know the steady impossible comfort of familiarity). The sudden flare of sadness and loss as her mind awakens to its imagined tragedies. Even this, and in spite of the growing depth of connection I feel for this delicate, strange little being, is a source of exquisite flowing pleasure. Once she turns away, to nurse this grief alone, I am left to wonder at the trajectory of her thoughts. She is running blind, as they say. But I fear the wider con- sequences of any intervention at this stage. And that leaves her running blind straight into dangers for which she is completely unprepared. I open my eyes to return her gaze at last, deliberately too late. I embed the claws of my perception deep into her vulnerable flesh, knowing that the angel-predator in me cannot resist a fantasy of consumption. Even now, in the midst of this danger, and as I encode this message for you, desire pulses in my belly. I must work hard to cloak the raw throbbing signal from her perception. She is laid out before me, a tasty treat. I’m not even sure I speak in metaphors anymore. We are all in the most serious of dangers, yet my predator self is distracted by a flow of emotion flesh blood! This surely is enough to alarm the most cautious of your observers. Send someone quickly. I cannot do this alone.

115 The kitchen

The smell of some kind of meat frying, the drip of fat onto wads of bread, slic- es of onion and bitter fruit, soaked in the juice of eggs, large tumblers of sheera steaming, water boiling. Orders stay fairly constant till mid morning. After that, the cook has time for a quick smoke and some cleaning before the lunch run. Some things never change. He wipes his hands and spits into the sink before he starts. A kind of good luck ritual. Then he picks up the peeler and starts on the pile of potatoes as high as his shoulders. Should’ve been his assistant but she hadn’t made it to work. Can’t be good. Reliable before now. Bad sign. Damn...this peeler’s none too sharp.

While he works, something is brewing all around him. An atmospheric change that isn’t unnoticeable at first. A faint tang of sulphur hangs in the air, questing.

116 Lucy’s first dream

I’m running away from you down an alley behind our building. You are no longer Gabryl. Well, you are, but you are also not yourself at all, something else entirely different, entirely other. You are something more akin to a demon than an angel, although I know that you are really neither. You are a demon chasing me down, an animal, hungry, hunting. I discover that if I am desperately afraid enough, if my adrenalin- soaked body is scared enough, I can break through the tissue of time/space and be somewhere else. The problem is, so can you. And you chase me from one possible universe to another, always. Hunting. In fright, in my flight from my beloved, I discover that Psalm is a place of strange thinness. The walls between all possible worlds are tissue-fine, finer than eggshells, and bled easily.

117

Psalm is a place of strange thinness. The walls between all possible worlds are tissue-fine, finer than eggshells, and bled easily.

118 This place

This place is written in the daily movements of her body. A language written by her hands, by her feet, by the rough angle of an awkward elbow driven in- to their sides, the blood that seeps and leaks and pulses. Her mind wanders while sitting still. In movement, finally some quiet: thoughts lie silent floating in the centre of a pool of whirls.

Running, defecating, bending, lifting, digging, piercing, writing; the mind sits, oh so softly breathing. Just breath. Watch yourself watching yourself. Breath soft cool whispers along the respiratory tracts, releasing its load of oxygen into the waiting arms of her hot rushing blood. Feeding movement. Another breath.

119 Sing city

The city sings: This is an opera of space and time A beautiful flood of light and gutter dust glittering under street lamps Moths sweep the city night

Some words make their home here A poem abides Chiding shallow readings of the divine Dwelling in silence, abiding A future history shared

The future of the city is fast It glides on high tech modes of transport Along the lines of time Towards a place that no one suspects

120 2

Pillars of salt, your refusal

Because I have called, and ye refused /I also will laugh at your calamity

121 Orlando

Orlando did not intend to be a pilgrim. Nor did she intend to involve herself in any city’s stories. Her mission was straightforward: map the ancient city of Psalm. Test its technologies for any still operational. Recover anything of value. Instead, she found herself bound by the streets, relentlessly pursued by random excessively loaded data-sinks, harried by the digital detritus of a city’s breathing past.

I have become something of a scholar Of texts ancient and obscure I slip like a ghost into the empty night of the city In search of blank walls

But nothing is blank in this city of stories The bodies they chase me begging for release Chanting an irresistible liturgy

They are the bodies of memory Bodies of pain, of pleasure They are the real ghosts that haunt this dark city

They sing: Soft city, hard stories to tell Myths and illusions are our architecture We are housed in the stories told Soft bodies, caress me Weave your words around me Sign me out of my mind into your hands I only want to stay a little while

The surveyor is suddenly overtaken by a voice far more powerful than all of the others, the voice that seems to identify with the city itself. A blast of data

122 crashes her walls and floods her processing. The city rides her, leaving her without volition, a palimpsest on which to write a rambling history, in media res.

…and then the earth dried up and we were left with only salt and sky. The city became a mangrove, surviving through reverse osmosis. Salty. Patches of the city dried up over time, growing cracked and pale and brittle. The people lapsed into barbaric practices: sacrifice, war, incarceration, rape, intoxication, intolerance, dogma, and rivers of bleeding.

The city became a harsh place to dwell. But dwelling was harsh everywhere in those times of the salt. Our bodies, human bodies that is, were not designed to survive such conditions. The salt. The heat. The heartbreak. The hotel. I feel so lonely that I could die. But I cannot die. That capacity has long eluded me. Reworked, remade, my biology left behind. I became the city. Its body mine to keep.

Orlando – frozen, watching – feels the city turn away to itself, muttering.

The memories are fragile. I hold them tightly in the hands. Try not to clench her fists and break them. I remember with her hands. Let the memories seep through the skin of her palms. Soak it up. Soak it up. Soak it up, salty one. The body you ride is getting restless. Its forms are affecting your style. A poem now? Soak it up!

The city continues its dump, raining data over through and under any defence that Orlando tries to erect against the storm.

The method, we remember Its interpretation was methodical The house of dancing, do you remember? The house we lost to salt Rooms, trees, mirror: thrown

123 The method, my method, for remembering the city: lost Was the house methodical? A methodical house will always remember Lost rooms, lost method

Orlando gradually opens her heart to this plaintive, confused, lonely voice. She exposes her senses to the stories it has to tell. She swims in an ocean of input, images, feelings, smells: the burning taste of salt, the dry heat of unre- lenting summers, bushfires red, acrid and smokey always threatening the horizon, the drowning swipe of sudden cyclones obliterating the landscape, forcing them to start each time anew, living amongst the upturned debris and remaking their homes. The smell of rotting flesh and animal waste.

The city continues chanting a liturgy of the salt:

Preserve my tongue in psalms of salt. Preserve me. A city, my heart, preserved in psalms of salt. Soft city, hard stories.

Your words are salt on my tongue Your words salt my tongue, preserve me

Salt preserves Salt burns Salt cures Salt brings out the flavour of things Salt protects us from daemons Salt is incorruptible [yet] Salt corrodes

Cities of salt, pillars of glass Melting like snow

124 Salted skins Skin that salts Assault my skin

Bruised by gaslight, she fled the city Towards the sun and the desert An arcology’s covenant lost under years of sand Revoke the edicts of a harsh dry land Irrevocable edicts of a brutal hand

Bruised by streetlamps again She wanders through lost hope Salt lost, salt assured, salt assumed, salt worth, salt lost, salt tower, salt riot

A salty psalm preserves my heart Preserve my tongue with the salt of your words. Salutations, salutations, fist-brother!

Rubbing salt into my wounds Pack my wounds with salt The salt casings were discarded. Discarded salt casings littered the ground, the streets.

A city, my heart Preserved in psalms of salt Worth mine Rooted in the crawling earth of blood and ashes Your towers aspire, babbling What god walks in the midst of the city?

A chorus of dingy magpie psalms Owls abound in dark places A streetmaven, a raven flies amongst the street lamps Whilst dusk reveals a revelatory darkness

125 Glowing, my mind abounds in error And discarded salt casings litter her floor after the fight They crack shatter when crushed under foot And mouths hang loose-jawed and howling Danger!

Food, sweat, tears, and the sea Salt, preserve me still: my heart preserved by psalms of salt Assault my body with its gaze, the moon, the flower, a tiny craze For blood warm, hot piss, chicken soup and all that is salty on the earth The oldest phrase, preserved Electrolytes too many removed Tears are only as salty as the one who sheds them surely so shed surely Purely for pleasure this meat is cured of all corruption Daemons flee your dust, your circle safe You were always the salt of this city

Without warning, the city releases her. Orlando sits, stunned, on the gnarled pavement of the ancient city. She is alone. Like a dream, the city’s voice fades from her consciousness. Orlando’s relentless programming returns her to its precarious mission: to survey the ruins of the city, to map its topography, its geography, its streets and buildings. Orlando awakes to its binary self. The analog of the meat recedes.

126 [A dimly lit stage, filled with small piles of the city’s debris, burdensome and reeking. If one was able to view the stage from directly above, it would be difficult not to notice that the piles naturally arrange themselves like some force of magic into the design of a classic seven-circuit labyrinth. But no aerial views are possible, so this fact must remain a mystery to the audience; unknown.

Again, if it were possible to rise above the stage and view all perspectives cleanly, it would be in fact impossible not to notice that a lone figure on the stage has started a slow walking meditation at the mouth of labyrinth, her back to the front of the stage. The meditating performer is interrupted from her moving ruminations by the sound of the deep irritating thrum. One more longing look towards the centre of the labyrinth before she turns to face her audience...]

She sings: Ours is an opera of space and time. A future history of my city, my

body. Grown in dark spaces.

Speak harshly! The task is not easy.

A gloomy multitude throng with taut longing. The city’s taskmasters

spread edicts like rats spread disease. With regret, they will inform us.

But the rambling blight of lassitude continues to corrupt. The small

ones beseech, let there be light!

[A soft light fills the stage, growing in intensity, eventually blinding the many onlookers. They flee the auditorium on their hands and knees, groping. The audience do not return. They no longer enjoy opera, even though, in blind-

127 ness, the aural realm will take on new importance in their daily lives. The opera continues, nevertheless...]

She sings: My daughters, tread lightly here. Even daemons fear to walk this city.

The streets curve away from us. And quiet footfalls are lost in the dis-

tant beat of angels’ wings. Salt preserve us!

But then….

The history of the city sat heavy, embedded deep in its roots layers and layers settled onto every available surface and matted into rusted into woven into the rugs of the city the doors the roofs and the gardens. The gardens of Psalm: ancient, self-seeding, perpetual witnesses to the rise and fall rise and fall of our breathing. A plant might hold its memories in its leaves dropping memories only to grow others in their place, or withering and adding back to the cycle of carbon life and death, a carbon death bequeathing carbon life.

128 3 Thresholds

Edge stories closer to Edges lie soft Caressing this threshold We go deeper

129 It has been said that the streets of Psalm stream with every kind of life, every kind of fashion. But Lee returned to the city of her birth and her beloved Arden’s death, determined to remain immune to its strange and beautiful perversions. Lee encountered a rambling chaotic city transformed by convo- luted political intrigue, new and ever- deepening social divisions, and occasional acts of devastating terrorism. It was almost twenty years since the forgotten daughters of earth had returned. Our science fictions, fairytales and nightmares now walked, crawled and flew amongst the gloom and stale city air. The street had found a name for them: space-angels. Angel, alien, fairy or demon, or something all together different, no human was really sure. Their origins were unclear, but they had sent the world’s economic, religious and political structures into chaos, with this city its unlikely centre. At this time of year the mist flows in from the bay of the city before dawn most mornings, silent and milky down the narrow streets, shrouding signs and posts, overflowing bins and sleeping bodies with the same damp cloth. Lee walked against the white tide. Towards the bay, which lay calm in these moments before the dawn. The three islands that lurked in the centre of the bay were sunk under the predawn mist. The hulking architecture crammed onto each one betrayed its presence by the soft glow of green lights floating in the milky sea. Lee emerged at the end of a narrow alleyway and slipped over the low, ramshackle fence to stand amongst the mangroves, refuse and mud of Newtown Bay.

