Writers of fiction stand or fall by their writing and not their academic qualifications, but the bewilderingly talented China Miéville (degrees in anthropology and international relations, PhD in Marxist theory and law) often makes it wonderfully hard to separate the two. Take “A Second Slice Manifesto”, a very short story from this second full-length collection, which imagines an avant-garde movement that extends “conceptual slices” into the perspective of existing works of art and derives new images from this altered view of the plane. Members of the school apply themselves to Les Parapluies by Renoir and Van Gogh’s Chair, and find that their new perspective – the equivalent of cutting through a cube – exposes detail invisible to the original painters and observers. Miéville writes:
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