Not to be insulting, but for those of you who might be baffled by the Latin title, it more or less simply means “the city and the world,” or “to the city and the world”—originally the opening line of Roman proclamations, long since adopted by Popes doing likewise. Here I am bending it considerably to mean of the city and the world; in speculative fiction terms, science fiction and fantasy alike, fiction in which a fictional city or a fictional world is one way or another as much a central character as any of the humans (or non-humans) inhabiting it.

“World building” in its extended sense of an imagined physical venue for the story has always played a central role in more speculative fiction than not, whether a fictional planet, or a fictional generation starship, or a fictional space habitat, or a fictional city, or a fictional fantasy world, and there are probably those who would contend that it can’t be the real deal without it.

But here we have four novels by two of the leading literary lights of the current speculative fiction era—The City and the City and Kraken by China Miéville, The Dervish House and Ares Express by Ian McDonald—in which the city in the first three and a fictional Mars in the fourth become as much foreground as the characters embedded in them, and in which even the story line itself, to one degree or another, becomes almost secondary.
And, interestingly enough, both authors—McDonald unintentionally, and Miéville quite overtly—are champions of two drastically divergent streams of speculative fiction, so much so that one might oversimplify them as science fiction and fantasy. Nevertheless in all four of these novels these streams converge on this world-building centrality, albeit in radically different manners.

McDonald writes science fiction. It may, as in Ares Express, be so rococo as to have the feeling of fantasy, but however he does it, whatever contortions it may take, he does try to create suspension of disbelief in the traditional science fictional manner, by shoehorning what might otherwise be fantasy into accommodation with the known laws of mass and energy.

Miéville, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. He not only writes fantasy, but much of it is written in the mode he has dubbed, and of which he is champion—namely the “New Weird.”

Ares Express, first published in Britain in 2001, brought to the United States by Pyr in 2010, is a peculiar kind of sequel to McDonald’s first novel, Desolation Road. That characters are not repeated is not particularly peculiar, that McDonald sets both novels on his version of Mars is not peculiar, for many writers return to further explore a world they created in one novel in another one—literary recycling, as it were, waste not, want not.
What is peculiar is that it is and is not the same fictional Mars in both novels. Both novels are set on a future terraformed Mars with human cultures spreading all over it, and both McDonald versions of Mars owe much to Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance, which is to say the cultures in question are in their ways as baroque and colorfully realized a bouillabaisse as Vance’s Dying Earth or Bradbury’s own Martian Chronicles. But this is Ian McDonald, who even in a first novel took care to make what has the flavor of fantasy fit within the confines of science fictional realism, paying attention to creating a belief in the reader who cares that both his versions of Mars lie within the possible, if not the probable.
But these two literary planets created a decade apart are not the same Mars, not exactly, and the significant differences are mainly literary.

The Mars of Desolation Road feels something like Bradbury puffing on a doobie, the love affair of the writer with his dream of a Mars that never was, except maybe in a way in Edgar Rice Burroughs, baroque in style, culturally dense and complex. It’s a true novel, not a collection of short stories written over time like The Martian Chronicles with consistency not entering into at all, but with a set of interweaving story lines that do form a whole—but which, like the characters, colorful and bizarre though they be, escape the forefront of the reading experience and the memory thereof.

Ares Express gives us another baroquely complex stew of arcane local cultures and extreme characters. It is another dream of an improbably terraformed Mars, it does therefore have a certain fantasy feel, but here there is a viewpoint character with centrality and simpatico personal depth. And this McDonald Mars owes quite a bit to steampunk.
Quite literally. Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12, the heroine of the story—and she is a real picaresque heroine—is a punk to her family, a black sheep runaway wise-girl out to boogie. And her family is a tribe of the engineers who crew the great trains that traverse the surface of the planet, transporting goods, passengers, con artists, and popular culture from one more or less isolated culture to another.

The locomotives may be powered by onboard fusion reactors, but as aesthetic artifacts and Rube Goldberg technology, like most of the rest of the infrastructure and architecture on the surface of the planet until higher forces intrude, they are Victoriana. You can see how it all could work by pushing such technology to its very limits, but if you ask why in hell do it this way, the only answer is aesthetic.

