The geopolitics of inner space in contemporary British fiction

This article examines the speculative re-organisation of political space presented in two recent works by British writers, Matter by Iain M. Banks and The City and the City by China Miéville, and how they engage in distinct but related ways with the new technological remapping of the West Bank explored in Israeli architect and theorist Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. The discussion analyses the hollow earth topos and shows how these novels draw upon and extend a literary tradition that has served as the inspiration and touchstone for ‘experimental’ philosophical and technical approaches to the projection of sovereignty into three dimensions and the re-imagining of the nature and function of geopolitical borders. It reveals Banks and Miéville's significant contribution to the repeated and sometimes surprising intellectual cross-fertilisation between the fictional, theoretical, and actual practice of dividing political space in three dimensions