Bringing Infrastructural Criticism to Speculative Fiction: China Miéville’s “Covehithe”

Abstract

This article unites infrastructural criticism, speculative fiction, and ecocriticism. Bruce Robbins, Patricia Yeager, and other scholars have been building the field of infrastructural criticism over the past ten years, but this work has largely focused on infrastructure within realist fiction. Because speculative fiction often emphasizes infrastructural objects and systems as the techno-scientific developments that differentiate their imagined worlds from ours, these narratives offer highly productive cases for rigorous analysis of those parts of the world that enable water, petro-culture, electricity, and telco flows and connections. This article presents through sustained close reading an ecological and ideological critique of the infrastructures at work in China Mieville’s short story “Covehithe” followed by consideration of how to develop this short story as a test case for a method of applying infrastructural criticism to other speculative fictions.