One of the concepts in Perdido Street Station is “crisis energy.” From what I understand, it is a magical energy created from crisis situations that ends up acting in opposition to what seems inevitable. For example, one of the possible applications discussed in the book is the act of flying. Let’s say you cast yourself aloft by throwing yourself off a balcony. If you have a crisis energy engine, the impending catastrophe of splattering on the street below ends up propelling you upward instead. The higher you go, the more catastrophic your plunge downward would be, the more crisis energy is generated.

Knowing China Miéville’s leftist-leaning politics, I can’t help but think that crisis energy must be related to Marx’s crisis theory. I only have a two-sentence understanding of crisis theory, but an example that I understand is how while initial investment into a particular economy quickly accelerates its growth, as the economy matures, further and further investment actually begins decelerating growth and, going beyond the law of diminishing returns, actually starts antagonizing growth. What was once a constructive force becomes destructive.

In an abstract way, this can be summarized in the trite truism that anything in excess is bad for you, but I think it is more subtle than that. I can’t help but think of a biological equivalent, where the same enzymes in the same concentrations might make a cell grow in a particular part of the cell cycle, but as the cell matures, it might actually start killing the cell. Or how usually certain enzymes and messenger cascades keep a cells growth in check, but when the cell becomes malignant, these same enzymes and messenger cascades actually allow the cancer to spread. (I can’t think of a specific example right now, but I know the phenomenon exists.)

Interestingly, in some modern theories of cosmology, the force of gravity has been endowed with new, similar properties that might explain the evolution and end-stage of the universe. For example, the current incarnation of the Big Bang Theory cannot explain (1) how the universe managed to expand in size faster than the speed of light in the first few moments of Time, before slowing down to match our current observations and (2) how the distant parts of the universe are actually accelerating The idea is that there must be some hidden force that actually causes space to expand and accelerate, countering the (normally) attractive force of gravity. One idea is that perhaps gravity is attractive at (relatively) small scales, and repulsive as the distance between collections of matter increase.

Anyway, I thought it interesting that while “crisis energy” only makes sense as a real phenomenon in Miéville’s created universe, certain phenomena in the real world are actually (or at least possibily) quite analogous to it.