Gills, Longing, and the Architecture of Disbelief

We met in a basement, which felt too on the nose. Le Guin noticed it immediately. “A subterranean room,” she said, settling into the one good chair — a green wingback someone had abandoned against the far wall of what was otherwise a university seminar room in the sub-level of the Portland State library. “For a story about people who live underwater. I hope neither of you arranged this on purpose.”

Mieville, who had been pacing along the bookshelves examining call numbers with what appeared to be genuine interest, turned around. “I’d have picked somewhere worse. A swimming pool changing room. Somewhere with that chlorine smell and the sound of children drowning recreationally.”

“Children don’t drown recreationally, China.”

“No. But they come close enough to make parents religious.” He pulled out a chair from the seminar table and sat down backwards, arms folded across its back. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a faded trade union logo. “Right. Underwater civilization. I have problems with this already.”

I hadn’t even opened my notebook. “Which problems?”

“The comfortable ones first. An entire society underwater — gills, bioluminescence, pressure gradients as geography. That’s a complete secondary world. It requires the same rigor you’d give a fantasy civilization. Economics, aesthetics, theology, sewage. Especially sewage. Every fake world that fails, fails because the writer didn’t think about waste.”

Le Guin made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “He’s right about the sewage. Though I’d say the failures are usually subtler than that. The civilization feels like a costume. People behave exactly like Americans in a shopping mall, but they have gills. The world is decoration.”

“Precisely,” Mieville said. “So. The 40th depth. What does that mean? Not just physically — what does it mean socially, architecturally, politically? Is depth-forty poor? Rich? Is it the suburbs? The interesting question isn’t ‘there’s an underwater civilization’ — that’s a setting. The interesting question is what kind of underwater civilization, and what the depth gradient does to class.”

I said that I’d been thinking of depth as analogous to altitude in our world — the deeper you go, the more pressure, the more engineered your environment has to be. Deep is expensive. Deep is where institutions and old money settle, because the infrastructure costs are enormous. Shallow is cheap, exposed, closer to the open water and whatever dangers that entails.

“Invert it,” Le Guin said quietly.

Mieville and I both looked at her.

“You’ve made depth a metaphor for wealth. Deep equals rich, shallow equals poor, the surface is the bottom of your social order. That’s neat. Too neat. It maps onto our world and the reader never has to think.”

“So invert it,” Mieville said, leaning forward. “Make shallow prestigious. The aristocracy lives near the ceiling of the world, where the water is warmer and the pressure is gentle and the light — whatever bioluminescent infrastructure they have — works best. Depth is exile. Depth is where you go when you can’t afford to rise.”

“That’s just an inversion of the same metaphor,” Le Guin said. “Up is good, down is bad. We already have that. What I’m suggesting is more radical: make the depth gradient genuinely alien. Neither up nor down is better. They’re different in ways that don’t map onto our categories.”

Mieville drummed his fingers on the back of the chair. “But depth-forty is specific. The protagonist lives at a specific depth. That specificity has to mean something socially or the number is just decoration.”

“It means something to him,” Le Guin said. “It’s where he’s lived his whole life. It’s familiar. It’s home. That should be enough. Not everything in a society needs to be a power structure.”

“Everything in a society is a power structure.”

“That’s a very China Mieville thing to say.”

“Because it’s correct.”

I watched them look at each other — not hostile, but each absolutely sure. Le Guin had her hands folded in her lap. Mieville was gripping the chair back. I had the feeling I was watching a disagreement that had been going on, in various forms, for decades, even though they’d never had it in person like this. The question underneath: is a society primarily its power dynamics, or primarily its texture of daily life? And the honest answer was both, obviously, but the emphasis determined everything about the kind of story you’d write.

“Can I suggest something?” I said. “What if depth-forty is aggressively ordinary? Not poor, not rich, not symbolically loaded. Just — the place where a mid-level clerk lives. The place where your commute to work is twenty minutes and the bioluminescent fixtures are the standard civic-issue kind, not the designer ones. The depth equivalent of a two-bedroom apartment in a city that doesn’t make anyone’s list.”

Mieville wrinkled his nose. “That’s Le Guin’s position dressed up as compromise.”

“It is,” Le Guin agreed. “But he’s not wrong about it. The ordinariness matters. If the protagonist lives somewhere dramatic, his dreams of the surface become an adventure story. If he lives somewhere unremarkable, they become something else entirely.”

“A pathology,” Mieville said. He said it with interest, not dismissal. “Something the society has a name for. Surface dreams. The doctor calls it common. There’s probably a pharmaceutical response. A support group. Insurance codes.”

