China Miville: Writers should welcome

a future where readers remix our books

Novelist says anti-piracy measures mooted for literature are
'disingenuous, hypocritical, ineffectual' and 'artistically philistine'
Charlot t e Higgins, chief arts writer
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 1 August 2 01 2 1 9 .1 5 BST

China Miv ille at the Edinburgh international book festiv al, where he called for a uniform , blanket salary
for writers, nov elists and poets equiv alent to the 'wage of a skilled worker'. Photograph: Jerem y SuttonHibbert/Getty Im ages

China Miville, author of novels including The City & the City and Embassytown, has
described anti-piracy measures for literature in the digital age as "disingenuous,
hypocritical, ineffectual" and "artistically philistine".
Speaking in Edinburgh at a debate on the future of the novel, Miville said that just as
music fans remix albums and post them online, so readers will recut the novel.
He and his fellow writers should "be ready for guerrilla editors", he said, adding: "In the
future, asked if you've read the latest Ali Smith or Ghada Karmi, the response might be
not yes or no, but which mix?"
There was, he said, a "blurring of boundaries between writers, books and readers,
self-publishing, the fanfication of fiction".
The comments were made during the last of the five debates at the Edinburgh world
writers' conference, which has brought together 50 authors from countries ranging from
Scotland to Argentina and the Dominican Republic to Pakistan.
They include Kamila Shamsie, Ali Smith, Yiyun Li, Ahdaf Soueif and Jackie Kay.
The event, part of the Edinburgh international book festival, was a 50th anniversary
restaging of the 1962 Edinburgh writers' conference.
The original event notorious for its passionate exchanges between writers was
attended by such figures as Rebecca West, Muriel Spark and Mary McCarthy.
The effect of the internet and digital distribution on fiction, said Miville, would not be
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about creating "enhanced" ebooks, which he called "a banal abomination".

Rather, the effect would be to heighten the openness of texts. "Anyone who wants to
shove their hands into a book and grub about in its innards, add to and subtract from it,
and pass it on, will be able to do so without much difficulty."
But Ewan Morrison, author of Tales from the Mall, called Miville's vision of the future
"naive, and based on what I would call dot-communism, which is a spurious leftism
based on collectivity, that we are all heading towards a world where information will be
shared".
The problem of this new world was that it would be "demonetised" for writers, he said,
"and therefore none of us will be making a living when we have all these books that are
mashed up".
Poet John Burnside said he doubted the existence of a future online utopia, arguing
against Miville's view that the "original text will always still be there. It will not be
stolen".
Burnside said: "You say that the text will always be there. I don't trust the state, big
companies and religious nuts not to try to erase the text and replace it with their version
so that at the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov [its main character] ends up
finding Jesus and moving to Utah and lives happily ever after.
"I am not arguing about the excitement of technology, I am just urging a lot of caution
and a lot of mistrust of the kind of people with an axe to grind who may try to erase the
texts we care about."
Miville also called for a uniform, blanket salary for writers, novelists and poets,
equivalent to the "wage of a skilled worker".
Such a move, he said, would cut against the "philistine thuggery of the market" that
failed to sift the good from the bad. And, though it would cause writers at the top of the
bestseller lists to lose income, such collectivisation would for most writers "mean an
improvement in their situation, an ability to write full time".
Writers at the debate also spoke about novelists' negativity about the future of the form.
Poet Jackie Kay questioned the gloom, saying: "Just as religious people are often
predicting the end of the world, so novelists are often predicting the end of the novel.
Poets never talk about the death of the poem. Why do novelists have this extreme
anxiety?"
Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani novelist, talked about the creativity engendered by
significant technological change. Writers such as Italo Calvino had emerged, she said, in
the wake of the rise of TV and film, when the dominant storytelling form was changing
from page to screen.
"The novel has to find somewhere else to go. If the threat of something new and
different and bigger than you creates Calvinos, then it is not a threat," she said.
Towards the end of the debate, Kay came up with an impromptu play on words that
may have summed up the mood.
"What's not novel about the novel is navel-gazing," she said.
Miville spoke of a broadening of opportunity brought about by the internet's "long tail".
He hoped, he said, that the English-language publishing sphere would start "tentatively
to revel in that half-recognised distinctness of non-English-language novels".
He pointed out that "obscure works of Russian avant garde and new translations of
Bruno Schulz are available to anyone with access to a computer. One future is of
decreasing parochialism."
Citing Ubuweb the online archive for avant garde poetry he added: "With the
internet has come proof that there are audiences way beyond the obvious."
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Sei Array
21 August 2012 8:18PM