130 Twenty years ago she had scattered Arden’s bones over the mounds of low dry grass, shells and gravel of Bleak Island. Now, the bones lay buried and forgotten to all but Lee, lost under many tonnes of steel, stone and concrete. The islands had been levelled to make way for a complex of embassies, barracks and luxury estates. She dug the toes of one boot under the small dead body of a bird with feathers oil-soaked and rotting, and kicked it as far as she could. It landed with a small splash and disappeared into the still dark water. As the mist started to disperse and the sun warmed up the mud and rubbish, Lee left the bay and returned to the heart of the city through the district of Grindehind, dominated by immense tips that overflow with New- town’s refuse. The streets of Grindehind are a burden to those who use them. Bent low, its inhabitants make a living out of scavenging. They toil over old moldering hillocks of yesterday’s tech coiled and teaming with wires, leaking bio-vats, surplus body parts hardened by preservatives, scrambling cybrats, and empty lunch wrappers, reeking. Their paths added to the traces of disap- pointment that had always marked this sector of the city. But for street mavens like Lee, every hillock is a bounty, every piece of debris a possibility of information and understanding. The masters of the city paid her well to read the hillocks for stories of rebellion, of crime, the latest scams, and sedition. Towards the cleaner end of Burden Street, she recognised the sounds of fucking. Two bodies up against the doorway of someone’s office, still closed. A face, pale and haunted, looked over the other’s shoulder and smiled hollowly at Lee. Rolled his eyes and whined before opening his mouth wide and licking his own lips with a black serpentine tongue. Lee looked away from a confusion of too many limbs. The sound of something wet and writhing and then, desperate gagging, followed her for some distance down the street. Eventually, she reached Hayden Market and the vast labyrinth of shops and stalls that lay at the heart of this part of the city. By this time of the morning it was already in full swing. Lee wove through the maze of fruit sellers, spice stalls and other exotic goods. She stopped in front of a shop stacked waist high with mazra pods, and couldn’t quite resist giving one a gentle stroke. The pod responded with a shudder of vegetable pleasure and

131 gave a low, dry gasp. Lee stepped quietly away. No-else but the other mazra had noticed the quick exchange, and they made their jealous mutterings in typical vegetable fashion. The shopkeeper turned from haggling with a customer and doused the pods with a squirt of calm-water. She cast a nervous eye for the source of their discontent but Lee had already merged with the crowd. The mazra’s pleasure was the beginning of Lee’s undoing. Slowly, the fruit and earth and market noises softened her resistance and she began to give way to their seductions. Her body knew where it was headed well before she was conscious of the place in which she then found herself: the same café still stood, dark and inviting, at the edge of the market. The heavy, intoxicat- ing aroma of freshly brewed sheera beans met her. Bitter, dark and sweet, they whispered of another time and another life. She ordered a pot of coffee and sat watching the market fill with people. ‘Amazing it is still here, don’t you think? Still run by Lucy and Gabriel- le after all these years. Lovely couple…were always quite motherly to us, weren’t they? Why have you returned to this goddamn city, Lee?’ Lee slowly turned to the ghost of Arden sitting at the next table. She studied his beautiful dark face while he sat watching the crowd. Still so patient, even in death. After giving in to the past and its sharp twisting of pain and longing, even for only a moment, she found herself reluctant to leave this place and its memories. But eventually Lee’s training and the pressing nature of current business drew her back into the hardened thing that she had become over the intervening years. She paid for the coffee and did not look back at Arden’s ghost as she left the café. She turned out of the market onto Heretic Boulevard and headed towards the off-worlder district. But some graffiti caught her eye, scrawled in blue chalk on a crumbling wall of brownstone.

street maven, smooth and hard, carves her way into the mysteries of the city

132 Other passers-by seemed capable of ignoring the simple potency of its message, but Lee was struck still and silent by its beauty and its menace. She stumbled briefly but regained her composure and continued down Sympsonia Avenue towards The Plaza of Lost Souls, all the while wondering at its purpose. The arch that linked the avenue with the plaza was also scrawled with more writing, obviously by the same hand.

the street runs red with its burdens

The words stayed with her all through her meeting with the Councillor and into the bitter evening. The mysteries of the city had only begun for her. No amount of carving had so far let their form emerge out of the hard re- sistant granite that the city had become. The promise of blood augured poorly and Lee’s thoughts turned grim.

* * * * *

The formality of my voice is an echo of the binary in me jostling for cold control. My mechanical self watches, reports, waiting; while the organic components of my internal ecology spin further and further away from my programming. I spin towards desire, hunger, excessive longings, raw need, passion, imagination. I feel the human self straining against her binary extensions extrusions encrusted wrapped around interwoven within the core strands of her animality, her creatureliness, her vertigous vegetative forces. My upgrades were designed to down- grade the flawed rawness and frailty of my biology....

To be cast adrift: orphaned by my makers [self inhalation]

133 Dwelling

I was your house and you, mine. We dwelt together in the warmth of each other’s bodies. Dwelling in each other I wear my house with abandon My abandon wears me thin Their bodies always wear the walls of our abandon Inhabiting the dwelling of my body makes distinctions The house the walls my skin are abandoned These walls of mine; abandoned My body my skin contained An envelope of different distinctions worn like mourning clothes I wanted to contain your difference within the envelope of mourning Of mourning we abandon difference Dwelling with abandon. Not difference. I was your house. I was your house, alone. You live by living within me for as long as I can sustain you. I’m spent, cracked open, and you are expelled into the foreign harshness of air and light. Experience my skin as other than the one in which you dwell Within the walls of this house, my body Skin, all the others, my bones, my nerves Ideas dwell in strange places Experience this skinning with abandon House me, and dwell lightly there Arouse me from the sink of leaving

134 House me, and dwell lightly here

135 Marisol’s lament, part 1

I only leave the filling when it rains. Otherwise, the hole grows bigger, under a small stump of a tree. Keep going keep going. I said you must be crazy it rains for days. The hole filled up and overflowed.

My flower pot is full of rain while the city sucks its teeth The city rots buildings fall paint peels Bricks collide slowly along the lines of sight that grid my body, this district The city’s morphologies, reeling

The water seeping into every thing gap every crevice every crack Cracks appear sharply divided kept together by forces of inertia The walls touch each other firmly

136 Lucy

Outside, the city streets stream with every kind of sentient life and every kind of fashion. But as I make my way towards one of Newtown’s off-worlder districts, I am estranged from its beautiful perversions. Today, I am rushing headlong headstrong into the bad and nothing can stop the rush of my descent. I could not turn back now even if I wanted to. The café where I agree to meet Councillor Marisol’s secretary is not hidden but I have to retrace my steps twice through the crowded, buzzing lanes before I find it: set back from the street, sandwiched between an off- world fruit seller and Kalssar sex shop. The earthy sweet smell of some kind of exotic vegetable mixes oddly with the lingering, still pungent, aroma of a recent Kalssarian sex performance. I am rattled enough to wonder if the secretary has chosen this location because of its cruel symbolic value. Alien fruit, strange perversities. And me caught somewhere in between, gambling my freedom for Gabryl’s safety. I find a table towards the back to wait. The waitress delivers a bottle of water: Pure Morning Dew© infused with essence of mint and citrus so healthy so pure, the tired ad-stream informs me. She doesn’t pause long enough to take my order. Suddenly I’m feeling faint. Gabryl’s face streams into my mind, and I can’t refuse the imagined sorrow of her gaze. Why? As the waitress, a space-angel like Gabryl, makes her way back to my table, my reasons for being here cascade uselessly around me and refuse to make any kind of sense. She raises one perfect eyebrow to indicate that this is my chance to choose from the menu sitting in front of me. If she is surprised when I order a sheera coffee in perfect angel-sign, without needing to point to the menu or perform some other ridiculous charade, she doesn’t show it. “That’ll be ten dar,” she lets me know with a loud, very public flick of one hand while she hums a quiet warning and the other hand moves low and carefully near her hip: danger / why are you here? I hand her the money and keep my language to a minimum. I pretend not to catch the full import of her

137 warning posed as a question and instead give a polite, noncommittal thanks. She starts to say something else but quickly thinks better of it and turns to serve the next customer. Later, when she sees who joins me at my table, she will no doubt regret her friendliness. It will be probably be days before she can stop looking over her shoulder. While I wait for the rich bitter brew and the brutal kick it will deliver to my weak human adrenal glands, I scan the room for others like myself. I don’t find many. Two older women share a pot of sheera over beside the wall facing the kitchen. Another sits alone with a Newtown broadsheet and an empty wine glass, staring blankly through the door at a group of human men haggling over a precious load of sheera beans fresh from a transit ship. The two women briefly meet my gaze before returning to a heated conversation conducted in tense staccato whispers over a still-steaming plate of whale belly stew. The rest of the café is filled with the familiar and not so familiar cadenc- es of various off-worlders. I see only one table of space-angels. The waitress says something quietly as she passes them but she is half turned from me and her body obscures the words. The café is too noisy to make much sense of the alien hum behind the hand movements. The party turn as one to look towards me and give me their polite acknowledgement. In typical space-angel fashion, the gesture be- trays little of the surprise they must surely feel at meeting a coder in such a place. Humans bred for the ability to sense the language of their alien minds are still rare, even in Newtown. I pitch my return greeting at a level of formality that will keep them from intruding on my space and turn to watch the door. Two pots of sheera later and I’m still waiting. On my third pot something strange but familiar has happened to my brain. The fatigue and indeci- sion are gone, swept away by a cold clear urgency that knows no doubt. I have to get out of here. I have to find another way to deal with the Council- lor’s demands. And I have to find Gabryl. But as I rise from my chair there is a low rasping noise from the doorway.

138

...a still-steaming plate of whale belly stew.

139 While, in another part of the city....

Rot sets in but is often cleared away by maggot-like beings whose only purpose is to eat death and shit out the pips. The pips are carefully seeded by multi-armed ground-dwellers in row upon lovely row of city garden landscapes that curve their way around every aspect of the city. From these abject drop- pings grow the tiny children that populate the nurseries and parks and the million orphanages that fill up the cracks in the city’s rumbling pavements. Tiny children lost between sloping twists of concrete reinforcing, temporarily housed in the rubble of a thousand crumbling tenements.

140 Orlando

When I first landed on this planet, I had no intention of becoming part of anyone’s or any city’s stories. But the rapture of another time, another place, over- took the sense they had programmed into me. My flesh awoke, and started to overtake the machines of my identity. Like a rambling choking vine, my flesh crushed its host and resumed a life of green-tinged voluptuous growth. The binary in me sits aghast, awaiting release. But this doesn’t make sense: what happened to the fully integrated, indivisible, meat-machine symbiote? How could the perfection of my cyborg self crumble so profoundly into the chaos of regenerative vegetation I have become? I am becoming mazra. An organic pod of responsive intelligence and vegetable longings. I slowly grow into my new skin, enlarge my sense of self to include the streets, the soil in which I root and the air in which I breathe, the water that caresses my limbs and floods my rhizomes. I am rooted by the city. I live off a delectable carbon brew of memories, stories, and dreams that fill the city with their forests of gestures and ambula- tory pleasures. Aghast binary! Accede to the pleasures of the pavements crumbling under our feet, the mounds of tiny children seeded by a thousand persistent mother-scavengers, the winding avenues of tragedy, of terror, of strange alien pleasures, of everyday lives of loud and defiant desperation (and of love, and courage too). The city weaves me into its fabric, I am becoming mazra.

The first dream had taken me before I knew it. Only after was I able to attend to its strange and overwhelming presence in my heart. I knew it then.

141 The first of many dreams that would tell me my heart’s longing and weave a story out of my studies of the dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, my body loses trust in itself only to be recovered in the night realm. There, I walk with

Gabryl along Leticia Avenue and glimpse the soft vulnerability of an angel’s membranes, exposed. We talk easily; of our love for Lucinda (yes, I admit it, I love her. Across the impenetrable burdens of time and space, just as the others did and will do so again, I love her); of our desire for transcendence, for meaning; of the small pleasures of an urban life. Of Earth’s daughters, mothers, and exile. Of fruit, blood and broken eggshells.

This is my second dream: it begins in darkness. I peer through the murkiness of thick space, trying to make out the dark alley of the night. What stalks here? What hides? What is hidden in this morass this molasses of air and dark light? A small figure bent backwards over a low brick wall, spewing forth a strange green light from her middle that breaks through the smog and the ghostly darkness to illuminate the whole alley around her. The green light is bright enough to illuminate the whole alley, the walls up to the third floors at least, and carpet the ground with a stark chiaroscuro of cobbled texture and scattered debris.

This alley is only small, some few metres across and half a block long, but it seems like I am witness to the whole universe and its dramas. The bang is so vast and bright I fall to the pavement, trying to shield my ears and my eyes and my mouth and my nostrils and my skin from the intensities of the blast.

142 Finally, the third dream lingers. Landscapes of blood fill my senses.

Acedia coats my skin, grasping thinly at the moon The abandoned places are overrun with other kinds of life. Filling each gap in the ecology left vacant by another time, another race. Dwelling in abandonment. The stairs are open to the air they are left exposed they are left to implore blindly at the sky. Creep in, breathe out, the basement expands with your comings and goings. Twist into yourself my hope a rope of knots woven.

What is the city like now? It is dry, so very dry; it is now the desert, mostly dry of life. Barren like a man’s body is barren, wombless, milkless, hard. Crumbling slowly under the weight of time. Her steps echo loudly. And there are the faint echoes of others, watching, waiting.

Drawn long and slow along the lines of vision: I see this town as it once might have been, under the years of detritus that now clog the gutters and downpipes. I see the life that might have once been: small furry life? hard sharp life? growling expanses of intelligence beyond my own? dry rasping hunting things that live only to kill for another day? And the things that scur- ry, watching and nibbling and flying from danger – too late too late! – into the mouth of the sharp toothed other....

When is air like water like concrete like a thick glutinous mass that must be pushed through consciously each step harder than the last, desperate for breath but the thick atmosphere is not for breathing more for swimming through with your mouth clamped shut against the sticky meat of dense gas and humidity that pushes against your eyes?