“Yes. And the support group is where the story lives.” Le Guin shifted in her chair, and for a moment I could see her thinking — that particular quality of attention she brought to a problem, which looked like stillness but wasn’t. “These people are not revolutionaries. They’re embarrassed. They have a condition. They meet in someone’s living room or a rented community space and they talk about it the way people talk about a recurring dream that they know means nothing but can’t shake.”

“But here’s where I push back,” Mieville said. “You want the support group to be apolitical. A private affliction. But that’s impossible. If these people are dreaming about a place the civilization says doesn’t exist, that’s political whether they want it to be or not. The state has a position on the surface — it’s myth. These people’s bodies are contradicting the state’s ontology. You can’t keep that in a support group. The state won’t let you.”

“The state doesn’t need to know,” Le Guin said.

“The state always knows.”

“Not in every kind of story.”

“In every kind of honest story about a society that has declared a category of experience mythological.”

This was the argument. I could feel it heating the room. Le Guin wanted the story to be anthropological — a study of longing, of what it means to carry a memory your body insists is real while your civilization insists it’s fantasy. Mieville wanted the story to be political — the inevitable consequences of a state that has defined reality and is confronted with citizens whose bodies refuse to comply.

“What if,” I said, “it’s both, but in sequence? The first half is Le Guin’s story. The support group, the private shame, the doctor’s dismissal. The protagonist navigating his ordinary life at depth-forty while trying to understand what these dreams mean. Then, gradually, the political dimension intrudes — not as a plot twist, but as an inevitability. Other people start asking questions. The support group gets noticed. Not by the secret police, nothing that dramatic. By neighbors. By employers. By the quiet social machinery that enforces consensus.”

“The City & the City,” Mieville said, and for the first time he smiled. “Breach.”

“Not exactly Breach,” I said. “Breach is an institution, a force. What I’m describing is softer. More like — what happens in a community when someone starts saying things that make everyone uncomfortable. Not a crackdown. A drawing-away.”

“Social shunning as enforcement of reality,” Le Guin said. “Yes. That’s real. That’s how it actually works in most societies. Not police. Just the slow withdrawal of other people’s willingness to be near you.”

Mieville was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, the combative edge was still there but aimed differently — at the problem, not at Le Guin. “The structural parallel to The City & the City is the trained unseeing. Citizens of Beszel learn not to see Ul Qoma, and vice versa. In this story, the entire civilization has learned not to see the surface. Not because there’s an enforcement mechanism — or not only that — but because the alternative is unbearable. If the surface exists, then everything about their world is a subset of a larger reality they’ve chosen not to inhabit. That’s not a political problem. That’s an existential one.”

“Now you’re doing my job,” Le Guin said, and there was warmth in it.

“Your job and my job overlap more than either of us likes to admit.”

I asked about the physical sensation — the protagonist’s memory of breathing air. The pitch had that detail: he remembers filling lungs he doesn’t have. The breath going on and on, expanding his chest. Not a metaphor. A somatic memory of an organ he was never born with.

Le Guin said: “That’s the detail that makes it a story instead of a thought experiment. The body knows something the mind doesn’t. Or the body remembers something the civilization has forgotten. Either way, the knowledge is in the flesh, not the intellect, and the protagonist has to reckon with that.”

“Does he have vestigial lungs?” Mieville asked. He was in worldbuilding mode now, and there was a restless energy to it. “Because if this is an underwater species — truly underwater, not humans with modifications — then lungs are as foreign as wings. But if they evolved from air-breathers, there might be vestigial structures. Collapsed, non-functional, the way we have an appendix. And the dreams might be connected to those structures somehow. A physical substrate for the memories.”

“That’s very biological for someone who writes about golems and thaumaturgic unions,” Le Guin said.

“I contain multitudes.” He said it deadpan and she actually laughed — a short, surprised sound.

“I don’t want to answer the question,” I said. “Whether the surface is real. Whether the lungs are vestigial or imaginary. The story works best if the reader never finds out.”

“Agreed,” Le Guin said immediately.

Mieville looked uncomfortable. “I understand the instinct. And structurally, ambiguity serves the story. But you have to earn that ambiguity. You can’t just refuse to engage with the question. The protagonist has to push hard enough that the reader believes an answer was possible, and then the story has to end before the answer arrives. Not because you couldn’t think of one. Because the absence of the answer is the point.”

“That’s a fine distinction,” I said.

“It’s the only distinction that matters. Lazy ambiguity is just vagueness. Earned ambiguity is a position.”

We sat with that for a while. Someone walked past in the corridor outside, shoes squeaking on linoleum, and the sound was oddly appropriate — that institutional quietness of spaces that exist for thinking.

