Subtraction and Contradiction: China Miéville
China Miéville’s second novel Perdido Street Station (2000) addresses the idea of essence from three different perspectives which mirror a number of concepts of speculative realism. The essence being insisted on here is what is most hidden, strange and fluid; as Harman says, ‘“essence” simply means that any object has real properties that are not exhausted by their current appearance in the mind or their current impact on other entities more generally’ . The main issue that the character Lin has in capturing Mr Motley in a sculpture of him she is making is that she cannot think how to represent essence while seeing his parts in motion. This is because she is a figure of +what Harman calls fission and fusion, meaning the separation and joining of an object and qualities.