China Miéville on literary/artistic movements to come. Of note here, aside from my pleasure in being designated as the "bard" of salvagepunk, is the manifesto quality of his post: not manifesto in the sense of stridency of certainty, but of the kind of saying that makes the said the case. Naming movements in advance, laying a glass-and-steam pocket for their incubation, out in the open.
This sense of open protection, of the envelope that doesn't hide itself away to wait until it grows important and fierce - for rarely does that work out as intended, is crucially marked in China's post on the inflection of the dystopian/end of days/apocalyptic/cold morning after feel, an inflection that winds through each of the future movements described: each is a navigation through and negotiation of the dominant modes of culturally figuring the end of it all.
The dominant modes to be rejected, that is, from the kitschy reduction of the zombie to the level of a Keyboard Cat meme to the "well, now it's over" misprision of how literary production - or, for that matter, the oil-clanked motors of production and slippery circulation - might come to a grinding halt. All in all, against the grave-diggers of our world, the ones who consign unfinished trajectories to the knacker's or who endlessly repeat, in a pitiable sadness of not quite jouissance, the cultural figure or gesture that really had something there, ceaselessly recombine it to leave it hollow-eyed and twee.
In place of that, let's make sure to keep making tears and pockets for our hard boiled Cthulhus and our hot-wiring wreckage angels.
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