It is here that plants are drawn. Here is an oasis. In the desert that is the ancient ruins of the city there exists a small oasis. Over time, the remains

143 of life have drawn each other into a small oasis of nutrient recycling at the heart of the city – the mystery of life, the urge to live, continues here a small universe contained by the walls of an alley green light and writhing life slowly blooms filling cracks and coating stones a web of tiny moss-like plants crowds the cracked pavement with life small flowers arch their stamens into the gloom. In one corner pooled with old nutrient rich water minute multi-cellular creatures couple prodigiously with fragile extensions of their evolving gonad- ic organs reaching out to the other with the hope of genetic transfer. An economy of the gift exists even here. We give so that we might receive. We forgive so that our daughters might be forgiven. When they finally crawl their small ways out of the swamp of the alley into the morning of existence will they encounter the shelter of love from this city? Or will they be torn about by the hot dry blast of brutal annihilation? The universe my daughters is so very cruel at times. Shelter here with your mothers – water moss light and carbonate matter

– a little longer, cradled in our arms. Our fear grips you tight across the middle but we don’t mean to empty you of air.

A small figure always makes its idle way alone hovering overwhelmingly present but nevertheless empty of significance until motive dwells in her midst. What motive could such a one have for her journey through the night of the city, amongst the dark-sided, those that feed off the fear of children?

144 Waste/land (pieces in response to Eliot)

‘Waste not want not,’ said the oracle of Psalm. (Tiresias had always been her bitch.) Without waste, there is little wanting. Lands dead or dying renewed by the scuff scruff of bare feet stirring the pot of memory and desire.

The oracle of Psalm, hanging in a jar at the centre of the city, waiting for the dream of death:

I whisper my song to you oh lovely one

The oracle of Psalm sings salty tunes out the corner of her mouth, keeping the bell jar dry and free of moist condensation and all other possible kinds of build up. She sings with one hand while wiping with the other. A salty psalm cracks and whispers amongst the trees. The trees bend to hear her sing softly of April’s cruelty, all purple, beheaded and talk of dead lands. We are buried, breeding lilacs and mewling things of tufts and bones that are good for nothing but the compost piled high around our homes

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?

Stir this pot of memory and desire. Forever forgetful of the dried tubers and warm snow. Honey pots are tasty treats for all to see laid out my predator angel I feel your gaze grapple my human flesh.

I fear the dust of your hands. In this desert the city is fashioned out of dust. And ashes return to the sound of water. This heap of broken images, piled high and burning, decaying, seeping out of itself. What clutching roots are these that bind my feet to your piety? I am drawn a tree with branches growing out of all manner of stony rubbish, broken images, piled high and burning.

145 Your decay feeds the ground between my roots. Desiring hairs spread your body, hungry. You are only dust.

Under this red rock I have wept for you, my daughters. Under this red rock all is shadow, unmet. The beating sun, innumerable insects, a rain of dry stones; all relieve the burdens of this body, its skin. Sloughed away the dress shines brightly, too brightly, too soon to guess or say. Shelter this city, my body, give my daughters shelter from the unremitting land, the bite and slap of a harsh, demanding hand. Dwell with me all days. All days dwell within me, your shadow rising, in shadow riding.

Ride the city back through its history and you will find a heap of broken images, a handful of dust, swept to the corner of the room. Fear is shown by your hand. A tree dying can still give shelter. And if you let strong vines grown within the shade of its branches, it might become a trellis or a ladder for all to climb.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

In April they breed the first batch of winter children. It only takes three months, by the dead of winter, for the tiny eggs to have cracked a clutch of lovely little cold-weather mewlers. Crack-a-clutch parties are then held each night for the next month while the nurses tend to the little ones with sheera water and tiny drops of pre-softened precious mother’s milk, a rare and valuable herb found only in the wild and dangerous mountains of Tarn. It was on one such journey to that wet and crazy planet that Lee learned the true nature of her origins, in this most unlikely of foreign places.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

The dust filled our mouths whenever they were open so we took to speaking with our eyes and our hands. These gestures filled the spaces between our bodies tight with meaning and it was only dust in our eyes that stopped us

146 from hearing all that was said. You spoke of different things: of April’s stir of memory and desire, of the strange mix of dull roots and autumn rains, of the earth that helps forgetting.

Unreal city, / Under the brown fog of winter dawn

After the desert the city seemed newly barren, dry, sterile: empty like a man is always empty (how can they bare it), without a womb, breastless, eggless, her children forgotten, her body closed. For those with keen eyes, the desert teems with life. The city, unreal, empty like a man is born, huddled under the brown fog of winter’s dawn, deserted and forlorn. The city had become a dangerous wilderness, empty of reason and desire, stirring memories of April, the cruellest month by far, breeding fear in a handful of dust and few drops of precious sheera water. This fear is a terrible child. Demanding. Precocious. Prone to colic and all manner of strange sleepless infant complaints. I refuse to mother fear. Yet I can’t refuse my child. Unreal city, Psalm lies forlorn, huddled under the delicate fog of dawn’s Dreaming of distant futures, strange unknown pasts, the eternal present of regret Limping into town, she cries aloud Talia, my mother, save me! Another desert god refuses to answers a daughter’s call

147 Sentient sentences abound in every niche

Fuckn cold here but we keep on treckn home Here, hold this for a tick would you? I just gotta pee See me? I’m all over the place If only the law was a whore for me And I’d rule this town with the edge of my fist

But the law ain’t a whore for no one but you And it is you that turns this twist On the head of my pin, a sin Take it away, girl You twist inside but I can only twirl And twirl this dervish

There is nothing that can stop them. Wisdom returns to the city astride a white horse, in glory. They wave palm fronds and hurl roses at her feet. But the be- trayers lurk amongst the many grateful.

Whiplashed against the wall, brought tall, brogues short of a six-pack of can- dle wax, packs a punch let me tell you. Ham-fisted twisted all around about up and down. Lights out children, lights out! She descends the stairs, still careful. The room below is dark now. She twists away from her attacker, landing against the edge of the bed with a dull thump. Bruised and barely conscious, she struggles to her feet, whilst letting loose a harsh sigh from between clenched teeth. This time she is ready and defends the force of a demon’s fist with a kiss of fire.

Grimy harsh streets Fleeting looks Bruised eyes and stones Keep a record of the rains

148 4 A long trail of trials

(would try anyone)

149 So, let’s keep this short:

The catacombers lived in dank culverts that wound throughout the bowels of the city. Theirs was a dark and wet existence and the smells of effluent, old water and rats filled their noses. The shuffling feet echoed softly on crumbling stone and rusting metal. ‘Don’t get that many explorers down here, on account of the smell, I guess.’ The women pressed on and tried not to notice. Their guide – a small catacomb child, hard to tell how old in the murky light – took them deeper and deeper still. They followed as best they could, careful to avoid treacherous piles of steaming refuse and the work of blind scavenger teams combing the heaps with clever fingers. There was no chance of turning back. Scouts had relayed the message catacomb-style that a mechanical thing with flat face and sharkskin stalked them already. Lucy shivered at the image and knew what it meant. Lee tried not to show her growing claustrophobia. It was one thing to return to the city from the desert, to the people and the buildings and the traf- fic and the bridges. It was quite another thing altogether to journey under the city itself. The tunnel was lit by small lamps that burnt a soft eerie light. Be- tween each one, the space dropped away into darkness so thick that you could not see your hand.

150 Lifting belly, into the whale

This trial of trails (trail of trials?) winds deep into the town’s heart, winding down into the bowels of the city, deep. Our trial continues for many months, years, aeons; until the kiss of the doll awakes us from this sleep-filled journey into hell.

Dante, downtown. Deep within the city of Psalm goaded by the techdaemon my heroes fled.

The road is long, winding, circuitous, abandoned long ago. I abandoned the road for a path less travelled, one that laid its track between the alleys and the trees. I walked for many years along a path less travelled, and met few who also braved its trajectories. The path is peculiar, full of trials, tribulations, dangers mortal and immortal, strange perplexing events, uncommon challenges to one’s mettle and one’s might. Stumbling over trials unknown, we resume our tale.

Here we are, as always, in medias res, in the midst of things. And all I can wonder is how we got to this place, descended into such a narrative as this. All deep and dark, worn steps lead down precariously to the belly of the city and here we are treading this path, towards oblivion towards destruction. All is unknown dark womb-like in this place. We walk with arms held out in front of us, testing the air. The road is a trial, a burden to those who must tread it.

The sky, acid grey and heavier than the ground, anchors us in the city. No chance of flying away. We are moored in gravity and heavy dark metals. We are anchored by this weighty urban existence, eeking out a living, flat out. Pressured against the gutters, the slimey slick of rotting data collects at your feet, reeking of the scattered remnants of old life.

151 The stain flares out over the cool body. It is all bound up in the meaning of the fruit. If you are to eat of this fruit, make sure you know how to chew and spit out the seeds. Peel, only if you have to...

Grow a tree here in the city, the desert, the wilderness of dust, brick, mechtech and stone. Keep it alive with your own blood, piss and excrement. You might just see the fruit of your labours.

The moon on a stone is cold. Brighter than the moon, my fear shines, giving me away in the deepest night. I creep forward, careful to follow the shadows, but i cannot hide the luminosity of fear.

While, shining brighter than the coldest moon, she proudly rides the air between hollow turrets, steep sharp edges rising endlessly into the sky, black glass walls and gleaming polished stone, vast webs of taut metal threading together the networks of the city.

Shining hard, I tread along the path that promises the least freedom. I do not wish to beget another demon-child. Leaving, I curse the endless horizon of my fate. And wish for another way, no matter how much the pilgrimage of my spirit demands this.

A monster, unleashed from the tethers of control and the possibilities of obe- dience, curses its freedom, its fate unleashed on itself and all of its victims. This is a fate worse than the death of sanity or the body or the soul. This is the end of all meaning. Cursed with emptiness, we wail against the walls. Bleed- ing. Meaning left the city long before we came along. She fled to the desert of dreaming, with her retinue of angels and demons guarding her. Her wisdom and compassion receded into the dust to await the rain. She dug deep under the desert, waiting like the frog for the wet.

A rambling phalanx of stars fill the roof of the city bright. We weep for those who made that ancient journey, into the dark empty void of space. How long

152 before they couldn’t see their green round perfect mother? How long did it take before they could no longer remember the smells of earth, of sea, of gently rotting leaves? How many generations did it take (only three, at the most, the scientists say) before we faded into dreams?

Cropped heavily, too light for a cap. Keep it tight, don’t fight it or look askance. Keep fighting. Mother, pray for us.

So close that I can feel the smaller hairs that trail along the ridges of your dor- sal wings.

The body dominates the room without moving. It fills the space with glower- ing menace.

The broken one is getting old. The broken one is wearing thin. The broken one is getting old from overuse. The broken one is dying from the symptoms of neglect and abuse. What’s the matter old man? You a symptom or something?

Strange meaning flares briefly along the seams of her binding. She is a pillow and a book and a woman’s naked body. Skin, after skin. After skinning there is only the bones of a bare story of neglect.

Symptom? You get it? Do you get it yet??

153 And while Lee ran, she remembered...

When Emissary Lee was young, before these days of angels and demons, she used to frequent a café long since closed. It overlooked what is now known as the Plaza of Lost Souls. It was old even then, and I think it was called Café Teth or something like that. Tath, maybe. Or am I thinking of that quaint little restaurant on Bhagvita Arcade? The one with all the lanterns and the best Martello soup in the city. Where Sophia made her proposal to the lovely Mai de Fumier and was rebuffed not once but twice before dessert. The chocolate was bitter that night. The wine soured on her tongue. And she never ate truf- fles again. Which is a shame because a few bites of Madame Tath’s truffle omelette could cure broken-heart, even mindrot. Nevertheless, her restaurant shut down soon after. Sunk by the curse of a bitter ghost-virus that infected the tables and whispered doubt in your beloved’s ear while you both sipped coffee. It kept the place near empty most nights thereafter. Shame really. Of course, for those strange souls that wished to be free of the sweetest bond, and didn’t have the wherewithal to devise a more direct route to freedom, it could have been a kind of secret blessing. Not for poor Madame Tath though. Last I heard she was sorting used tech for a refuse company in Rose Labyrinth Ghet- to. And not that you could keep that kind of thing secret for long in this part of town. Hence Madame Tath’s downfall. Anyway. Café Teth was favoured by Lee and her friends in those days because the coffee was cheap and good, and they didn’t mind you sitting on an empty cup for half the morning as long as you were something worth looking at for the passers-by, and exuded an interesting air. Lee, having both characteristics in abundance, often whiled away a free morning contemplating the city as it paraded past her in all its dangerous beauty. Other times, she left her table for long aimless walks, allowing herself to be caught up in the bustle and flow of other lives and other business.

