The Interstitial City and China Miéville’s Equivocal Hybridity

China Miéville is one of the best representatives of the twenty-first century’s questioning of the division between literary and genre fiction, and of the tendency toward generic hybridity in contemporary writing. He has often been seen as a proponent and practitioner of both formal and thematic hybridity, a writer whose hybrid literary forms celebrate social and cultural hybridity. This element of his work has been identified in, for instance, Perdido Street Station (2000). However, in both this novel and, more clearly, in The City & The City (2009) elements of the narratives, particularly their endings and their manipulation of genre norms, indicate a clear awareness of the difficulties and limitations of cultural, personal, and even textual, hybridity.