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A living wage for writers and poets?? I'd be all for that. I've

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always wanted to tell the boss that I'm leaving "to take up

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writing as a career."
As for novel mash-ups, and remixes, how do we know that James
Joyce and Chip Delany haven't already done that with Ulysses
and Dhalgren. And would any but the most excruciatingly astute
notice anyway?
To wound the autumnal city indeed!!
Yes....someday we will all be well, more like Benny Noakes I'm
afraid, reading our own mashups and going, "Christ!! What an
imagination I have!!"
But actually, most people don;t have much imagination to begin
with, so there is still a ray of hope for the written word.
obenole
21 August 2012 8:37PM

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What's novel-gazing about the navel is not the not

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I'm still waiting for godotcom

Which is obvious btw (beyond the way)

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Hedgehogger
21 August 2012 8:37PM

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Appropriate coming from Mieville since The City and the City

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ranks as one of most appallingly edited (and hence barely

readable) novels I've read, which was a shame as the core idea
was good. Maybe he just needs to find a decent editor or listen to

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the one he's got.

Menardo
21 August 2012 8:43PM
Where has posted his novels for "remixing"? I'd love to get my
hands on them and add my own meaning to them. Why should

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his thoughts matter on something he's put his name on, the
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elitist. It's my turn to decide what China Meiville writes like.

Or is he just saying things to be noticed?
KingLudd
21 August 2012 9:07PM
Poet Jackie Kay questioned the gloom..... Poets never
talk about the death of the poem. Why do novelists

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have this extreme anxiety?"

How many poets make a living from writing? The ones I know
have alternate forms of income. Poets never talk about the death
of the poem because it was never alive, as a way of supporting
yourself, in the way that the novel has been.
The time you invest in writing a book is vast. Absolutely
enormous. I don't think anyone who hasn't done it can easily
grasp the extent of the commitment. In some cases it's a lifetimes
work. And then to have that all stolen from you. It's an
unbearable prospect.
The problem is, of course, that if there's no money to be made
people just won't write books. This comments section here is
always chock full of beautiful souls who bang on about how "it's
not about the money maaaan" - and "hey guy, art is like, an end
in itself? and if you're doing it for the bread then, like, you totally
shouldn't be doing it?". It makes me spew like that kid in the
Exorcist. Green pea soup at 1000psi all over the laptop screen.
We don't want to light our Montecristos with tenners and snort
coke off bald midgets heads. We just want to be able to feed our
families. You know, like you do.
All very well citing Calvino as an example of innovation,
consequent on technology. But I think if Calvino had faced the
prospect of all his novels being pirated by some little arsehole
called Josh, after having the endings rewritten by a middle aged
30 stone slash writing civil servant called Marion..... and if he had
then discovering that Invisible Cities had been creatively
reimagined so that it was largely about RPattz........ and that
Marco Polo and Kublai Khan were now having a torrid gay
relationship, I think he would've thrown himself under a passing
Fiat and saved the future the trouble of starving him.
Refactories
21 August 2012 9:09PM

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"I don't trust the state, big companies and religious nuts not to

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try to erase the text and replace it with their version so that at
the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov ends up finding

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Jesus..."
Er...
Sunburst
21 August 2012 9:13PM

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He and his fellow writers should "be ready for

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guerrilla editors", he said, adding: "In the future,

asked if you've read the latest Ali Smith or Ghada
Karmi, the response might be not yes or no, but which