Retro aesthetic. Ian McDonald has managed to write a romance of the rails, a railroad novel with all the trimmings, set on a far future Mars. There certainly is a literary tradition of this sort of thing, and any number of classic films, but you don’t see much of it in science fiction, or, for that matter, fantasy. Though, interestingly enough, China Miéville did it too in Iron Council, albeit with a razor sharp and iron hard political edge.

There’s just a certain allure to trains and railway odysseys for many people, obviously McDonald among them—nor am I immune—or rather to what they once were in the nineteenth century and what they might become again in the future, at least within the pages of a novel.

Trains were adventurous cutting edge transport back in Victorian times, and they were also perambulating hotels of whatever level—or, better, Mississippi riverboats on wheels and running on rails. The look and feel of this pre-auto and pre-airplane technology, like the iron tube bridge across the Firth of Forth in Scotland, as far as you could go without cable suspension technology, seems both quaint and touchingly heroic to our eyes now.
In the nineteenth century, advanced engineering pushing what the engineers had to work with to the very edge of the possible had a heroic romantic allure that seem archaic to us now, but a romantic allure nonetheless.

This to me seems to be the essential appeal of steampunk. Retro, wistfully heroic, silly maybe, but also sweet.

And no more so than when it comes to locomotives, trains and the rails taking them over the far horizons, especially as when, in Ares Express, even whistle stops tend to drop you into yet another exotic dreamscape.

There’s a story in Ares Express that includes confrontations with Artificial Intelligences and higher forces beyond Mars, dimensions beyond the human realities of the surface. Sweetness runs away from her train, her family, and her culture to flee from an arranged marriage she abhors, embarks on a picaresque journey through a series of more or less fantastically baroque cultures with colorful traveling companions, searching for the grandmother who is searching for her, and later for her lost spectral twin who sort of never was born but sort of lived inside her. This ends up involving her in a war among the entities who terraformed Mars, a malignant Luddite guru with a flying city that’s pedaled through the air by his acolytes who wants to bring about some kind of apocalypse, and various forces and persons who love Mars just the way it is.

Sweetness, of course, happens to be entrusted with a mission key to the outcome of this over-arching storyline that McDonald admirably links to her personal tale.

It’s coherent, dramatic, and comes to a satisfying conclusion. but for me, at least, it’s the locomotive pulling the train of attention through McDonald’s richly colorful and richly enjoyable Martian landscape that’s central, not only to this one novel, but to this sort of discursive tale in general. As with any well-done discursive novel, and particularly a picaresque railroad journey novel, science fiction or not, the journey is more than half of the fun.

The Dervish House, McDonald’s latest novel, is quite a different thing in one way, and like Ares Express in another.

With River of Gods and Brasyl, the former set in an India of the much nearer future, and the latter in Brasils of more than one future and the past as well, McDonald showed an almost sui generis genius for extrapolating the futures of non-Euro-American cultures in complex, rich, and telling detail, up to and including semi-imaginary pop cultures extrapolated seamlessly from the ones presently current.

But even so, in these novels, story and character, not the imagined worlds, are more front and center, the enjoyment of the less discursive magical mystery tour icing on the cake, as it were. And in The Dervish House, McDonald sets out to do the same sort of thing for a future Turkey—more explicitly, for the city of Istanbul.

Indeed, the novel is set just about entirely in greater Istanbul, though what more or less turns out to be the central plot of The Dervish House, or at least the major one, revolves around events that take place in the natural gas fields of Central Asia. There are three plots here, coming together, or, better, radiating out from, The Dervish House of the title, an old Sufi ashram-cum-communal-dwelling, now turned into a rather seedy apartment compound, where the paths of the characters, some of them a bit seedy themselves, cross and intersect.

But the novel might just as well, and certainly more accurately and simply, have been called Istanbul. For the city itself is front, center, and dominant, its millennial history alive and meddling in its fictional future, its living folklores, its place as the capital of the most populous and most recent member of the European Union, its diverse, volatile, and dangerously divergent mix of Shia, Sunni, Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, Greek, European Turkish, and Anatolian Turkish cultures.

Once again, McDonald makes his imagined future world, his imagined future city, exhaustingly real, vibrantly alive, his Istanbul, for in The Dervish House, you can feel his deep emotional connection to his semi-fictional city.

When it comes to the main characters and the plots, that is, the multiplex story lines, it’s a bit of a muddle.

