Another concept that definitely informed my conception of the imaginary city of Cantral Araban is the metropole-province axis, which is basically the dialectic between the central city of a region and the surrounding countryside. This dialectic is especially characteristic of ex-colonies. I learned about this paradigm from Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson, which was one of the required texts in the Southeast Asian Studies survey class I took as an undergrad, and analyzing Manila through this particular lens was very enlightening.

Both my parents are provincianos, my mom from Ilocos Norte in the north of the Philippines, and my dad from Leyte in the southeast of the Philippines, and the paradigm of the metropole vs the province gave me added insight to their stories of alienation during their respective times in Manila. (They actually didn’t meet each other until they were both in the U.S., though.)

Multiple trips to Ilocos Norte, and indeed, trips to more remote regions like Romblon illustrated to me the dichotomy inherent in this paradigm. Manila shares a culture that is characteristic of any major cosmopolitan city, and in my mind Manila has more in common with NYC than it does with other parts of the Philippines. There is, along with this culture, a sense of superiority in the metropole that sort of poisons its relationship with the rest of the country (and I think that maybe Redstaters can understand this in their own perceptions of NYC.)

But the thing that is most striking about a metropole in a developing nation like the Philippines is the technological dichotomy between the metropole and the provinces. In some provinces, running water and paved roads are unheard of luxuries. In contrast, in Manila, it is quite possible to live entirely almost as if you were still in the United States.

I remember in Final Fantasy VII, one of the things that I found kind of haunting was the fact that Midgar had all the accoutrements of a modern (if not futuristic) city, including superhighways and railways. However, none of these amenities really existed outside of the city. One of the scenes that intrigued me was when the main characters escaped the city by taking one of the superhighways to the city edge. However, the highway didn’t actually leave the city, and actually remained unconstructed outside of the bounds of Midgar itself, so the characters were forced to jump off the unfinished highway into the void beyond. Having lived in the U.S. all my life, this was hard to comprehend as realistic, since the entire nation is crisscrossed with railways, and the interstate highway system ties together every city in the lower 48. But then I think about Manila and how the only freeways (at least in 1999) were the ones that led north of the city and south of the city, and how both terminated only a few miles outside the city limits. The northern highway narrowed to a two lane (and sometimes narrower) road that wound itself passed the lahar-strewn fields of Pampanga, north to the Gulf of Lingayen and then along the western coast of Luzon, through rugged terrain, utilizing switchbacks and sometimes unreliable bridges. The southern highway ends in a final half-cloverleaf junction practically at the foot of the mythical Mt. Makiling, leaving you on a narrow road that leads to the hometown of the national hero Jose Rizal.

The provinces are palpably different from the city. While Manila is indeed another world (as all cities, as I’ve said, are their own microcosms), the surrounding countryside is another world yet even more removed from my developed world sensibilities. It is easy to wax poetic about this and romanticize the experience, but I will spare you such naivete.

So the highways of Cantral Araban likewise end before the city limits, turning into simple paved roads that go off into the wild in all directions, leading into lost feudal kingdoms, elven forests, dwarven mines, and wizard’s towers (and all that Tolkienesque drek.)

I definitely don’t have quite as radical an agenda as Miéville does in terms of redefining fantasy. I am still quite enamored with Tolkien’s world-building and language-building proclivities and am loathe to discard such well-worn bricolage. Whereas Miéville achieves an entirely unique sensibility in his Torque-stricken world of Bas-lag, what I really wanted to see was the Fourth or maybe Fifth Age of Middle Earth, like, what happens when Adam Smith comes to Gondor and corporations come into existence. What happens when the steam engine gets invented and someone decides to build a railroad from Minas Tirith to Annúminas? What happens when some humans decide that it isn’t right to kill Orcs because they are sentient beings too? Or when someone comes up with the Dúnedain equivalent of the Magna Carta. What happens when the Gondorian John Locke or the Rohirric Jean Rousseau comes to town? What happens when someone decides that representative government is much better than a hereditary monarchy? (And I find it interesting that fantasies are never written with representative governments or quasi-representative governments like Miéville’s mayorship and parliament, despite the fact that in the real world, Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic long predated the feudal monarchies on which most fantasy worlds are based on.)

So maybe it depends on what exactly you mean by radical.

The other thing I want to explore is the fact that there practically no people of color in the fantasy genre. Why is this important, you ask? Well, better minds than mine have answered this question, and I think it is something worth pursuing. I am not one of those people who think fantasy is only for escape. Speculative fiction—the collective domain inhabited by science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction (of which Miéville is only one example out of many)—is an interesting metaspace where we can view real world situations without attaching too much cultural baggage. Or, as more often than not, where we end up attaching different kinds of cultural baggage to otherwise real world-like situations. It is by mixing and matching pieces of culture, by atomizing assumptions that we thought were axiomatic, that we can possibly come up with workable protocols by which to approach the problems of race, religion, and class that so plague our modern society, and speculative fiction certainly facilitates this kind of gedanken experiment.