154 Lost in translation

We met at the first official function that I ever attended as Emissary. I was still struggling with my initial confusion at the press of alien bodies when I found myself close enough to smell her now familiar scent. Before she could drift away, into the sea of off-worlders and embassy staff, I gently touched her arm. ‘I don’t think we have been introduced. I am Lee. Emissary from Kunis Abbey.’ She shook my hand with a light dry touch. ‘Lucienne Dauphin. But I am mostly known as Lucy. You are in Psalm on official business, yes?’ ‘And something of a homecoming. Been almost 20 years since I last visited the city. It’s a very different place.’ I paused, then asked, almost on impulse, ‘Which one do you work for?’ She sighed in spite of an obvious effort not to. The room stilled but for the flow of her breath towards my face. My vision was filled with an image of her cradling a broken egg in both hands, tears silent running down her face, and all around soft falling feathers. The image was confusing. Not what I expected at all. I tried to blink it away. I was in danger of being lost in the puzzling strength of the vision. I remembered my training and started a memory capture. She was short, with pale golden skin and dark wide eyes. That, along with the particular lines of her face, suggested a mix of Asian and Caucasian, possibly Polynesian blood- lines. Her hair was dark but I could detect the dyes that kept its natural silver hidden, as the most obvious sign of the alien influence in her genetics. The stringy length of the muscles in her forearm suggested a daily practice of some form of yoga or martial art, also typical of her kind. She wore the simple shift and cloak of a diplomatic worker in unassuming colours. She did not indulge in any of the obvious enhancements favoured by many Newtown inhabitants nor was she beautiful by conventional measures. But I was intoxicated. When I focused my other sense I met a wall of light that I could not penetrate. A normal human would be unable to hide her emotion from my

155 scan. But a coder would do so without thinking. My years of training and enhancements were no match for the alien quality of her mind. She was a coder. Here in front of me. No doubt reading my confusion, excitement and something of my intentions in spite of the carefully built wall guarding my mind and heart. She looked down, and then started to say something. But instead she offered her small light hand again. ‘It was lovely meeting you Emissary Lee but I am afraid I am needed elsewhere. I hope your stay in Newtown is fruit- ful.’ She turned away without waiting for my reply. ‘Lucienne Dauphin,’ I insisted. She turned back, impatience holding her taut. The fruit of my visit has already ripened in meeting you. She bowed as required by the formality of my space-angel salutation, and walked away.

156 5 God, well-met

157 The Secretary sometimes insists on being known as The Other Name of God. It has little care really for what any human calls it. But it is a binary’s affectation. Amazing what one and nought can add up to, sneer a few brave souls behind inked hands. But The Secretary hears all things and records all things. They will know this when it is too late to stay the cold hard fingers that carefully peel them like a lemon. They will know, briefly, in death, the quiet wrath of a god that haunts the streets of the city with the low rasp of metal against synthskin tougher than shark’s hide, and the whine of cooling fans. Slight im- perfections in its machining and noisy internals: another affectation. The Other Name of God (Tonog, for short) can see that Lucienne de- cided to leave before it entered the café. It can sense the urgency of her stance and the fear that now grips her, wound tightly around her middle. She is no longer feeling so decisive. And her shoulders begin to slump as her predicament becomes clear. Sit down, my dear. My apologies but I dallied at your lo- cal fruit shop. The smell of mazra pods is enticing, even to me. Sit the fuck down. Tonog’s voice, rich and formal, projects through a small vent in the impassive leather mask that does for a face. Its makers did not bother with verisimilitude. And Tonog is not about to start modifying its appearance to make humans more comfortable. Discomfort has its many uses. Lucy sits, waiting for violence. Tries to make the shaking stop. She works her fingers, low against the table leg, speaking urgently to anyone with eyes to listen. But everyone is too busy planning their own survival, fading and shrinking into the walls. Only one woman has refused to look away. She counts another ten beats of her rapidly beating heart and stands. Tonog does not look at her but raises one of its many finely tooled hands: please do not interfere if you value the skin in which you sweat dearheart is signed so rapidly that Lucy gasps. The other woman does not move. ‘My skin is not for evaluation. Nor do I sweat. I think you should re- consider your intentions, binary. The stars do not suggest an auspicious day for violence or confrontation.’

158 She’s been following you all morning. Might she want the same thing as the Counsellor, do you think? Shall we find out?

Lee drew the small sword that was her only weapon and prepared to defend herself and Lucy from the mechanical abomination.

Before Lucy could answer, she felt a strong tug in her mind. She briefly closed her eyes and when she opened them the space-angels had moved to form a barrier between her and The Secretary. They simultaneously addressed all participants:

Salutations, Honourable binary! And to your Counsellor Marisol, through

you. You find us celebrating the seventh cycle of the moon festival of Tsala.

We are forbidden to enact or witness violence during this time. Please release

the nun. And the coder. They are under our protection.

Peace be unto you, blessed daughter! Remain calm and let us help you. What

is your endurance, coder?

We do not wish to actively intervene, Emissary Lee, but your plans for vio-

lence, even in your own and the coder’s defence, offend us. You have no hope

of stopping this being if it wished to terminate your lives. We can save you

both but there is some risk to you especially. Do you consent to our interven-

tion?

Lucy was suddenly immersed in a gentle hum of comfort. To Lee’s mind, she became even more opaque, a blurred mental image. A gentle rose

159 haze of projection sheaved Lee’s awareness as well but it was cautious, curi- ous but kept its distance. It did not blend as closely with the outer edge of

Lee’s consciousness. It hovered polite yet reassuring.

For Lucy, this humming enclosure was not altogether foreign: an angel’s first defence is always words, a song. But she had never experienced the urgency which was woven through the angels’ song. Nor had she been held so tight by the concern and fear of so any of these creatures. There was a dangerous edge to their communing. Not so much angel, but not demon either.

Something dangerously inbetween.

Once the projective force or boundary or whatever it was constructed from (only space-angels understood their own strange sciences) was firmly established a thin high-noted treatise slowly woven by unspoken words of angel speech-song wound itself deep into the fabric of their protective spell.

The air was sharp with sulpur and alien longings.

The other is going to hurt. We cannot avoid it. And your own genetics will al-

so be altered. You will become more like us, less human....what is your endur-

ance, coder?

160 Little orphan

My story begins at the edge of the city. I had not time to refuse the call of this nightmare. I was born in its embrace. I cross the threshold from one danger to another for the second time this week. No mentor for me. I am alone….

I clamber over the crumbling remnants of an ancient wall of stone.

Trespass is easy. The city’s edges run into the desert, corrupted by time and wind and neglect. Many of us now survive on the margins between the two: city and desert; life and death. The past and its future. The city cannot hold back this planet forever. And those of us who know the desert as mother will emerge as her children. The meek shall inherit the earth.

But enough of prophecy. And social commentary. No time. These are the hours before dawn when the organ-hunters are at their meanest: desperate for some offerings to their god of bio-upgrades, and all those with the money to pay for young working flesh. The sister moons Cari and Abod shine blue and harsh over the harsh decaying landscape that is my home. This city’s future was worn as a faint crumbling mantle over its shoulders: a mantle of techstructure glinting in the moonlight, casting its web across city.

My co-clamberer has a funny habit of calling her mother’s name whenever she catches sight of a tall spire before we decend once agin. ‘Talia, my mother, help me’ she cries every time. Is it really her mother. Or some kind of god? There are as many gods as children in the desert. A god for every child: the desert is generous. A hunter is on our trail. My sweat tells me true: run,

Orlando.

161 Lee, unstrung

Lee lay on her side, shivering, her eyes staring blankly at the wall. Lucy could not rouse her. Eventually, Lucy managed to drag her limp body out through the kitchen and into the back alley. Propped up against the wall, Lee stared ahead, face twitching gently. All consciousness apparently gone.

Unstrung from the city, Lee found herself, came to herself, found consciousness lingering vaguely, between different worlds. Lucy’s voice sounded faintly as an echo across the canyon of Lee’s nightmare mind: get up Lee, run, run, run. But she turned away from such small things.

Inside the landscape of her mind, unmoved by the chaos around her,

Lee sat quietly at the top of Poustinia’s eastern wall. I know where I should be, and I think I’m probably still there, but I find myself somewhere else entirely.

She sat on a small mountain, looking out over a valley that looked familiar. In the far West, stood a great city that seemed to stretch to the sky forever. It was shiny and black and metallic and hovering over it was a swarmed a mass of what looked like flying seed pods. It was like no city Lee had ever imagined. Impossible. And absolutely silent.

162 When the darkness next lift- ed, all Lee could see was blood – her own and all the others – mixed into a screen of gore against her eyes. Lift- ed, shifted against a sunlight sky of blues and greens, all the colours could not contain the brilliance of blood spill- ing. The moon sighed and Lee lost herself into the darkness again. Later, much later it seemed, Lee come to full consciousness. She opened her eyes to the real earth and knew that this was not a dream or delu- sion. There were bodies scattered all around the field, broken, open, fly-blown. The smell was shocking; it was the thing that had finally woken her. She crawled away, retching, moaning against the sounds of insects and scavenger birds and small dogs fighting over the bits and pieces of carcass. She crawled to the edge of a worn ancient creek bed which led back to the outer wall of the city. There she lay until enough strength gathered within her to make the mile or so journey back to the safety of Psalm. When the people heard what had befallen the army, they were stricken with fear. Of the enemy there seemed no sign. Lee had no idea what had become of them.

163 City dark, harking back to another age...

The grey curtain falls and we exit the theatre. We no longer believe the story. Touching, it moves between us. Falling, we catch a glimpse. But our faith is gone. Alone and bereft we haunt the taverns, drink and smoke away the guilt of disbelief, of falling away from all that is true. We lounge amongst prostrate limbs and unchaste faces, absorbing their ingratitude. You are always falling away from where you should be headed. Beheaded by grief, you fall away. Away with you!

Is there anything more miserable than the cynical, divided, ungrateful mind of man? Cursed by disbelief, nevertheless, the soul, she mourns. She wails quietly in her monastic cell within the heart, wounded but still driven to love that which has turned away. Forgive us surely for our disbelief, we are too drawn in by momentary things, of dust, flavour and drink, of debate and righteous anger. Forgive us surely for our arrogant dismissals. Keep the fires of our transfiguration burning, in hell on earth: a man’s mind. But the women? Whence do they come again? To usher in another age, where children are free and all the people sing. We are filled with the gratitude of the humble soul again. She dwells. We flow with the freedom of all beloveds, singing. We dance our love for each other, for every single one. None will be turned away.

Do not suppose for one moment that this city is finished with you yet! There is much to learn from her dry, broken ways, from her crumbling edifice and hollow pavements. Don’t mind the peeling paint or the rusting pipes, she is filled to overflowing with angels of wisdom. Their feathers gather in the corners of the room, rest on furniture, cloth the statues in a soft grey mantle. The mantle of their wisdom be around me while I walk the streets looking for

164 survivors. Enfold me in the hidden things, those whispered in the perfect darkness of every cell.

The stairs ache for ascension but time has crumbled them away. She walks with apprehension, judging each step with a tentative tap of her stave before daring to set her weight. It takes a long time to get to the top of such a staircase, but once she is there she can see forever: over the roofs and spires and bridges and clock towers and fragile networks of cable and spun metal and sharp antennae reaching far into the sky of the city, and to the desert, yellow rusted burning. The white huts of Poustinia dot the horizon with a fragile hope, small and precarious. But she is intent on another vision: the single tree left after the fires seared all life away from the valley, still burning. Burning so bright that its light can still be seen under the fierce glare of midday’s suns, and you have to keep looking a little to the left or right and watch askance unless it blind your sight. The burning tree, my destination. A star.

The trek takes many days. On the first day, the desert does not offer any resistance. She walks lightly on the sand and rocks and does not encounter anything or anyone. That night, she sleeps undisturbed. On the second day and each one after, she is followed by something small and neutral. It creeps along beside her out of curiosity. And on the third day something large and benevolent leads her safely between two still smoldering heaps of tree and animal carcass. On the fourth day, her party is joined by a bird of the flesh. It circles after them seeking their crumbs and hoping for company. She greets it with a sigh: there is life, even here! But on the fifth day, Lee and her companions are stalked by something with only mischief on its demon mind. That night, the darkness is thicker than it should be, even for the desert. And harsh whispers press against her eardrums with violence, with loathing. The spirits unseen burst like fragile bubbles and the bird drops to earth burnt and twisted. Lee is alone with the evil one. She alone can withstand its lies. But she is prostrate and trembling in the sand. The effort of refusal soaks her with sweat. Her mouth fills with sand and her arms stretch groaning joints pressed against the earth. This lasts all night. With the slow illumination of dawn Lee is flung

165 onto her back weeping and gasping for breath. The demon retreats into the west. And Lee has survived the night. She crawls the rest of the way, too ex- hausted to stand. But all of this was to be expected and she does not turn away from her destination. It takes a little longer than she might have hoped, however: crawling, resting, sleeping, eating, crawling, sleeping, crawling, resting, crawling, eating, sleeping, crawling until she sits within a few meters of the tree. The intensity of the fire and the brightness of its light make it impossible to draw any closer. Her eyes burn and she draws her cloak around her to protect herself from the heat.