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mix?"
Frightful.
Will some pretentious 19-year-old brat put his grubby paws on
masterpieces like Age of Iron, Black Box, The Heart of the
Matter or Invisible Cities and fill them with vile hipster lyrics or
appalling scribblings of their own? I hope there'll be a law against
that.
Then again, what would be the point of such mixing, when
literature is one uninterrupted three-thousand-year-long
process of mixing and remixing. Homer remixed ancient Greek
folk tales, Virgil remixed Homer, Dante remixed Virgil, Goethe
remixed Dante, Proust remixed Goethe, Lawrence Durrell
remixed Proust, etc. Coetzee drew from Kafka who drew from
Dostoevsky who drew from Pushkin who drew from medieval
Russian peasant poetry. Garcia Marquez found lots of inspiration
in 17th century Baroque literature, then the whole of Latin
America found lots of inspiration in Garcia Marquez. David
Mitchell modelled Cloud Atlas on Italo Calvino's offbeat, multiplestorylines stuff, and now plenty of young writers are remixing
David Mitchell for their own multiple-storylines stuff. And so on,
and so forth. That's just how literature works.
So even though the traditional paper-and-ink text is,
conventionally speaking, closed, there has been enough
innovation and progress over the centuries, and there will be in
the future. No need to breach all borders by making the text
open 100% and let hordes of teenagers to ruin masterpieces.
Sunburst
21 August 2012 9:16PM
Oh, KingLudd. Also a fan of Invisible Cities! I applaud your taste.

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DanNorth
21 August 2012 9:56PM
Re-mixed books, eh? I suppose there's no reason why it shouldn't
happen - it works in music, right?

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But, I have to ask (and it's not a rhetorical question - I really

don't know the answer), where are these re-mixed books, and
who is writing/reading them? Is this an entirely theoretical
debate, or is there actually a demand, a push, for readers to be
able to re-write novels for their own purposes? Aside from the
recent and (please, god, please) short-lived fad for sticking
zombies/vampires in classic literature (a cynical commercial ploy
that by no means matches Mieville's characterisation of a
people's movement to collectivise writing), I don't know of any
examples. Nor can I imagine reading a novel and wanting to
rewrite it in my own image. I normally finish a novel eager to
move on to another novel, but hey, each to their own.
Also, this is rather like Barthes' 'Death of the Author' (1968),
except that he was talking metaphorically - the onus shifts from
the author as the central source of meaning, to the reader, whose
active interpretation of the text reconstitutes it. But you don't
need to actually rewrite it to create your own interpretation. Is
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this just that very contemporary need to share every little

thought that crosses your mind? i.e. We can't read and interpret
something without then producing a new copy that matches our
own interpretation and passing it onto others?
clawsofaxos
21 August 2012 10:36PM
Miville also called for a uniform, blanket salary for
writers, novelists and poets, equivalent to the "wage

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of a skilled worker".
Who is going to pay these wages?
clawsofaxos
21 August 2012 10:37PM
Also, we already have remixes of books. They're called films, or
plays, or radio/TV series.
charrette
21 August 2012 10:42PM
Meanwhile, elsewhere in this same issue of the Guaridna
Kiss and tell: street artists imitate Gustav Klimt's
erotic art

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A crew of nine leading lights from the street art scene

are making new works inspired by the great, sensual
Austrian and Mode 2's response is characteristically
provocative. Etc.
and:
The Robinson Institute is supposedly an exhibition
about the banking crisis, but it is really a ramble: a
seven-part installation that involves much back-andforth around Tate Britain. Along the way, you see a
Victorian thresher, a copy of Polanyi's The Great
Transformation, portraits of Wat Tyler. It's meant to
be the collection of a wandering scholar the
eponymous Robinson but it's really a charge sheet
of how the British people have been nobbled down the
ages by their rulers. Yet the clips of Quatermass II
and references to Beatrix Potter make this less a tour
of leftwing anger than something disarmingly witty.
Those are the hallmarks of Keiller's work: a politics
that forsakes dogma for an undeniable love of
Britain's landscape and people. What more can we
say? Just go
I suppose one difference between remix music and remix art on
one side and remix novels on t'other is time - that it can take
rather too long to decide that a detourned novel just wasn't worth
the damned effort.....
Menardo
21 August 2012 11:18PM
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Oh for god's sake---ALL of literature is a remix of literature and

you have to be a moron to not see that. But you have to have the
courage to put your name--and your name only--to the result

