On the possibility of legal form in Mieville's speculative fictions

Abstract

This article explores the nexus of the legal and the literary in the works of China Miéville. Miéville's acclaim and popularity among the genre fiction communities often overlooks his political commitment to a Marxist view of law. At the same time, literary criticism of Miéville's fiction tends to flatten this Marxist politik by ignoring its historical indebtedness to Pashukanian and Trotskyist lines of thought in Miéville's critical and creative works. This article responds to both these vectors by asserting that there is a significant and hitherto unexplored difference in the frame of possibilities to imagine law in the Weird speculative fictions that Miéville composes.