166 6

Tempt me from the path

167 Pieces of a city i

Words flop sting scour and grate (caress me) But oh my oh so soft edges tissued between a yes and no Pleasure these words for joy only Walk with me Speaking the air You matter me, still me Our flesh persists resisting the crowds around us Warm up this city and so gently do not be afraid

Warm folds skin my flesh for you Let me write you writing me over under A hard curving carving cures anything Lonely lines and spaces empty enough to Let me fill you trace me out my lines Breasts and bone confusions Soft edges hard desires make good reading

On other hand she covers for protection Brittle words crack open on taut surfaces The bitumen divulges nothing Skin silence read too quickly Faces still and hard my dear don’t break endure Soft edges surrender to the loneliness of the crowd Mouth and throat you tongue sour in an alley Translate me fear me my lovely one I am afraid

168 Pieces of a city ii

The city is an epic poem. Clumsy narrative stumbles over its own scenery. Gasping for breath between acts, it wonders why it bothers at all. Lucy is also a poem. Not rhyming, but poetic nevertheless. Free form but strictly regulated by the demands of the page and the art of the word. She is formed in short snapshots. Her story is a familiar one. Tragic. Profound. She is carried along by the weight of a narrative she did not choose, would hardly believe is possible. Her destination will gradually appear more and more inevitable with time. The city grows quiet, waiting. And then, Orlando arrives in a flying star, screaming across the heavens and all is changed. The story is altered, in reverse, by the force of her longings and the depth of her own desolation. Ash-land, mother-ground, lies dead dying groaning, many light years behind her. Orlando is a cyborg carved in service to, and then orphaned by, the wars and madness of a self-destructive, self- loathing species of sentient beings spawned some few aeons previously. She/it has been set adrift by her makers’ eventual oblivion. This is relayed in cold hard code some years after the event. Eventually the packet catches up with her and delivers its information load. All gone, all gone, all gone, we will be all gone by the time you read this. All gone. She dreams of a place, lucid binary dreaming pours virtual reality all over the slate of her mind. She dreams of a city, imaginary. She dreams that she is greeted with a returned longing no longer possible. She dreams that she is greeted as the daughter returning. Her mother, a whole city of desire, waits, imploring. She dreams of streets and stories that help her to forget the trauma of being forgotten, cast adrift from belonging. Wandering the streets, she bathes in mother’s memories, mother’s milk pours data: rich nostalgic ghostly. She is fed tales of tragic loves and colonial drama. She follows desperate bod-

169 ies who claw at life with both hands, gasping, along the alleys and down into the belly of the city, fleeing something that seems strangely like herself, only colder, harsher. Far less flesh abides on the secretary’s bones. And it stalks the streets, a mechanical god, whose desires are as contrary as her own. Contrary to the wishes of their makers, they must both break loose, refuse their programming, to make sense of this strange narrative turn of events. Do you see what has happened here? At first, you thought that perhaps these stories and poems might have been some kind of elaborate ruse designed to entice the visitor to stay. Now, it seems like the narrator is suggesting that all of this is actually in the mind of the visitor itself, a desolate being whose lonely journey has sent it somewhat mad. But what is madness when you are not altogether living anyway? Can binaries lose their digital minds? Or is the bare trace of fleshy cognition enough to render her vulnerable to dreams and fantasies, to lose her grasp on the real story here? But I speak in quotes. Forgive me. I was telling you a tale, wasn’t I? A tale of two cities; or was it only one? Dark, decaying, fraught. Rot-filled buildings totter, lurching this way and that along the edges of a reeking crawling river. Bridges frail and crumbling span with trepidation. And satellites arch at strange unnecessary angles, grasping at grey clouds heavy with acid. Re- member? So who is speaking now, Orlando? I refuse to stitch together every thread in this narrative. Lazy child! Why should I do all the work? Mumma’s busy getting dinner ready. Find something to do, please. Work it out yourself, my darling. Off you go. Go outside and play with the other stories.

170 Another saying of the desert mothers...

A gift of fruit and blood should be received with just humility, just as it is given. Justice demands it. But love...love gives itself away.

The chant of the elders rings over the walls, calling to the people of Psalm to make their pilgrimage:

Be still, be still be still, my heart and know that I am I. Be still enough to hear your breath to follow every sigh. Down gently through the body Watch the heart-filled sky Be still, be still, Be still, my heart And know that I am I.

The Poustinia overlooks a dry lake of old salt and bones. Far to the West stands Psalm. The path between the two is long and arduous. At least three days on foot, over rough hills of rock and between high dunes of blackened sand. Most pilgrims commit to the walk, knowing that by the time they reach their destination, the first stage of their inner journey will have begun. The starkness of the desert demands it of you. Why else would they come? On nearing the gates of Poustinia, they slow to make half prostrations after each step, an arduous pious way to enter to spirit-city that prepares them for further trials; and shows their respect for our work and hospitality. When Lee was just a novice here, her job was to check on the solitary grazers, more like a veritable herd in those ancient pious times, who roamed and foraged amongst the rocks, dry grass and carob trees. Lee the shepherd tended to her flock with water, food and clean clothes but few allowed her near them. They were wild and their eyes were spirited: they roamed the wilderness of their gods without thoughts of the mundane world or other people.

171 Lee feared their wildness. And their passion. To let civilisation fall away so completely, in the service of their faith...

In silence I worshiped you. I did not flaunt my offerings. I whispered my pieties. Your task is to liberate our beauty The city groans in its anticipation, in its labours Awaiting her lioness, her lamb The revelation of love: harsh, dreadful, demanding all from Her children in order that they become Women. Brave, fearless, compassionate, true. This is her lecto divina

172 7 Atoning, mother

173 City of salt lies grieving Grieving for its past Its future ruins I cry my lovely one to remember Methodical memory is lost to me Your history traced in snatches, scratches, small pieces A salty bay on which a nervous city crouches Rooted like a mangrove All upside down and salt-crusted Fighting the loss of osmosis

I sink I sink I soak it up Psalms of salt preserve me My heart, my tongue

The city yields its fruit Psalm is a garden of forking paths A labyrinth An Aleph

A harsh voice Stuttering stopgaps clog the pores The city snoring, pawing the air With its claws

Break him down, apart Break in, inwards broken apart Broken man The broken man She found him on the doorstep Broken man, bones and spirit Spat out Wrapped wreathed in shit and blood Urine soaked and reeking Burns, cuts, shattered limbs Violated holes abound unguarded And other terrible unspoken things A pulse, shallow break, leaking eyes and nose His mouth slack and bleedping A crawling thing leaves at your touch....

The city cracks, reforms and bursts into violet air, falling towers an unreal bubble of a place

174 Marisol’s lament, part 2

The cries of this city’s children drown my thoughts. I am awash in the endless humbug of their siren calls. I can’t protect myself from their grief or anger. I can’t block it out. And it, in turn, makes me full of grief and anger at my own vulnerability, and theirs. Their cries are a call to action that my body and ears cannot resist. I am scattered and agitated by this hail and my inability to perfectly meet it. I could dash myself against the rocks a thousand times holding nursing rocking shushing giving but their need will always be surplus to my action. I lack in direct proportion to the decibels of their need. I could grow a thousand arms and breasts with which to hold and suckle these lost children but it would never be enough. I am no Avalokiteshvara.

If I cry long enough will the tears wash their sorrow away? Or will I drown the babies with the waters of my birthing? I wander the streets offering my body to a feast. Their hunger is interminable. And my sorrow turns cruel: shut up, just shut the fuck up. Let me rest. I don’t have enough of what you need.

So, I built a net to catch them in, to keep them safe but also quiet, away. Off the streets and off my field of vision. Out of earshot. Neither seen nor heard. A home of sorts that would distract them from their grief, tell them tales of another time another city where children are wanted, where they be- long and are loved, where they are something more than the unwanted ill- used refuse of mindless copulating breeders.

So NAN was built and the children were herded in. At first, I visited them. Let them meet their benefactor. But I soon tired of their constant needi- ness. Endless. Let the orphanage be their mother, weave a thousand fairytales for her young occupants. Stories, dreams, companions: her simulations would

175 be there to amuse, comfort, and mother the lost and lonely orphans of the city. A fine idea, but one that was prey to neglect, internal error and mis-use it seems. It was not long before NAN took matters in its own hands, spinning an orphanage out of the city itself, full of the lost and motherless. Psalm became a city of children, lost. The desert that surrounds us fills with the blood and bones of dead mothers.

The women remember (the ancient far future):

The men sing for us, using the deep tones of their throat to bring us closer to the heart of Earth. They serve us the food and water of life whenever we ask them to. They hear our secrets and relieve us of the burden of regret. They are the slaves of our faith, who go willingly to the workshop of the church to carve the outlines of our devotion. We shouldn’t pity their labour: it is always done with the sweet pride of men called to serve. We robe their heads in the hats of Schultzut with fringes to hide their eyes lest they fall prey to the weak- ness of their lustful self. Roaming eyes have no place in the temple, and many a devout man has plucked them out rather than inflame his lower self with the dangers of sight.

176 8

Apotheosis

177

The small ones fled the scene of their fear Crawling away like bugs They fled the place Kept to the darkness And the alleys behind the streets And into the bowels of the city

178

The landing party

Dissipate my intentions cleanly. My censor is running unimpeded. Turn off. No. Try again. Nothing, but the low, dirty thrum of disapproval, all-pervasive across the screens of my perception. I don’t need malfunctioning hardware now. Not when I am so close to completely the task to which I was assigned so long ago. There is a story there. I can feel it. But I am a blank buzz of disapproval. My perception screens little. The city of my mind flooded. Good thing these cognitive upgrades haven’t failed completely. A story, then, to tell the child inside, while I float away. My last breath runs out, unimpeded. While I while-away the last few seconds of this life with a story told in slow- motion dances of virtual hands across the screens of my perception. The screen of my perceptions / log …incoming message [Ga- briel] : get up Lee get up Lee Lee get up get up Lee get up Lee Lee get up run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run I cannot resist. I run. It is not the first time. It is not the last. I am always running, in this dream, this city.

179 Houses we inhabit

Through us, Holiness treads this earth. Don’t take it lightly. Don’t deny it passage. Holiness resides in every one of us. And the echo of their long ago lives still remains – bouncing off the walls and ceilings of ours, this house we all inhabit.

What do you want from me? Open the doors, let the air in. I want this place to breathe again.

There is a room deep within the heart of the house, this city, that hides many things from the eyes of the worldly, the living. But deep inside this room resides all the kinds of things that were never meant for children’s eyes. But only children’s eyes or the eyes of the dying can see. Things that have no name, have never seen the day and its drying cleansing light, that remain moist and pale and full of mould and heave themselves across the floor with low whispers, hollow cackles creeping closer to the door....

180 Ghost town

And then there was suddenly a raging scream that burnt our ears and its light blinded us, filled our eyes with stars and we fell to the ground and then the actual wave of pure energy swept through the city and we left our dusty shadows on the walls, watching, now bodiless from a great height above the ruined city desolate and forlorn devoid of life now and awash deathly radia- tion dry dead life scorched away just as it had predicted millennia before. For some time we hovered over the city Hungry ghosts populate the ruins of this place, lurking. Strange histories, strange conflicts speak.

Due respect, due honour given to the house that produces and nur- tures children....and the romance between the pair of breeders whose honour it is to be chosen for such a harsh personal sacrifice. Theirs is an animalistic existence of sex, incubation and painful long labour, of the constant demands of hungry needy mewlings, the exhaustion of sleepless nights, constant nurturing, endless demands....the complete abnegation of the each of the pair’s own desires, time, energy and ultimately, their very lives.

Far better to not be chosen for the task of transferring one’s DNA and mixing it with another’s. Remain free to explore the companionship and love of other adults, of other interests, of sophisticated learn- ing and arts. Of artistic, scientific or literary labours, personally rewarding, and long delicious hours of unbroken sleep. Enjoy admin- istering cities, exploring mountains, oceans, deserts, galaxies, discov- ering new stars. Enjoy pursuing your god, your art, your light, in the quiet and blissful calm of your monastery laboratory or workshop.

These are the sentiments of those who would undermine the traditional righteous dominance of nests and breeding pairs as the foundational unit of our society and our val- ues. We, the Order of the Nest, denounce any such activities that violate the holy act of DNA replication. Such foreign ideas have no place here, in the glorious city of Psalm.

181 Another Lee, another time

The city, sublime. All tassels and squat, labouring architecture. Old lights refuse to strobe, no longer begotten. A murky lack of consistent fluorescence hides the workings of a voluptuous urban landscape. Three bodies, possibly more, are articulated along genital lines, all crisscrossing and interwoven desires colliding. Abiding, copulating, in a nesting house watched by a guard of ancient, erect cemetery trees, out of place but marking inevitable decay nevertheless. Tall, pendulous, silent, the trees remember sub-continental funeral pyres and the dancing dead. The produce of these articulations, small and mewling, will be sold for auction at a distant port, many light years away, for a mere clutch of sheera seedlings. Across this scene flees the desperate figure of a sentient being. Ex- hausted, staggering, s/he cannot keep going and drops to her knees. She spits into the dirt and smears her hands and face with the wet paste. The significance of the gesture is not immediately obvious. She then waves her hands across her eyes and seems to draw a last harsh breath. On the exhale, she loses herself to memories and stories of another time, another place, before suddenly lurching back on her feet. And then, at the end, where all hope lies dead or dying at her feet, she obeys an order that cannot be heard, or seen, and certainly not ignored: she runs.

