So what is it? I am about 140 pages in right now and there are a few different story lines going on so I can't really give a good synopsis, but I can say that it is a bizarre, fantastical world where beauty and revulsion are neighbors. Sophistication and high society are right next to slums and brothels. There are a myriad of new and wonderful creatures, some more and some less human. One of the main characters, Lin, is a Khepri, a race of creatures that more or less resembles a hybrid a beetle and human. There are also Cactacae, cactus people, Vodyanoi, frog people, Garuda, hawk people, and others. Mieville's world is imaginative and wonderfully filled with a wide array of creatures. And then there are Remades.
Remades are simply remade beings. Most of the time, they seem to be viewed as freaks and outcasts. Isaac, another main character, comes across a Remade that is tasked with trying to emulate a Garuda at one point in the story and is horrified by the "indignity" of it. We hear about a mother who was guilty of smothering her child who was Remade with her baby's arms attached to her face as a reminder of what she did. Another character, Derkhan, explains Remaking in these terms:
"I'm an art critic, Isaac," Derkhan said eventually. "Remaking's an art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I've seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they retreat into at night. Snail-women. I've seen them with big squid tentacles where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for gladiatorial shows...! Not that they admit that's what they're for...
"Remaking's creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone rancid. I remember you once asked me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing for RR." She turned to look at him as they paced through the fair. "It's the same thing, Isaac. Art's something you choose to make...it's a bringing together of...of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that survives. That's why the same people who despise the Remade are in awe of Jack Half-a-Prayer, whether or not he exists.
"I don't want to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art."I was really fascinated with this perspective on Remaking. To associate it with art is one of the more fitting explanations that can be offered. Certainly there is an aspect of creativity involved with Remaking, but it is a perverse creativity. Derkham states that art is designed to make us more human, and Remaking is a perversion of this. It is taking something and twisting it into a form that makes its victims less human. This is why Isaac was revolted by the the indignity of it.
In a world where transhumanism is becoming more fact than fiction, people are already experimenting with ways to make our bodies something that they are not. The limits of our existence, what we are, are not defined by the image of God anymore, they are becoming defined by science and technology. Our bodies are what we make them. It's not all bad. Science and technology are an amazing tool that can be used to aid us. We have prosthetic limbs that can be controlled neurologically, wearable technology is available to us and is on the cusp of simply being fashionable, and the steps between wearing and implanting that tech into us is a matter of money and time. None of this is necessarily a bad thing, and a great deal of it could be very beneficial to us. But just because we can do these things, we often never spend the time to ask whether we should.
Body modification is moving much faster than our ethicists, and vastly outpaces our theologians. What is the Christian to think of all of this? The fundamentalist black and white answers aren't going to cut it. But maybe we would do well to deeply consider what the image of God means to us. Mieville touches on something in this book when he discusses the Remades. Human creativity is a wonderful thing, but it can go bad. It can go rotten. It can go rancid. It can turn from something beautiful into something undignified and perverse. The church would do well to think deeply about this.
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