The most deeply felt character, perhaps, is a boy with a strange heart condition that makes loud noise life threatening. He has robot cloud toys that metamorphose and move at his electronic command and form his main connection to the wider world outside the Dervish House.

There’s an art dealer pursuing an ancient body preserved in honey, which becomes a kind of vision quest, and her wheeling and double dealing lover, a market trader wizard setting up the dirty deal of a lifetime.

There’s a character who unwillingly becomes able to see djinn, a faded one-time star economist with an old tragic love story, and so forth, with a cast of well-rendered minor characters.

But the over-arching story line revolves around a complex swindle scheme concerning Central Asian gas, and the subplots do more or less converge upon it formally. There is and are formally satisfying denouements.

But while the story lines don’t really come off as perfunctory structure, the main line in particular is so deliberately complex a futures market scam that it becomes rather over-complex for gripping dramatic involvement, and the human characters less vivid and deeply felt by the reader, and one suspects by the writer, than Istanbul itself.

Geography, folklore, climate, weather, history, politics, food, ancient religion, future pop culture, slang, tech, the media sphere—it’s all there, as in River of Gods and Brasyl. But in The Dervish House the centrality of the extrapolated city is almost defiantly front and center. Istanbul is the main character here, and McDonald makes no bones about it.
To quote the very last lines of the last paragraph of the novel, where McDonald comes entirely up front about it:

This is the secret name of God, written across Istanbul in letters too great and yet too small to be comprehended. This is the stir of djinn and rememberings, which are not as different as humans think, in the twilight of Adem Dede Square, outside the old dervish house. This is the turn, this is the whirl, this is the dance that is woven into every particle of the universe. This is the laughter of Hizir the Green Saint. This is Istanbul, Queen of Cities, and she will endure as long as human hearts beat upon the earth.

This is a love poem to a city.

China Miéville’s Kraken is also a kind of love poem to a city, if not an unambiguous one—a more or less contemporary London transmogrified but not quite transformed by the New Weird. The City and the City is all about an entirely imaginary city or cities somewhere and somewhen in literary Central European Ruritania, bordered on both real contemporary European countries and the outer reaches of the Twilight Zone, one city but also two interpentrating cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma.

But these two city novels, written more or less one after the other, superficially similar in thumbnail description, are radically different.

The City and the City is a strange, tautly written, and not overlong novel, a cross between fantasy and the police procedural that works and works very well. Its first person narrator is Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad, and the plot is a murder mystery, which expands into political macro-consequences, and which forces him to work across the border with an Ul Qoman detective.

Thus far, from such a thumbnail description, it would seem that this is a novel that simply combines a few well-worn genre templates—the police procedural; what the French call the roman noir, the sort of thing written by writers like Raymond Chandler; the murder mystery in which the murder proves to have political consequences beyond homicide; and the Ruritainian novel of the nineteenth century that takes place somewhere in a nonexistent middle European city drenched in then-exotic atmosphere.

But Beszel and Ul Qoma are and are not the same city, and the frontier between them is not a line on a map but something conceptual. This is a concept so difficult to fathom—and, I would guess, by Miéville’s deliberate intent—that even the inhabitants themselves don’t all get its metaphysical complexity, and no one knows who created it or why.

Beszel and Ul Qoma are interpenetrating cities that occupy the same geographic space but not the same political and psychic space, and we are not talking here about “alternate realities.” Buildings, neighborhoods, and even government edifices exist in either Beszel or Ul Qoma. Citizens of each city are supposed to “not-see” the buildings and people in the other. Streets and highways run through both cities, but the automobile traffic on them deliberately “not-sees” the other city’s vehicles, though if necessary drivers do to avoid collisions.

Not seeing the other city has to be a deliberate act of will, because in physical terms everyone in both of them can see everyone and, everything in the other. This bizarre frontier is called the Breach, and being purely conceptual, has no physical existence. It is entirely conceptual and non-linear, but violating it and crossing over is a grave crime in both cities.

The integrity of the Breach is policed and guarded by a mysterious group also called the Breach. Their authority is absolute, and they appear more or less literally from nowhere to arrest violators and whisk them off to no one knows what end or where.

