Statusen för Orciny lämnas oupplöst, och medvetet så. Min kopia av boken innehåller en "Reader's Guide" som har en intervju i ryggen.
Random House Reader's Circle: Orciny first seems like a myth, then real, then a hoax--and yet it's never really disproved. Indeed, Bowden's extraordinary attempt to walk out of the cities, at once utterly mundane and thoroughly uncanny, seems to show that Orciny does exist, at least in potential.
China Mieville: Yes. This, I guess, is all part of that teasing thing I was talking about before. They disprove nothing in the absolute, only that a prime suspect for the commission of these crimes (a city), turns out to not be guilty of these crimes in this case. Of course, that said, there's also been a poking around with the ideas of why that might be such an appealing possible solution, why the drive to that kind of explanation.
Den "retande sak" som han nämner verkar hänvisa till detta tidigare citat / fråga:
RHRC: The Breach and Orciny are similar in many ways--indeed, at one point, the possibility is raised that they are the same thing--but in the end, readers are taken into the Breach, while Orciny remains unknown. What's striking to me about this process is that the revelation is a bit deflating. And not only here: again and again in this novel, when you come to a revelatory moment, at which a more traditional fantasy would open outward, into the unreal or the supernatural, you bring things back to the real, in all its harsh particularity. In this sense, couldn't this novel be considered an antifantasy?
CM: By all means. There is a long and honorable tradition of antifantasies, of which some of the most invigorating, to me, are by M. John Harrison. And yes, I think you are absolutely right that this is part of that lineage. And I don't even mind the term "deflating." I think it's fair and it was, so far as it goes, quite deliberate. Now obviously I know that won't work for all readers, and I know, in fact, that some readers have disliked the book for precisely that point. That's fair enough. But for me, the hankering for the opening-out, the secrets behind the everyday, can sometimes be question-begging. Of course, I have it too--I'm a fantasy reader, I love that uncanny fracture and whatever's behind it--but surely it's legitimate and maybe even interesting not merely to indulge that drive but to investigate it, to prod at it, and yes, maybe precisely as part of that, to frustrate it.
Så verkar författaren ha avsiktligt lämnat båda möjligheterna öppna, att reta och frustrera läsaren.