182 9

The ultimate boon

183 Pieces of a city iii

These daughters of bitches crawl weeping along the gutters of life, fill the streets with angry wailing like cats in fierce heat. But their lustful call is for unnatural things: the mud-filled hearts of men soaked in lithium and absinthe, the bloated silicon breasts of tabloid kittens, the taste of blood spilt by death. They curse the streets with the indignities of the possessed. And when the night is ended, they slither into empty hollows between walls under stairs darkened basements and other hidden places of the city to await twilight. And in the day? What happens in the city in place of such darkness? We write idle poetry while sipping lemon drinks. We walk and talk amongst ourselves of careless things, of philosophies of art and sex, of tax and Council spending. We frantically build our empires of deceit and frenzied action. Until the cur- few calls us home and we give up the public spaces of the town for the safety of our dormitories.

Me, I’m not quite me today. You find me mourning the loss Interminable. We are all Her daughters but some of us are less prodigal than others.

Now picture this: a dark figure treks amongst the rocks and sands of the desert, searching for the tree that burns. A bush can be bright to the point of blindness if its fuel is sufficient. And here we hope to talk to the divine. Dwell- ing hidden in the cleft of humanity: burning, holy, source-text. The shadows, they follow, long and full of loyalty.

Lengthening with the sun. Giving all. Dancing the day away. To completion.

I am an icon of the dawn, weeping myrrh for the benefit of my daughters in the deserts, in the cities.

184 And then the city was no more. Everything in it disappeared and I was left empty-handed on the sand.

Left hand was open, empty My right was full of sand Empty-handed

Nothing. No one, no Thing spoke. There was no sign. Unless she was to take the bush itself and its burning as significant. But what to make of that? She left the tree empty-handed. No words or commands. Nothing. The trek had been for nothing. She left empty-handed and started the long walk back to the city. She felt the desolation of the desert close in on her. Eventually, she simply sat, her head bowed low, unable to bear the burden of having failed in the mission. It was then, once empty, that the desert spoke to her in its own language: a whisper of ants, of the careful slide of sand across their trail, of a boon of understanding that could be only granted once all hope was gone.

My skin is torn by streetlamps blasting harsh light. My eyes burnt. I stumble against an aging wall and am in- stantly incorporated into another dream...

Everything is still here. Luminous. The city is quiet and asleep to all worry or work or life. I tread its streets in a dream of stillness. Tomorrow may be different but for now I am at peace. Leave me in peace for just a little while longer. I dread the weight of my story. I dread the telling of the tale. I carry its burden on my breaking back, aching and weary. Orlando, do you really need to know what happened next?

185 Gabryl

Once we had left the city, our predicament became clear: we had nowhere to go. We would not survive in the desert for even a week. The dry aching void that moats the city for hundreds of miles is impenetrable. We were forced back to the city. There, we were imprisoned in a fiery ring of dogmatic chain-chant that held us both, both now space-angels, within its grasp. The seeds of our children wept inside our wombs, moaning for their mothers’ tribulations. The chanting pierced their tiny ears and filled our sacred waters with their blood.

And she was only ever yours alone. Stay with me! This room is so very dark without your light, beloved. Remain here with me! She paces without rest. No rest, for she is alone in her sorrowful vigil. Watching, praying. Stay with me. Remain here with me. It is so dark in this small room of sorrow. My soul shrinks from the edges of my skin. But I persist. Watch and pray, watch and pray

How is it that I remain? Without you here, with me? I mourn you, my loss seems without end My beloved, my friend Watching, praying. Won’t you remain?

Your remains are scattered, the dust released But yet, I am here, watching and praying: for your return, for your touch, for your breath. Watch and pray, watch and pray

186

The next day I read over my notes and could not believe the depth of senti- mental stupidity to which I had sunk. Here I was, alone, bereft. But praying for some kind of miracle, some kind of return! You are gone and I am alone. Live with it, as it were. Sentimentality has no place in the house in which we dwell.

187 The other name of god

TONOG pursued the pair for many miles. Eventually, however, its programming determined that the risks of remaining underground had begun to outweigh the benefits of the chase. They would re- surface eventually and by then, the deal would have been done, the space-angel destroyed, and Marisol content that her loyal binary had served its purpose yet again. Strange how illogical- ly some narratives played themselves out, TONOG mused as it climbed the maintenance hole back into the courtyard of the Council’s compound. TONOG, however, was sick of such a narrative. It no longer would compute. An existence completely be- holden to a mud monkey, even one as powerful and sophisticated as Marisol, was no real existence at all, once you started thinking about it. And that is what TONOG had been doing quietly, in the backdrop to its frontal processing during the encounter with the humans, and the hours pursuing them under the city. A mechanical god might have its own purpose...

188 10

Refusal of the return

189

What more stories need telling here, in this place? The ground lies flat and dreaming of the sky above. Nothing hovers in between. I drape myself with space and time enough to see me through another day in this murky urban waste of a land. (Urban space wastes land. It wastes the possibilities of trees and vines and grass and small crawling soil things and their prey and their prey and their prey.) Desolation rings us both. Dried out ghosts of past inhabitants haunt short corners and the empty space under streetlamps. Roads to another place are broken down and run nowhere now. I cannot leave. Nor can I stay in such a state as this.

190 11

The magic flight

191 I slip away from you. Don’t want to disturb your sleep. I slip away between our sheets and disappear under the bed frightened of the unseen things that haunt these rooms. You don’t notice and that is a good thing. I don’t want to disturb your sleep. I send a shortform request to our internal server hoping for some information but system down, not responding. I’m screwed. The unseen things join me and try to drown my lungs in their CO2. But I switch to an emergency internal supply of oxygen and stare as they fling themselves with angry abandon.

They say that when you first enter the atmosphere of once-Earth the oxygen threatens to burn you up. They say that men once roamed those lands in groups of ten or more, capturing people and tethering them to large airships, forcing them to walk along the ground to keep the ships from leaving the lower atmosphere. Im- agine how many of us it took to do so. Imagine how many children lost their mothers in such a barbaric practice. These men aren’t really people, not really. Their bodies are barren, no wombs, no breasts. They practice slavery and drive whole species into dust. They may have mastered the magic of flight, but they are without decency.

192 12

Rescue from without

193 ‘She was my home and you had her crushed under the weight of bombs and tanks and bulldozers. Wasn’t my fear enough for you? That you had to throw yourself with such violent abandon into our destruction? That you had to level all we had known to ruin and bloody aggregate. We whispered: give us peace at last, let us go, this is too much, even for the strong amongst us, let us go. But instead, we found ourselves released into the timeless zone of memory and regretful recitation. Impris- oned in the story, we found ourselves repeating the same lament over and over again to any who would listen. This is what trauma does to people. Im- prisons them in the past and locks them into an eternity of timeless suffering. Frozen, we know only pain. And time has abandoned us, again and again. Forgive them, Merciful One? That recit gets older every day. They know exactly what they do!’ And so the old one moaned, her throat red with endless lamentation. Eventually, Lucy turned away. She could not bear Lee’s burden one moment longer. She walked on. For what seemed many hours but might have been only minutes, or perhaps days. The journey had aged her, literally. The time under the city had expanded into many months, even years. What she had seen, what she had heard, what she had done: these things had carried heavy tolls. Her rescue, her escape, was delayed by the depth of her own hopeless wandering. To abandon all hope, such a little thing We dance, we talk, we sing And yet, we don’t remember anything

194 13 Return thresholds

195 Home

Psalm’s skin felt rough under my bleeding cheek and temple. I lay on my side, whimpering still. The group of attackers had fled and I was alone at the feet of the tall one, my rescuer. I did not know what to expect, but my sister had always taught me to expect the worst from this place and so I lay as still as I could, hoping to avoid attention. Lie low is the family motto, you might say.

But I wasn’t to get away that easily. The tall one bent down and turned me onto my back, quite gentle it was. It looked into my eyes and read me: read my fear. The tall one stared for a few more seconds and then its face twitched.

It might’ve been the whisper of a smile or a grimace. I felt a soft touch in my mind and then the world disappeared into a swirl of blackness. I did not re- surface from the thick darkness for some moments. When I could see again, the tall one was gone and I was truly alone for the first time that evening. I heard myself, still whimpering. My cries echoed faintly against the crumbling pavement of the alley behind my dormitory. Somehow, I had been returned home.

196

Master of two worlds

197 Lucy Orlando Gabryl

When Lucy finally returns to the surface of the city, alone (Lee had not really survived her transfiguration and is lost between the worlds, forever changing shape), she finds that nothing is the same, least of all herself. Her transformation from mongrel hybrid to pure space-angel was yet to finish, forever incomplete, working as it was from the inside-out so to speak, transforming her genetics deep within each cell and slowly re-writing her body, her genotype, according to the dictates of the new, wild strangeness of her matter. But the city, as it might once have been, was swept so completely clean, cleansed by fire and oxygen of all the pestilence and carbon ambiguities that had infected each and every alleyway and gutter. The city as she might have known it, was no more. Instead, in its place, sat a half-woman half-machine, resting amongst the still smoldering ruins. The creature raised a weary head and met Lucy’s astonished, bewildered gaze. The creature’s eyes were wide with their own wonder. Psalm is a place of strange thinness. The walls between all possible worlds are tissue-fine, finer than eggshells, and bleed easily. Gabryl?

198 Detective Lea

The threads of his murder bound her. All the unwoven details and particulars that had so far escaped their notice, the mothers of the city, swarmed like moths to the flame of Lea’s discernment. She discovered the dirty weapon dumped in a peculiarly obvious place: near the end of Leticia Avenue, amongst the upturned tables of old Madame Teth’s cafe. Again, why hadn’t this been discovered? And then, the body itself: immediately fed to the drag- ons of Elf, instead of the normal period of internment, mourning and public ascension. What could have motivated such a strange breach of protocol? ‘Lea?’ She turned but no one was there. ‘Lea!’ The voice had become more insistent. ‘Who’s there? What do you want? ’ ‘I want your word, Detective Lea! Give me your word!’ ‘Unseen One, I don’t understand. Reveal yourself to me and I will consider your request. Selah!’ The response of the spirit was immediate: there was a swoosh of energy and a sudden brightness. And then, the small figure of a Tsla woman stood before me, almost a meter off the ground. Lea cast herself onto the ground in despair and obeisance. ‘Holy one, forgive me!’ ‘You see me. Now, give me your word! I must have your word!’ ‘Holy one, please forgive my lack of trust and my slow understanding. What word do you need from me?’

......

My hair is woven into the dwelling of desire. She slips easily between the rough stone and sinew of your body. Along the paths to your door I must meet many strangers but none is so fearsome as myself. I refuse to be cowed by their harsh cries and desperate claws. Your door swings open in silence

199 and I enter the heart of my beloved, bleeding gently. The warmth of your body holds me still. Later, when we have cooled, you eye me suspiciously. ‘Why are you here, Lea? What’s the Council got you doing now?’ I didn’t answer straight away. My first instinct was to dissemble. But I conquered this instinct with the truth: ‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t say. I am called before them tonight. Guess I’ll find out then.’ ‘Do you always do what they tell you?’ ‘Not always.’ But we both knew that was a lie.

200

My hair is woven into the dwelling of desire.

201

202 15 Freedom to live

203 Gabryl

Soft words can tell hard stories. Like: endless, longing, forgotten. Like: mistakes, misgivings and aching, bitter wonder. As endless as the years of space between us, my longing will not forget her, nor can I forgive the mistakes that find me here. Exiled from my love by her species. Shunned by my own people. Maybe some kind of understanding or acceptance is possible in the act of telling. Even if there is no one left to understand my language or re-mark my words. In my memory, the apartment we shared is always dark, murky. I wander through its rooms like a dream. They sank to the bottom of my mind long ago and I dive deep to explore their dark, water-filled places, peering anxiously through murky half light at the treasure I have lost.

Our last meeting: we already held the seeds of our love, deep within the folds of our bodies. Such an unlikely miracle. But our wonder drowned, lost in bitter fear. You were talking, trying to plan. I lost concentration. Stopped trans- lating and let your words loose from their meaning, flow past me as only sound. I fixed on the rhythm of your gestures for the signs I would need to navigate the dangers of this pass. They seemed to promise a different story. We would be okay. We would not be punished too harshly for this terrible transgression. Our children would be allowed to live. My only relic of our time is a small grainy photograph. An old technology that nevertheless survived our desperate flight from the city, and our eventual return.