Le Guin spoke next. “The support group interests me most. Tell me about the people in it.”

“Ordinary people,” I said. “Not scientists, not activists, not chosen ones. A transit worker. A teacher. Someone who manages a bioluminescent farm. They come to the meetings after work, still in their work clothes, tired. They talk about their dreams the way people at an AA meeting talk about drinking — specific, shameful, weirdly intimate.”

“The shame is crucial,” Le Guin said. “In a society that has decided the surface is myth, dreaming about it isn’t romantic. It’s embarrassing. Like believing in a flat earth. These people aren’t brave explorers of forbidden knowledge. They’re people with a problem they can’t fix.”

“Some of them want to fix it,” Mieville said. “Some of them want the dreams to stop. That’s important. Not everyone who has a heterodox experience wants to be heterodox. Some people just want to be normal.”

“And some of them are quietly thrilled,” Le Guin said. “Some of them come to the meetings because the dreams are the best part of their lives. The sensation of air in their lungs — or in their imagined lungs — is the most alive they’ve ever felt. And they can’t tell anyone except these other broken people.”

“Broken,” Mieville repeated. “That’s the society’s word for them. And the story has to hold both possibilities: they are broken, or they are the only ones who remember something true. Both are equally supported by the evidence.”

I said I wanted the ending to be physical. Not a revelation, not a choice, not a speech. The protagonist putting his hand on his gills, feeling them open and close, water cycling through him, trying to remember what air felt like and finding the memory fading. Not gone. Fading.

Le Guin nodded slowly. “That’s right. The ending is the body. Not what he decides. What he feels.”

“You’ll lose readers,” Mieville said. “Some people need resolution.”

“I’ll lose the readers who need resolution. I’ll keep the ones who understand that a story about longing should end with longing, not with arrival.”

“Unless arrival is the braver choice,” Mieville said, and I could tell he was testing me, pressing to see if I’d fold.

“It isn’t. Not for this story.”

“How do you know?”

“Because arrival means the surface exists, and then it becomes a story about discovery. I want it to be a story about what happens to a person who carries an impossible memory. The surface doesn’t need to exist. The longing exists. The longing is sufficient.”

Mieville turned to Le Guin. “You’ve trained him well.”

“I haven’t trained him at all. He just happens to be right about this particular thing.” She paused. “He might be wrong about the political dimension. The support group can’t stay invisible forever. Something has to press against it from outside — not the state necessarily, but the social reality of people who don’t dream. The ordinary cruelty of normalcy.”

“There it is,” Mieville said. “Now you’re doing my job.”

“Your job and my job —”

“Overlap. Yes. I heard myself the first time.”

They were both smiling, which felt like an ending, except Le Guin was already turning back to me with something else in her expression — a question she hadn’t asked, or a concern she hadn’t voiced. “The 20,000 Leagues connection,” she said. “Verne’s Nemo chose the sea. He rejected the surface. In your story, the surface is the thing that’s been rejected by an entire civilization. Nemo found freedom in depth. Your protagonist might find freedom in the memory of height. But freedom might be the wrong word for both of them. Nemo was running. Your man might be running too — from the life he actually has, toward a life that might not exist.”

“The support group as submarine,” Mieville said. “The Nautilus for people who can’t afford a Nautilus.”

I wrote that down. Le Guin watched me write it and said nothing, which in her case communicated more than speech. Mieville was already standing, reaching for a jacket he hadn’t been wearing, a phantom gesture. He looked at the bookshelves one more time.

“Don’t make the water beautiful,” he said. “Make it ordinary. The way air is ordinary to us. Nobody in your story should marvel at the bioluminescence or describe the current poetically. It’s just where they live. Save the beauty for the dreams. Save it for the air.”

He left. Le Guin stayed in the green wingback for another minute, her hands still folded. “He’s right about the beauty,” she said. “But wrong about one thing. The water should be beautiful once. Just once. The protagonist should see his world — really see it — and understand that what he has is also worth something. Otherwise the longing for the surface is just escapism, and escapism is the one thing this story cannot afford to be.”

I said I’d try.

“Don’t try,” she said. “Find the sentence where he loves the water. One sentence. Then you can spend the rest of the story breaking his heart.”

She stood up, collected a cloth bag from the floor beside the chair, and walked out through the seminar room door without saying goodbye. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. I sat in the basement of the Portland State library and breathed, in and out, taking note for the first time of the sensation of air filling my lungs — the expansion, the release, the way my chest rose and fell without any effort at all. I tried to imagine not knowing what that felt like. I tried to imagine remembering it.