The Breach may or may not be the original creators of this set-up that no one seems to know who, why, or even when it came into being. It is the question the archaeologist, who is the murder victim McGuffin, was trying to solve.

And that being the setup and this being the kind of novel that it is, that is as far as I should go, rather than enter into the plot complexities that are the engine of any good detection thriller. In The City and the City Borlu is very much front and center, being the first person narrator and an interesting and simpatico one despite himself. This is a noir detective tradition, and this being in form a noir detective novel, so is the plot.

But The City and the City is more than a noir detective novel, much more, though exactly what more remains complex and elusive. China Miéville is a writer who enjoys world-building, and a thoroughly urban one—just how urban we shall see in Kraken—and the two interpenetrating cities are far from just being necessary setting. Miéville imbues them with just the kind of Victorian eastern European noir atmosphere of nineteenth century Ruritania, non-extant, conjured out of imagination, but somehow not a fantasyland at all.
The City and the City is a different novel from what Miéville had done before, at least for adults, and a successful one, and certainly weird. But not “New Weird” at all as I’ve just come to understand the concept, or think I have after seeing the film Inception.
Inception is a story about a mercenary operative and his crew who enter the dreams of targets to either mine them for the targets’ secrets or implant false memories to cause the reaction commissioned by the client. So far, so good. The hero (or anti-hero) has a good psychological reason for doing what he does, and the story line that takes him through at least the first half of the movie or so is coherent and interesting.

But the story then degenerates into an FX orgy of endless combat sequences, car chases, explosions, action cliffhangers, and so forth, which take place within dreamscapes where anything that can be visualized with FX technology goes—and with modern computer FX technology that means just about anything you can, uh, dream up and have the budget to afford. Not only do the laws of mass and energy as we know them not apply, there are no alternate ones either. Worse still, this massively overlong thud and blunder denouement takes place in three intercut dreams interacting arbitrarily and pretty much incoherently.

This has been a powerful cinematic trend the past few years, spawned by the success of The Matrix, which takes place entirely within nested matryoshka doll realities, nightmare dreamscapes for the most part where everything goes in the service of directorial slow-motion FX derring-do.

Movies as superhero action comics.

No rules of mass, energy, motion, or even magic.

At least in cinematic terms, this is the New Weird.

Fantasy for sure, but not fantasy as we have known it.

And in literary terms, likewise Kraken, a novel that would seem to make the theoretical and rhetorical concept of the New Weird concretely clear, for better and for worse.
Back in the day, the critic Alexi Panshin wrote about “science fiction that knows it’s science fiction,” meaning a purely literary game, fantasy of a kind, where the created reality more or less operates under the known laws of mass and energy when they don’t get in the way of the tale, but which stretches them with as much rubbery science as needed when they do to suspend disbelief.

Or to render the question of belief or disbelief irrelevant, since the writer and the reader acknowledge to themselves that it’s all a purely literary game. Gregory Benford called this “science fiction as tennis played with the net down,” meaning ignoring the rules of scientific consensus reality; true enough as far as it goes, but what it really means is science fiction played by a different set of rules selected by the writer for literary purposes. Science fiction as a kind of consensus fantasy reality.

Out of this evolved the “New Space Opera” swamps on Venus, canals on Mars, faster than light starships, the good old stuff that everyone now knows does not and cannot really exist, but that makes for good ripping tales. Space opera settings and tropes as a form of science fiction that knows that it’s really fantasy.

But fantasy, like the New Space Opera, which is a subset of fantasy, must establish a set of rules for the specific literary universe in question in order to be dramatically satisfying—the rules of its brand of magic, as it were—and the reader must more or less understand what they are as close to the onset as possible. Otherwise, it’s the old “with a mighty effort the hero leaped out of the pit” whenever the writer feels like pulling a deus ex machina rabbit out of his hat. And it’s damn hard, if not impossible, to create and maintain dramatic tension, which is to say, among other things, tell an emotionally involving story.
Or not?

The literary New Weird, like the cinematic New Weird, seems to deny all that. It might better be called the New Fantasy, because that’s what it is—fantasy unlike what has gone before, not fantasy as we have known it.

Kraken is set in a contemporary London, at least timewise, and it is clear that China Miéville, a true Londoner, loves the city he inhabits, which is therefore his own even more deeply than Ian McDonald loves his Istanbul for the duration of a novel. One can’t help thinking of another born and bred Londoner, Michael Moorcock, presently in exile, and his own ode to the city, Mother London.

