Weird border crossings in China miéville’s “looking for jake”, “the tain” and “säcken”

Abstract

China Miéville has been identified with the “new weird”, a loose-knit cabal of contemporary writers unsettling the generic borders between horror, sf and speculative fiction. Donna Haraway’s call for “tentacular thinking” seems aimed at smothering, feeling around and through, creeping out of the binaries and border policing of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene, while Miéville’s novels thrill in different ways to the overrunning of borders—borders between ideas, beliefs, languages, people and species. Such border crossings abound in Miéville’s short fictions, too, and this chapter focusses on the short stories “Looking for Jake” (1998) “The Tain” (2002) and “Säcken” (2014), as ways into his weird and eerie border crossings.