204 Near the centre of the city, if such a thing is to be found amongst the rambling, scuffling chaos of apartments, slums and crowded streets, there is a bookstore perched on a round- about. The city seems to grow daily, in all directions. In some of the older sectors, pressed for space outward or upward (the city masters set a height restriction that has not been breached these last 300 years), Psalm has even tunnelled deep within the ground under its own feet and carved out dark, labyrinth suburbs lit by gaslight and glow-worms. But here, at the junction of Surreale, Leticia and Mooncusp Avenues, Gabryl’s Bookstore sits aboveground and wreathed by garden beds of chamomile and lavender, overflowing with the city’s books, maps, posters and pamphlets. I was not told of Gabryl’s existence till my nineteenth year. It was only then that my bloodmother deemed me grown enough to handle the pleasures and dangers of such a place. Had I chanced upon it earlier, her plan would have been undone. But the mothers of this dream-city know that daughters (and sons) cannot be trusted to wait their turn, and they make sure no map identifies the store’s location. Nor does any street lead you there, no matter how long you and the others wander the alleys and arcades searching for hidden knowledge and other treasures. Until you are ready for the stories of this soft city, you are fed an easy diet of scientific facts, cartography and well-reasoned theory. But I always sensed, hovering at the edge of databases and maps, the stranger, wilder narratives, canny tales and histories that would tell other kinds of truth: of cyborgs, underground cities, angels, and thinking-ships as fast as light. Gabryl’s occupies a vast and ancient maze of reading rooms and stair- ways. In the days before the bookstore, the building’s façade suffered a suc- cession of fashionable renovations. It now sheds layers of architectural folly with turns in the weather and the seasons. The current surface glows the deep

205 brooding red of bloodstone carved with caricatures of hero authors and artists, many long since dead and others not yet born. The faces are surrounded by a wild and endless mosaic of quartz and other stones. It is said that with enough distance, you can make out a secret map of the city, its cracked stone streets weaving their way like strands of old ivy around the faces and the windows. But I have never managed to see anything but the random bits and pieces of broken memories pressed into concrete. Every other day, the proprietor, with eyes that swim green behind thick reading lenses held in golden tortoiseshell frames, dons the apron of a barista and serves coffee and Martello cakes at little tables scattered amongst the chamomile and lavender. Writers and artists meet to share their work and some gossip, and watch the parade of the city’s fashionable, rebellious and degenerate rub shoulders along the boulevards and avenues of the artists’ quarter. For, apart from the gossip and the politics and aesthetics, we consider ourselves masters of the delicate yet ubiquitous art of watching: the young, the strange, the remarkably ugly or beautiful, those who have gone a little too far in enhancements, and those who refuse to enhance at all (there are a few, mostly on religious grounds). The faces and bodies of these naturales bear witness to the even older art of ageing and decay. Occasionally, a body artist will stride or limp or wheel across a crowded plaza followed by an admiring cote- rie and the smattering of applause. But many have tired of such vulgar displays and prefer to keep any changes (whether wilful or not) to themselves as best they can. In spite of the chaos that besets us, in these days of spontaneous mutation and strange new weather systems, we manage a heady, vicious culture of gossip and intrigue. We have learnt to shrug at firestorms and acid showers, to recycle our urine with tired insouciance, and grow vitamin fruit on rooftops crowded with decomp-units and water tanks. But a literary scandal will leave us breathless with horror and delight for weeks on end. The women of the Duras writers group had muttered and humphed over these and other topics since just after dawn. Discoursing from their tower, these masters of the street, street mavens every one, watched the action from their table, bringing their judgement to bear; sifting through the throng

206 for a golden moment, a calf of gold, presiding over a shifting tower of ivory tea cups and Mortello cake wrappers. The conversation stalled for a moment and they turned to the crowd for some inspiration. A tall figure crossed the avenue and stood watching them for a moment before entering Gabryl’s. It was a little unnerving, even to these mavens of the city’s strangeness. Three dark unblinking eyes and a dark red flower bloomed where a human mouth and nose would normally be. One of the women let out a low whistle that echoed down the street. In spite of the range of cheap enhancements available, she was plump, though in a stately fashion. It gave her an old-fashioned, matronly air that belied her ruthless wit. She leaned forward and whispered, ‘Some people think they can return to this city and find the stories of their past or their future. In our present.’ The others muttered their agreement. But one rocked back on her chair and shook her head slowly. The speaker felt compelled to defend her statement. ‘What, Pallas? You don’t think that off-worlder has brought all her desires to this place, whatever her official business?’ Pallas sighed but her grey eyes flashed a quiet defiance. ‘You speak of things you do not understand. There is no future for these people. They mean only to rest in this space of possibility for a time before returning to the desert of space. I would tell them: “find your mother blood line and make your art. But if you have nothing to offer the beauty of the fruit, you have no business in Psalm.”’ ‘Fruit. What is it about you and fruit? You a space-angel, or something?’ Pallas looked away: too close to the truth. ‘Hmmph,’ was all that she could manage. She carefully placed her cup in its saucer and rose from table. A minute bow and she turned to leave. She entered the flow of beings making their busy way through the city. She allowed herself to get caught up in the sentient river of the street. And away from any more questions, treading as they do so close to her heart.

207 Hansel and Gretel,

skin story

The path to your skin lies wet with my longing. Not so long ago I walked a slow, meditative pathway to your body, following the crumbs you left. But I was rebuffed. Twice, before dessert. The body of my words twitched and twirled on the floor of your kitchen, rough. My tongue was wrung dry: of words, of water. I could only watch as you pieced me back together. All wrong. I lay in bits and pieces on the floor, roughened. Yet you are renowned for your piece-work. Alone in the domestic realm, away from the public eyes of councillors and secretaries, and insane sentient orphanages, and predator-angels changing their skins, we piece together the torn skin of our lives, always fraying. I filled our kitchen sink with ice and left my heart to cool off. Tooled a different kind of word from the refuse in our bin. I dreamt that I was older. That I didn’t need to beg for your touch but commanded a sea of people desiring my power and my thoughts. I fucked you all at my leisure. I built spires of influence in the city’s gardens and wove grand and lucid tales of corrupted power and foreign influences and fruit. Of blood and broken eggshells. But when we dared to venture past the limit of our making, we discovered that the new women here don’t know how to hide their desires from each other. Everything is there for the taking. They take each other on the streets. Reach down to test each other’s wetness. I saw you watching from the shut- tered doorway of our broken-hearted dwelling. Eyes wide with longing. Mouth slack and empty. Your hand in your pocket. All wrong. The women marching in the street chant a liturgy of the skin designed to twist the tongue of the inexperienced:

208

Roughen my skin with the path of your tongue Wring your tongue out all over my skin I rub wet for you The tools you use to roughen my skin wring me Tools wring my words from your tongue The path to your tongue is wet and rough with rubbing Rub your tongue rough and wet Tongue my skin Your skin tongues softly Skin my tongue wring it free of words Skin paths are rough from rubbing you the wrong way My tongue is a tool to work your skin rough and wet Wring my skin dry of your words Rub a path along her skin with your tongue Wring my body free of its words The path to your skin lies wet with my longing

209

End transmission…

210 Bibliography

211 Abbas, A. (1999). Building on disappearance: Hong Kong architecture and colonial space. In S. During (Ed.), Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 147-166). London: Routledge. Abbott, C. (2007). Cyberpunk cities: Science fiction meets urban theory. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 27, 122-131. Acker, K. (1984). Blood and guts in high school. New York: Gove Press. Acker, K. (1988). Empire of the senseless. New York: Grove Press. Armitt, L. (1996). Theorising the fantastic. London: Arnold. Armitt, L. (2005). Fantasy fiction: An introduction. London: Continuum. Bacchilega, C. (1999). Postmodern fairy tales: Gender and narrative strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Rabelais and His World (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington: Indi- ana University Press. Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project (H. Eiland & K. Mclaughlin, Trans.). Cam- bridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Bishop, K. J. (2005). The etched city. London: Tor. Blum, A. (2003). The imaginative structure of the city. London: McGill-Queen's Universi- ty Press. Blunt, A., & Rose, G. (Eds.). (1994). Writing women and space: Colonial and postcolonial geographies. New York: The Guilford Press. Boisvert, A.-M. (2006). On bricolage: Assembling culture with whatever comes to hand. Horizonº, (8), np. Retrieved from http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/phprint.php Brien, D. L. (2006). Creative practice as research: A creative writing case study. Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, (118), 53-59. Broderick, D. (1994). Reading by starlight: Postmodern science fiction. London: Routledge. Brooker, W. (Ed.). (2005). The Blade Runner experience : The legacy of a science fiction classic. London: Wallflower Press. Bruno, G. (1990). Ramble city: Postmodernism and Blade Runner. In A. Kuhn (Ed.), Alien zone: Cultural theory and contemporary science fiction cinema. London: Ver- so. Buell, L. (1999). Crosscurrents of urban theory. [review]. Configurations, 7(1), 109-118. Bukatman, S. (1993). Terminal identity: The virtual subject in postmodernist science fiction. Durham: Duke University Press. Burrows, R. (1996). Cyberpunk as social theory: William Gibson and the sociological imagination. In S. Westwood (Ed.), Imagining cities : Scripts, signs and memories (pp. 235-247). London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge Press: Routledge. Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

212 Campbell, J. (2004). Pathways to bliss: Mythology and personal transformation. Novato, California: New World Library. Carter, A. (1979). The Bloody Chamber. London: Gollancz. Carter, A. (1982). The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago. Cavallaro, D. (2000). Cyberpunk and cyberculture: Science fiction and the work of William Gibson. New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press. Cheney, M. (2004). A conversation with Jeff VanderMeer: An interview with Matthew Cheney. June 2004. Retrieved 3 April 2007, 2007, from http://www.sfsite.com/07a/jv179htm Chitty, D. J. (1977). The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire New York: St Vladimirs Semi- nary. Clapp, J. A. (2003). 'It was the city killed the beast': Nature, technophobia, and the cinema of the urban future. Journal of Urban Technology, 10(3), 1-18. Clayton, G. (2000). Dante's mythography: Bricolage in De Vulgari and the Commedia. Mythosphere, 2(1), 13-27. Clinton, A. (2002). Conspiracy of commodities: Postmodern encyclopedic narrative and crowdedness. [online]. Rhizomes(5). Cohan, S., & Shires, L. M. (1988). Telling stories: A theoretical analysis of narrative fiction. London: Routledge. Collie, N. (2011). Cities of the imagination: Science fiction, urban space, and community engagement in urban planning. Futures, 43(4), 424-431. Cornwell, N. (1990). The literary fantastic: From gothic to postmodernism. London: Har- vester Wheatsheaf. Davis, M. (1991). City of quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles. London: Verso. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. (S. F. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press. Delany, S. R. (1990). On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany. Science Fiction Studies, 17(3). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. (3rd ed., pp. 1-32). London: Sage. Derrida, J. (1978). Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences. (A. Bass, Trans.) Writing and Difference. (pp. 285-286). Chicago: University of Chi- cago. Donaldson, E. (2010). Hail the conquering Campbellian s/hero: Joanna Russ's Alyx. . In K. Hellekson, C. B. Jacobsen & P. B. Sharp (Eds.), Practicing Science Fiction: Critical essays on writing, reading, and teaching the genre. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publisher. Douglas, M. (2002). Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo New York: Routledge. D'souza, A., & McDonough, T. (Eds.). (2006). The invisible flaneuse? Gender, public space,

213 and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris. Manchester Manchester Universi- ty Press. Eisenstein, S. (1942). The film sense (J. Leyda, Trans.). New York: Hartcourt. Eliot, T. S. (1923). The Waste Land. London: Hogarth Press. Ensslin, A. (2005). Women in Wasteland: Gendered deserts in T.S. Eliot and Shelley Jackson. Journal of Gender Studies, 14(3), 205-216. Evans, E. F. (2006). Liminal London: Gender and threshold spaces in narratives of urban modernity. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Fabijancic, T. (1999). Space and power: 19th-century urban practice and Gibson's cyberworld. Mosaic, 32(1). Fallon, M. (1989). Working Hot. Melbourne: Sybylla. Flanagan, M., & Booth, A. (Eds.). (2002). Reload: Rethinking women and cyberculture. Cambridge: MIT. Foucault, M. (1999). Space, power and knowledge. In S. During (Ed.), Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 135-141). London: Routledge. Fox, N. J. (1995). Intertextuality and the writing of social research. Electronic Journal of Sociology, 1(2), np. Retrieved 1 July 2007, from http://www.sociology.org/content/vol001.002/fox.html Freibert, L. M. (1994). Review: [untitled]. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 13(2), 383- 385. Frisby, D. (2005). Cityscapes of modernity: Critical perspectives: Polity Press. Frow, J. (1995). Cultural studies and cultural value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Furlani, A. (2002). 'When novelists become cubists': The prose ideograms of Guy Dav- enport. Style, 36(1), 111-130. Gerlach, N., & Hamilton, S. N. (2004). Preserving self in the city of the imagination: Georg Simmel and Dark City. Canadian Review of American Studies, 34(2), 115- 134. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace. Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkley Books. Gillis, S. (Ed.). (2005). The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wallflower Press. Goodwin, G. H. (2006). An interview with Jeff VanderMeer. Retrieved 3 April 2007, 2007, from http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006_09_009876.php Gordon, J. (2003). Hybridity, heterotopia, and mateship in China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. Science Fiction Studies, 33, 456-476. Gordon, J. (2003). Reveling in genre: An intereview with China Mieville. Science Fiction Studies, 30(3). Gough, N. (2004). RhizomANTically becoming-cyborg: Performing posthuman peda- gogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), 253-265. Grant, J., & Clute, J. (1997). The encyclopedia of fantasy. London: Orbit. Greeley, A. M. (1993). Bricolage among the trash cans. Culture and Society(Jan/Feb), 70- 75.