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instead of diving into someone else's creation and putting your

own stamp on their vision.
But even more importantly, real literature isn't about other
works of literature. It's about lives being lived, and all the surface
issues of form are in service to the truths within. To discuss
literature in any other terms is to reveal one's self as a slave to
fashion, as certain authors with shaved heads and tight t-shirts
are wont to do in the Guardian.
Robstacle
21 August 2012 11:38PM
"In the future, asked if you've read the latest Ali
Smith or Ghada Karmi, the response might be not yes

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or no, but which mix?"

Oh come on, no reader is going to "remix" the latest novel just
because they have a digital copy and it's possible. If people
wanted to do that, they would have been doing it for decades, to
my knowledge, they haven't. People wrote fanfiction before the
internet and continue to do so now. But remixing and editing?
There's just no appetite for it and I don't see how technology is
going to change that.
masteradamo
21 August 2012 11:53PM
Please consider this. Relatively soon, machines capable of
imitating the output of human brains will be generating novel
type texts algorithmically. While machines may soon be able to

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ape consciousness with an impressive degree of accuracy, it is

unlikely that computers will be accorded the same type of
property rights which humans generally expect to enjoy. Who,
therefore, will own these automatic texts, and who will control
what happens to them?
"Easy," the practical minded reader might respond, "the person
who designed the algorithm." But anyone who's ever tried their
hand at programming software knows that behind every
application on a computer is a ladder of code, built of a history of
contributions from a multitude of programmers. A piece of
software is much more like a machine, full of various patented
parts, than a text allegedly built out of nothing by a single author.
Thus there is no clear breaking point in the spectrum of
contended ownership between me saying that I own the texts
which my algorithm generates and HP claiming they own this
comment since I wrote it using their hardware--or, for that
matter, Firefox, or the people behind this website, and so on. In
addition to that, if my algorithm has any degree of cleverness, it
will have gone out there and allowed itself to be influenced by
other information which it encounters in its space, to the point
where it can no longer be recognized as what I designed, such
that I couldn't take any more credit for it than a proud parent
might take for successful offspring.
I think perhaps what Miville's idea implies, beyond the mere
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liberation of intellectual property, is the disintegration of the

prevalent mode of authorship itself--not a new concept, but an
increasingly compelling one. What will change is not just what you
read, but the way you read it, the way you as a reader approach
the questions of intentionality and context and semiosis. This will
be a difficult transition for those who enjoy discussions involving
the mentioning of the names of as many authors as possible, but,
for literature as a whole, an exciting and maybe even
revolutionary shift.
The3rdMan83
22 August 2012 12:02AM
I would like to hear Miville's thoughts in their broader context
because he seems like a really interesting guy. I'm guessing that
he's referring to a new kind of genre whereby writers put their

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work up for remixes in the same way musicians do. If that's the
case then good luck to it. However it's not likely to be any good
when consent hasn't been given by the original author for a
million different reasons. So in a lot of cases where it wasn't
supposed to be remixed, it would really just amount to artless
vandalism. However where people have written something as a
sort of open, collaborative effort then that could work quite well.
I would also like to say that I am not against piracy and don't
believe that this is a question of piracy, but is more about the
intentions of the original author. If I ever get a story published in
the future I wouldn't really care what happened to it after it's on
the shelf in terms of how well it sold providing lots of people get
to read it. However if I came across an edited down version of it
then I would go on a headhunt.
fuzon
22 August 2012 12:03AM
China Miville is a very fine talent indeed, and so it is a shame to
read him spouting like a twit. No one who appreciates good

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writing and storytelling wants the work of talented people to be

messed around with by any old so-and-so. We come to an author
as we come to any individual artist, to appreciate their
individuality and perspective. Yes, of course as someone said
above, authors "remix" others by building on the work, but we
appreciate Homer and Virgil as distinct entities and they
compliment each other as such.
Miville is, I fear, letting his ideological position muddy his
thinking. He believes that all men are equal in every way and so
there's such a big, happy collective waiting to happen in which we
might just as well read one person's version of a story than
another's. The trouble is, he doesn't actually believe this or he
would never write again - I guess he just feels guilty for being
talented.
Of course, all human beings ought to be entitled to equality of
opportunity - but to believe in an equality of outcome which
discounts genuine talent and says that anyone's version of
something is going to be just as valid as anyone else's is plain
dangerous talk.