Same geographical locus, same emotional attachment, roughly the same timeframe from a temporally detached enough perspective, but not the same London.

Miéville, like Moorcock, loves London for its time-deep and verdigris-overgrown historical and folklorical roots, its sense of heroic muddling through whatever, its richly mazelike cityscape, its somewhat decayed grandeur, its eternal proletarian and lumpenproletarian subcultures, and so forth. But there the similarities end.

The London of Kraken is a magical London, a fantasyland, though not at all a Disney version, and the main story line is one Billy Harrow’s magical mystery tour through it, starting as a kind of police procedural at the more or less quotidian surface and delving stepwise down, down, down (or up, up, up, if you prefer) into its hidden magical deeps.
Billy is a curator in the Natural History Museum, and the novel begins with the seemingly impossible disappearance of the body of a giant squid, the kraken of the title, from its preservation tank. Initially, at least, he is both a possible suspect for a crime that couldn’t have happened but did, and an expert on the disappeared McGuffin, “assisting the police in their inquiries,” as the British cops genteelly put it, in more ways than one. The story unwinds, exfoliates, and expands from there.

I suppose I must attempt to summarize the story as best I can. No easy task, since in plot detail, I found it damn hard to follow—not that there isn’t detail in literally overwhelming profusion.

That’s the problem.

Billy Harrow is a well-rendered and simpatico character who matures and grows during the length of the novel from a kind of hapless and clueless naif into a main player. Yet, the game he becomes so deeply involved in—to save the world from the apocalypse, or at least to save London—is never quite clear.

Indeed, there are at least two apocalypse candidates in Kraken, maybe even more; at least two and maybe more mutually hostile giant squid-worshiping sects; a semi-personified spirit of the sea; magical gangsters; paranormal cops; the ka of a long-dead ancient Egyptian constrained to flit forever from statue to statue; and more minor players than I can count or quite remember involved in this sub-surface struggle to bring about one apocalypse or another, or prevent them all.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with this. In fact, chapter by chapter, scene by scene, line by line, there are riches to enjoy. The Egyptian ka is the leader of a striking union of wizards’ stooges and magicians’ flunkies, themselves a vast array of creatures and spirits. The leader of the gangsters is a talking tattoo, a kind of semi-material loa on the back of a human horse. The walls have ears. The ears have walls. One pictures China Miéville chortling with glee as he writes this stuff.

The problem is not the profusion of magicks and magical creatures and beings—as witness, for example, what Jack Vance has done with his Dying Earth books, or Ray Bradbury with The Martian Chronicles, or the J.K. Rowling with the Harry Potter books, or The Odyssey for that matter.

That is not the “New Weird” per se. It’s just fantasy. It’s at least as old as Homer, older maybe. When it works, it’s great fun, and sometimes great literature. And page by page, chapter by chapter, schtick by schtick, Kraken is great fun. And a bit more than that, a bit of a political edge and passion beneath and within the schick that is never entirely absent from Miéville’s novels.

But Kraken doesn’t quite satisfy as a whole. After finishing it, one finds oneself wondering what was really going on. With a certain dry wit, French intellectuals have been known to proclaim “It works in practice, but will it work in theory?” The New Weird works quite reasonably in theory, but Kraken demonstrates that the theory can create problems in practice even for a writer as puissant as China Miéville.

Perhaps especially for a writer as puissant as China Miéville.

 

Kraken begins coherently enough as a mystery—who stole the squid and how was it possible—and metamorphoses into a kind of mystical mystery quest. So far, so good. But then Miéville starts throwing the schtick.

One squid worshiping cult—hey, why not another? Why not an apostate from the first one, one mystical explication (or anti-explication) of what’s behind the veil of the main line of the story, and another, and another? Do we need a mainline of the story? Maybe not—why not have several of them intercepting each other at harmonic points in the manner of a musical fugue? Do we really need neat and clear harmonic points? Isn’t there such a thing as atonal music? Does the reader really have to ever understand all of what’s going on?
Didn’t Aleister Crowley proclaim that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”?
That, at least to me, is the haiku version of the central theoretical principle of the New Weird. Why should writers be bound by anything but the outer limits of their own imaginations? Why should fantasy be bound by pseudo-mimetic realism? Why not take the reader beyond even a consistent fantasy reality? It’s all imaginary anyway, so why should fictional magic have any rules? Why restrain yourself at all?

