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In the shadows of Rosemary Jackson, this article argues that her paradigmatic work offers both a benefit and a curse when approaching the fantastic. Arguably, in this hegemonic moment of global capital, a corrosive fantastic that erodes unifying structures and represents reverse socialization is an important interrogative literature. However, does it offer any alternatives to the reality it seeks to destroy? Using China Miéville's This Census-Taker (2016), this article suggests that darkness, which is to say an absence, inherently affects the way we see ourselves and the worlds we inhabit, becoming a mystery to be solved, a condition to be understood. But what happens if it can't, if the darkness cannot be unseen, if we heed Jackson's call to tarry in anti-social drives and remain in the dark? Significantly, such a question reconceptualises Jackson's position, attempting to balance her desire for subversion alongside the need to render a political alternative in the void opened by the fantastic hesitation.
Recent scholarship regarding the work of China Miéville underscores the degree to which his oeuvre is simultaneously indebted to, impatient with, and subversive of what is broadly labeled as genre fantasy,1 that is, the vast body of fantasy texts which more or less correspond to a familiar, though constantly evolving set of formulaic structures and tropes. Indeed, the essays collected in Caroline Edward and Tony Venezia's China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015) return to this helixing relationship of "genre takes" or "vertiginous sweep of genre-popping worlds that reconfigure our received understandings of literary boundaries" (Edwards and Vint, "UnIntroduction" 3) as something of a leitmotif-the Bas Lag trilogy (2004-2004) is an epic fantasy trilogy, Embassytown (2011) is bio-punk inflected science fiction, detective noir manifests in The City and the City (2009), while Un Lun Dun (2007) and Railsea (2012) read as YA portal-quest and post-apocalyptic adventure respectively. Beyond acting as an erudite survey of Miéville's texts, therefore, these essays (and the growing corpus of Miéville scholarship more generally) function as a bridge between genre fantasy and its more innovative outliers, outliers that articulate the political potential of the subgenres with which they are in dialogue.
Not unsurprisingly, while interest in Miéville has increased, the degree to which theorization around fantasy more broadly is simultaneously enjoying its own...