Swagger: Doom and Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris

(Content warning: brief mention of suicidality.)

More and more I am primarily interested in stories that feel like they are themselves, rather than like other things. 

This doesn't preclude genre convention–I am a STRONG advocate of stuff that could be described with an easy genre definition, like Noir or Sword and Sorcery or literally anything at all–but I find (like so many of us) that the hashtagification of things makes them less appealing to me. Comp titles are exhausting; we all understand their necessity on the publishing side of things, but I simply don't want an author to give me the word cloud of good stuff that they are mashing together, no matter how well they do it. I used to find it eye-rolling or naive when someone said, of their own work, that is like nothing else. (This simply cannot be true! I am sure it is like something else!) Now, I find it vaguely invigorating. I tamp down my own doubt and say, "Terrific, show me."

This isn't about originality, per se, or even vibe. It's about commitment. 

A few months ago, I finished the 2020 game Doom: Eternal. It is so clearly Doom. It takes itself seriously; it does not parody the earlier games, but revels in the stuff that made them silly. The score is metal. The demons are gross and often quite loud. There is some dark humor to be had in the form of communiques from the demons, or "normal" humans' reactions to the protagonist, the roid-fantasy DoomSlayer, as you stomp around in his power armor and unload weapons of unlikely size on hordes of already blood-drenched undead. But by and large, it is everything the original Doom games were, only moreso.

At one point, you are battling your way across a space station above Mars (it's Doom – you go back to Mars, because there's a hell portal there, obviously) as it succumbs to invasion and is torn to bits. A walkway is destroyed. To get to another part of the broken station, you fit yourself into a Howitzer-sized cannon and shoot yourself across the vacuum of space and through a wall. The game leaves the first-person perspective for maybe three seconds to show the DoomSlayer slam through concrete. It crumbles, but his body does not. Despite this being set in space, the wall's destruction sounds oddly like a thousand bricks being pulverized by a wrecking ball. The DoomSlayer shakes himself off and rolls his shoulders, unharmed. The game returns to the first-person perspective. Demons scream, noting your arrival. Gameplay resumes. 

This could be stupid. As I read that back to myself, it sounds stupid. 

It's also very, very cool.

The difference, of course, is confidence. 

You know this. You wear a lime green jacket you acquired on a school trip to Italy in 2008. Is it cool? Is it gaudy? Is it just plain dumb? It all depends on how you deal with it, the first time someone tries to tell you it's dumb. If you are visibly bothered, perhaps they were right. If you play it cool, they are dumb. We all know this. 

I'm not a fan of being unaffected or aloof for its own sake; I'm a big fan of radical sincerity. Tell your friends you love them. Do something charitable and expect no reward. All that.

But there's no arguing with cool. 

At one point, late in Doom: Eternal, you get a massive red laser sword. It's very cool. 

Anyway, this is about China Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris. 

It's a short novel about anti-Nazi resistance fighters in an alternate history. It's 1950. The war continues, Paris is occupied. A fictional meeting between real life engineer and magician Jack Parsons and real-life surrealists led to, basically, an explosion that brought those surreal creations to life. They wander the city, fighting Nazis. Unfortunately, there are also demons wandering the same place. Our main character, a Parisian named Thibaut, is sole survivor of his resistance unit. He is quickly drawn into a plot to stop the Nazis from harnessing the surrealist creatures (called "manifs") in some fashion, claiming their power for their own. Obviously, this would be bad.

Last Days is quite short. Compare with Miéville's earlier work, which tends toward the epic. His incredible debut, Perdido Street Station, is over 850 pages.

I like a lot of big, chonky epic fantasy, and plenty of it earns its page count. Why shouldn't some dark fantasy horror "weird" mashup allow itself the same space?

On the other hand, I wonder if Miéville would write Perdido Street Station as the same book now. 

What strikes me about Last Days is its confidence, and part of that plays out in its trim page count. Manifs, got it? Keep up. 

Yes, there's a chapter that explains the manifs' origins–sort of. But that chapter is less about the origins and more about the stories' imagery and ideas. Art is not resistance, the book tells us, but it can be useful for resistance–and it can be co-opted, twisted back against itself. Authors' original intent means little to the fascist machines trying to kill us. 

I wish I had a craft takeaway for these works, but I'm left with very little. They both feature an abundance of demons?
So much rhetoric these days seeks not to convince but to throw us off our game. Whataboutism and bothsidesism don't try to bring you into a new way of thinking but to simply shut you up. Doubt is a good and important human emotion, but there are times we must rest assured in the rightness of a cause. Transphobes, for example, love to (mis)use a few studies regarding trans identity and suicidality to try and advocate against inclusive care. When they do so, they aren't trying to convince anybody; they must elide and obfuscate, ignoring that these studies take place in a larger context of anti-trans prejudice on the far right, and that the science is very clear regarding the positives for outcomes for trans youth given gender-affirming care. They only try to trip you up, to use sophistry as a leg stuck out as your pass by. Advocates for trans folks can’t get drawn into fake “debates” with bigots. We gotta stay focused. Which is to say, cool.

Maybe that's my takeaway: when you deal with demons (and I'll extend this to include metaphorical demons), you must not blink, and this is true in both art and activism–which, for Miéville at least, are kissing cousins. You must wear the green jacket as though it is an extension not of your body but of your soul. You must shoot your cuffs and smile. 

You cannot march to battle against demons. You must swagger. 

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