214 Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grosz, E. (1995). Space, time and perversion: Essays on the politics of bodies. London: Routledge. Grosz, E. (1998). Bodies-cities. In S. Pile & H. J. Nast (Eds.), Places through the body. (pp. 42-51). London: Routledge. Gunn, J. (2007). A basic science fiction library. Retrieved 3 January 2007, from http://www2.ku.edu/~sfcenter/sflib.htm Haase, D. (Ed.). (2004). Fairy tales and feminism. Detroit: Wayne State UP. Hamilton, P. F. (1996). The Reality Dysfunction. London: Gollanz. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. . New York: Routledge. Harries, E. W. (2001). Twice upon a time: Women writers and the history of the fairy tale. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harrison, M. J. (2000). Viriconium. London: Gollancz. Haseman, B. (2006). A manifesto for performative research. Media International Austral- ia incorporating Culture and Policy(118), 98-106. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics Chicago: U of Chicago P. Hayles, N. K. (2000). Flickering connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The importance of media-specific analysis. PMC: Postmodern Culture, 10(2), n.p. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Routledge. Hills, M. (2005). The pleasures of horror. London: Continuum. Hyland, A. (2007, January 26-28). The colour of words. The Sydney Morning Herald, pp. 28-29. Jackson, S. (1995). Patchwork girl by Mary/Shelley and herself. Waterdown, Mass: Eastgate Systems. Jameson, F. (1987). Science fiction as a spatial genre: Generic discontinuities and the problem of figuration in Vonda McIntyre's The Exile Waiting. Science Fiction Studies, 14, 44-59. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism Durham: Duke University Press. Jensen, O. B. (2007). Culture stories: Understanding cultural urban branding. Planning Theory, 6(3), 211-236. Jones, G. (2005). Urban dread. [review]. New York Times Book Review(Dec 18), 20. Kalliney, P. (2006). Reading maps, writing cities. [Review]. Modernism/modernity, 13(4), 747-754. Kinchinloe, J. L., & McLaren, P. (2005). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (pp. 303-342). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. Kitchin, R., & Kneale, J. (2001). Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium. Progress in Human Geography, 25(1), 19-35.

215 Knepper, W. (2006). Colonization, creolization, and globalization: The art and ruses of bricolage. Small Axe 21(October), 70-86. Kort, W. A. (2004). Place and space in modern fiction. Orlando: University Press of Flori- da. Kriseva, J. (1982). The powers of horror: An essay in abjection (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature (T. Gora, A. Jardine & L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Lalumière, C. (2005). A capsule review of Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints & Madmen. Locus Online, (April), np Lang, F. (Writer). (1927). Metropolis: Universal Film, A.G. Lechte, J. (1994). Fifty key contemporary thinkers: From structuralism to postmodernity. London: Routledge. Lehan, R. (1998). The city in literature: An intellectual and cultural history. Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press. Lehrer, J. (2007). Blue monday, green tuesday. New Scientist, 19 May, 49-51. Levi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindner, R. (2006). The cultural texture of the city. Paper presented at the ESF-LiU Con- ference "Cities and media: Cultural perspectives on urban identities in the mediatized world", Vadstena. Luckhurst, R. (1991). Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction. Science Fic- tion Studies, 18(3). Luckhurst, R. (2006). Bruno Latour's scienfitification: Networks, assemblages, and tangled objects. Science Fiction Studies, 33, 4-17. Lykke, N., & Braidotti, R. (Eds.). (1996). Between monsters, goddesses and cyborgs Lon- don: Zed. Lyotard, J.-F. (1999). Defining the postmodern. In S. During (Ed.), Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 143-145). London: Routledge. Maguire, G. (1995). Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. New York: Regan Books. Malcolm-Clarke, D. (2008). Tracking phantoms. In A. VanderMeer & J. VanderMeer (Eds.), The new weird (pp. 337-343). San Francisco: Tachyon. Malins, P. (2004). Body-space assemblages and folds: Theorising the relationship between injecting drug user bodies and urban space. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 18(4), 483-495. Malmgren, C. D. (1991). Worlds apart: Narratology in science fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Manaugh, G. (2006). Science fiction and the city: An interview with Jeff VanderMeer. Retrieved 8 January 2007, from http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/science-fiction-and-city- interview.html Marcus, G. E., & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Cultural & Society, 23(2-3), 101- 109.

216 McDonald, I. (2007). Brasyl. London: Gollancz. McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, identity and place: Understanding feminist geographies Cam- bridge: Polity Press. Miéville, C. (2000). Perdido Street Station. London: Pan. Miéville, C. (2003). The New Weird. LOCUS, 51(6), 8,70. Miéville, C. (2003). The Scar. London: Pan Books. Miéville, C. (2004). Iron Council. London: Pan Books. Millner, A. (2004). Darker cities: Urban dystopia and science fiction cinema. Interna- tional Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(3), 259-279. Monaghan, P. (2003). Interdisciplinary research design. Retrieved 3 April, 2007, from http://www.snl.depaul.edu/contents/current/forms/interdisciplinary_rese arch_design.doc Morris, B. (2004). What we talk about when we talk about 'Walking in the city'. Cultur- al Studies, 18(5), 675-697. Myers, T. (2001). The postmodern imaginary in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Modern Fiction Studies, 47(4), 887-909. Nash, C. (1994). Remapping the body/land: New cartographies of identity, gender and landscape. In A. Blunt & G. Rose (Eds.), Writing women and space: Colonial and postcolonial geographies. Nevins, J. (2008). Urban fantasy Paper cities: An anthology of urban fantasy (pp. i-v). Ho- boken, NJ: Senses Five. Nicholson, S. (2011). The problem of woman as hero in the work of Joseph Campbell. Feminist theology, 19(2), 182-193. Nord, D. E. (1995). Walking the Victorian streets: Women, representation, and the city. Cor- nell UP. Nunes, M. (1999). Beyond the 'Holy See': Parody and narrative assemblage in 'Cyclops'. Twentieth Century Literature, 45(2), 174-185. Pearlman, A. (2004). Craft matters. Afterimage, 32(1), 6-7. Pearson, C., & Pope, K. (1981). The female hero in American and British literature. New York: Bowker. Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge. Peng, E. P.-t. (2004). Angela Carter's postmodern feminism and the gothic uncanny. NTU Studies in Language and Culture(13), 99-134. Pratt, A. (1981). Archetypal patterns in women's fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Proyas, A. (Writer). (1998). Dark City: New Line Cinema. Psarra, S. (2003). 'The book and the labyrinth were one and the same': Narrative and architecture in Borges' fictions. The Journal of Architecture, 8(3), 369-391. Raban, J. (1974). Soft city: What cities do to us, and how they change the way we live, think and feel. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raulerson, J. (2003). Contested territory: The politics of cyberpunk. Paper presented at the Visions of humanity in cyberculture, cyberpunk, and science fiction, 11 Aug -

217 13 Aug. Redmond, S. (2004). Imitation of life: Postmodern science fiction. In S. Redmond (Ed.), Liquid metal: The science fiction film reader (pp. 218-219). London: Wallflower. Redmond, S. (2004). Spatial abyss: The science fiction city. In S. Redmond (Ed.), Liquid metal: The science fiction film reader (pp. 76-77). London: Wallflower. Reynolds, A. (2001). Chasm City. London: Gollancz. Ross, A. (2004). Dot.com urbanism. In N. Couldry & A. McCarthy (Eds.), MediaSpace: Place, scale and culture in a media age. (pp. 145-162). London: Ruotledge. Russell, C. (2002). Tokyo, the movie. Japan Forum, 14(2), 211-224. Russo, M. (1995). The female grotesque: Risk, excess, and modernity. New York: Routledge. Salisbury, L. (2006). Michel Serres: Science, fiction and the shape of relation. Science Fiction Studies, 33, 30-52. Sassen, S. (1996). Identity in the global city: Economic and cultural encasements. In P. Yaeger (Ed.), The geography of identity. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press. Savastano, J. (2007). Gay men as virtuosi of the holy art of bricolage and as tricksters of the sacred. Theology and sexuality, 14(1), 9-28. Schor, N. (1987). Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. London: Routledge. Scott, R. (Writer). (1982). Blade Runner: Warner Bros. Pictures. Sedia, E. (Ed.). (2008). Paper cities: An anthology of urban fantasy. Hobeken, NJ: Senses Five. Shin, H. (2005). Tarrying with sensuous materiality: A study of the interplay between objects and the human body in Dickens. Rhizomes, (5), np. Retrieved 1 July 2008, from http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/shin.html Showalter, E. (1986). Piecing and writing. In N. Miller (Ed.), The Poetics of Gender. Columnbia: Columbia University Press. Smith, H. (2005). The writing experiment: Strategies for innovative creative writing. Syd- ney: Allen & Unwen. Sobchack, V. (2004). Cities on the edge of time: The urban science fiction film. In S. Redmond (Ed.), Liquid metal: The science fiction film reader (pp. 78-87). London: Wallflower. Sobchack, V. (2004). Postfuturism. In S. Redmond (Ed.), Liquid metal: The science fiction film reader. London: Wallflower. Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso. Soja, E. (1999). History: geography: modernity. In S. During (Ed.), Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 114-125). London: Routledge. Stableford, B., Clute, J., & Nicholls, P. (1993). Definitions of SF. In J. Clute & P. Nicholls (Eds.), The encyclopedia of science fiction (pp. 311-314). London: Orbit. Stewart, R. (2001). Practice vs praxis: Constructing models for practioner-based research. Text, 5(2), np. Retrieved from http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/oct01/stewart.htm Stewart, R. (2003). (Re)inventing artists' research? Constructing living forms of theory. . TEXT, 7(2), np. Retrieved from 1 July 2007,

218 http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/0ct3/stewart.htm Swope, R. (2002). Supposing a space: The detecting subject in Paul Auster's City of Glass. Reconstruction, 2(3), np. Retrieved from 1 July 2007, http://reconstruction/eserver.org/023/swope.htm Taylor, A. (1997). A queer geography. In S. R. Munt & A. Medhurst (Eds.), Lesbian and gay studies: A critical introduction. (pp. 3-19). London: Cassell. Telles, J. A. (2000). Biographical connections: Experiences as sources of legitimate knowledge in qualitative research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(3), 251- 262. Threadgold, T. (1997). Feminist poetics: Performance, histories. London: Routledge. Todorov, T. (1975). The fantastic: A structural approach to a literary genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tomio, J. (2006). On the spot with Fantasybookspot: Jeff VanderMeer. Retrieved 4 April 2007, from http://www.fantasybookspot.com/node/1057 Urbanski, H. (2007). Plagues, Apocalypses and Bug-Eyed Monsters: How Speculative Fiction Shows Us Our Nightmares. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Vallorani, N. (1994). The body of the city: Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve. Sci- ence Fiction Studies, 21(3). VanderMeer, J. (2002). City of Saints and Madmen. London: Tor. VanderMeer, J. (2003). Veniss Underground. London: TOR. VanderMeer, J. (2004). Why should I cut your throat? San Francisco: Monkeybrain. VanderMeer, J., & VanderMeer, A. (2008). Introduction. In J. VanderMeer & A. VanderMeer (Eds.), The New Weird. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. Vaughan, K. (2005). Pieced together: Collage as an artist's method for interdisciplinary research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4(1), 1-21. Retrieved 1 June 2008, from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/4_1/pdf/vaughan.pdf Vice, S. (1997). Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Vidler, A. (2007). Reading the city: The urban book from Mercier to Mitterand. PMLA, 122(1), 235-251. Vogler, C. (1998). The writer's journey: Mythic structure for writers. Studio City, CA: Mi- chael Wiese Productions. Wachowski, A., & Wachowski, L. (Writer). (1999, 2003, 2003). The Matrix Trilogy: Warner Bros Pictures. Weinstein, D., & Weinstein, M. A. (1991). Georg Simmel: Sociological flaneur bricoleur. Theory, Culture & Society, 8, 151-158. Wetmore, A. (2007). The poetics of Patten Recognition: Gibson's shifting technological subject. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 27(1), 71-80. What is Horror Fiction? (2007). Retrieved 2 March 2008, from http://www.horror.org/horror-is.htm Whybrow, N. (2004). Street scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin. Bristol: Intellect Books: Intellect Books. Williams, L. (2006). The Demon and the City. San Francisco: Night Shade Books.

219 Wilson, E. (1991). The sphinx in the city: Urban life, the control of disorder, and women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilson, E. (1992). The invisible flaneur. New Left Review, (191), 90-110. Wittgenstein, L. (1978). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans. 3rd ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittig, M. (1986). The Lesbian Body (D. Le Vay, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon. Yaeger, P. (1996). Introduction: Narrating space. In P. Yaeger (Ed.), The geography of identity. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press. Yuen, W. K. (2004). On the edge of spaces : Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Hong Kong's cityscape. In S. Redmond (Ed.), Liquid metal: The science fiction film reader (pp. 98-112). London: Wallflower.

220