Breaching the New Weird : worldbuilding and atmospheres in China Miéville's "The City & The City"

China Miéville's "The City & The City" (2009) is a New Weird novel that expands the limits of speculative fiction by establishing a rich storyworld where a logical impossibility serves as the foundation for the novel's worldbuilding. Making such a construction believable and immersive requires specific narrative strategies that necessitate readers accept the thought-experiment put forth by Miéville. The New Weird mode of writing is a recent noteworthy trend in speculative fiction that consciously draws on established tropes but also deliberately strives to move beyond the forms and styles that by now are familiar and recognizable in the context of speculative fiction. These forms draw on established genre tropes found in horror, science fiction, and fantasy literature but are propelled into new formations in the New Weird. This article explores the New Weird and "The City & The City" by analyzing how the novel's worldbuilding produces a distinct atmosphere that becomes a central aspect of the reading experience. "The City & The City" is uniquely positioned in relation to other books in Miéville’s oeuvre; Through an analysis of "The City & The City" that focuses on worldbuilding, this article will show how genre, expectations, and sensory engagement together emphasize the importance of a plausible storyworld even when weird and fantastical textual elements are part of the narrative. As we shall see, the atmospheres that are produced in the New Weird are a central aspect of this emerging mode of writing. I will employ concepts from possible worlds theory, contemporary worldbuilding theory, as well as argue for the effects of sensory stimulants and how exactly the narrative stimulates immersive experiences. This is done in part using Rita Felski's ideas on the purpose and value of literature from "Uses of Literature", with particular focus on her ideas on literary shock. I will expand on the shock-idea and analyze how speculative fiction makes use of affective responses to assist worldbuilding, and through worldbuilding ultimately assist and reinforce immersion. This is closely connected to postcriticism and its focus on emotions and the intangible aspects of reading. The New Weird is particularly interesting in the context of postcriticism since the unexplained weirdness and the strange storyworlds that are created cannot always be explained via conventional tools in the literary analysis arsenal. For example, there is rich potential for suspicious or political readings of New Weird texts, but I argue that the immersive potential of these storyworlds is more readily explored from a starting point that views these texts as deliberate attempts at pushing textual envelopes and crossing boundaries.