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Menardo
22 August 2012 1:12AM

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Response to masteradamo, 21 August 2012 11:53PM

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You know, that all sounds really impressive, but it's mental
masturbation.

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ArundelXVI
22 August 2012 2:18AM
Utter bullshit. Writing and literature are not music; words,
sentences and ideas have meanings, and it is up to the talent of
the writer to shade those meanings, arrange those words in an
effective way. Music is comparatively free of such constraints-

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notes or passages can evoke emotion and mood, but they need
not have meaning. Words and sentences do- that's what they're
there for.
"Reader remixes" sounds like a recipe for incoherent utter
garbage. Reminds me of the 90's when overcaffeinated geniuses
predicted hypertext would transform literature. "Choose your
own utterly shit reading experience!". No. Art-making of any
kind is all about choices, what the "author" in any form
specifically chooses to do, and what he or she excludes and does
NOT do. Writing and literature perhaps most especially- the
exact arrangements of words, sentences, phrases, meanings and
shadings of, plot, narrative drive, begiinning and ending.. it is not
a collaborative medium, it simply isn't. What the author chooses
to put down, with care and artfulness, is exactly why some
writers are revered for centuries and others remaindered,
binned and forgotten. Their choices and use of words.
Write your own goddamned words, sentences, paragraphs,
books, is what I'm saying. If you're any good. If not, give it up,
stop writing, I implore you. This sort of haughty dismissal of an
original author's work as fair game to steal and mash up into
amateur dreck is utter bosh, you can have it, I will stick to actual
literature thanks.
bloodynuisance
22 August 2012 2:40AM

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Daft.

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Excession77
22 August 2012 3:03AM
Is that anything like your remix of Cordwainer Smith (Scanners
live in vain, A game of rat and dragon etc.) in Embassytown?

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OT. Is it just me or do you think he has something in common

with Peake... Almost having it in common that they both fail to
really belong in the repitive genres to which they have been
assigned? Is it the influence of China (the country)
perhaps...which is a biographical commonality they have I
believe.
Seriously though, that is how literature is remixed and its been
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going since just after the novel was invented. It would be possible
to say similar things about visual art as well. I'm not sure
anything beyond that is really possible.
Excession77
22 August 2012 3:08AM

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Response to Robstacle, 21 August 2012 11:38PM

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Well it has happened, I'm not sure anyone has ever been
especially excited by Bowlderisation of Shakespeare, childrens
abridgers of folk tales and legends and Reader's Digest though.
Seems simply to irritate most people.

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Excession77
22 August 2012 3:13AM

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Response to masteradamo, 21 August 2012 11:53PM

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We've had Markov for donkey's years now.

Seems to work ok. HMMs do not however even a little bit "ape"
anything to do with consciousness.

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You are overthinking this.

In terms of creating artificial intelligence, the field has failed
miserably.
In everything else (I think we politely refer to this as "machine
learning" instead) it has been a rip roaring success.
littleredbookshop
22 August 2012 3:50AM
The problem with debates is people blurt out pretty much any
random, ill conceived idea that comes to mind, simply to keep the
whole thing lively. They shouldn't. Of course even more

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depressing is that China actually thinks this is a good idea.

David91
22 August 2012 4:07AM
I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of people being
determined and rewriting copyright works to suit their own
tastes so long as they don't then try to pass off this rewritten
work as the same as the originals or to sell them. What people do
for themselves or their friends is not particularly relevant to

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publishing. But if these rewriters seek to profit from passing off

the rewritten works as new works by the original authors or
otherwise to confuse the general public, this does become
dangerous to the reputations of the original authors. Rewrites
clearly labelled as such are potentially OK so long as the
"remixer" is not trying to profit from this thin copying exercise.

Jos Manuel Bueso Fernndez

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