From Genre to Political Economy: Miéville’s The City & The City and Uneven Development

China Miéville's 2009 novel The City & The City marks a significant and even a radical departure from his earlier work. Here, the entire elaborate machinery of weird fiction is mostly dispensed with; what little (if any) remains of it is fused with a quite different generic cluster, one composed of such overlapping, though by no means identical, genres of crime fiction as noir, the police procedural, and (above all) the hardboiled detective narrative.