Boys just wanna have fun.

Miéville starts throwing schtick for its own sake, and he certainly seems to be having fun, and fun shtick it is. Creatures of every form, every unnatural origin, every ectoplasmic existence, beings, magicks, satirical piss-takes, metaphorical political rapier thrusts, monsters in clown clothing, descending like a glittery snowfall of the unfettered imagination, as if Miéville had both hands in a bottomless literary toybox and was gleefully tossing its contents into the air, to the point where you wouldn’t be surprised if the fabled kitchen sink itself came hurtling down through the cloud of deus ex machinas into which any coherent story line eventually dissolves.

Write what thou wilt shall be the liberation from all laws!

Welcome to the New Weird.

But there’s a practical problem with the New Weird, at least as exemplified by Kraken, which is entirely absent from The City and the City, which, as I hope I’ve made clear, is a much weirder novel, and an entirely successful one.

The City and the City takes place in entirely fictional cities adrift somewhere in Ruritania and enthralled by their own bizarre ideology to the point where truly weird theory creates their really weird interpenetrating existence.

Really weird but consistent.

Kraken doesn’t have any consistent literary reality where, while you don’t know what comes next, you do know that it’s not going to contradict the set-ups of what has gone before. Kraken drops new beings, new magical realities, new possible explanations of what has gone before all along the story line. Miéville keeps mutating what he’s been building up to at many turns in the plot and going off on tangents.

The problem is that you can’t really tell a story this way, because a coherent story can’t exist without some internal ground rules. You can’t drop in another deus ex machina of whatever kind amuses you at the literary moment whenever you please and still have a real story, because if anything is possible, nothing is impossible, and if nothing is impossible at any moment, there can’t be dramatic tension. And there can’t be a real story without dramatic tension of some kind.

Well, what if you don’t want to be bound by the dramatic theorizing of a bunch of dead Greek males? Does a novel really need a story? Maybe not. many highly enjoyable novels and even some great ones—Gravity’s Rainbow, The Flounder, Naked Lunch, etc.—are so discursive that any coherent story line through them gets lost in the deep background of the literary three ring circus.

So okay, maybe you can write a successful novel where any dramatic story is nonexistent or incidental if it’s just entertaining or at least involving on a page-by-page level. But I would still contend that you need at the very least some kind of rules of literary engagement—there has to be an overall set-up in which the events take place.

Pardon me or not for using my own stuff as an explanatory example, but the most recent novel I’ve written, Welcome to Your Dreamtime, would seem to be a clear one. As the title itself proclaims, it all takes place in dreams. And as it hints, you yourself, the readers, not a fictional character, are the dreamers. No consistent story line. Not even a single character other than the reader. And we all know from personal experience that there are no rules of anything at all in the Dreamtime.

We all know that our dreams are New Weird fantasies to the max. But what is, is real, and we all dream. So we all also know that dreams are real phenomena, contained by the reality of our existence, fantasy contained within science fiction, from a literary viewpoint.
Which is enough to bring something like Welcome to Your Dreamtime together, if that paradox can be turned into a set-up. Which I did with a piece of science fiction tech that allows dreams to be written and produced like movies and sold to you, the reader, on dreamchips or downloads.

And that was enough to turn a series of dreams independent of any internal rules into a book that was not just a collection of previously published stories, but a real novel that told the story not of any characters at all but of the rise of a new medium from schlock to a true art form, and a certain distance beyond.

Okay, so maybe I am more hardcore in critical theory than in literary practice. but I would still contend that the New Weird could learn something from the history of western painting, which went from realistic mimesis of realistic subject matter to the hyperealistic renderings of things impossible by the Surrealists, to the freedom from any attempt at mimesis at all of the Cubists, to the total disconnect from anything other than its existence as paint on canvas of the Abstract Expressionists, which in retrospect now seems to have been a path better not followed, an evolutionary dead end.

Give me Dali and Magritte and or even Frida Kahlo or Diego Rivera over Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollack.

Give me The City and the City over Kraken.

Give me a New Surrealism over a New Weird.