If you think you'll come up with a really original idea, you're just kidding yourself.

In The City and the City, China Mieville writes a police procedural that takes place in "[t]win southern European cities Beszel and Ul Qoma," which "coexist in the same physical location" but are "separated by their citizens' determination to see only one city at a time." When I read the novel I marveled at the originality of the premise. Of course, as Mieville himself recognizes in an interview on BLDGBLOG, there's nothing new under the sun: I should say, also, that with the whole idea of a divided city there are analogies in the real world, as well as precursors within fantastic fiction. C. J. Cherryh wrote a book that had a divided city like that, in some ways, as did Jack Vance. Now I didn't know this at the time, but I'm also not getting my knickers in a twist about it. If you think what you're trying to do is come up with a really original idea-one that absolutely no one has ever had before-you're just kidding yourself. You're inevitably going to tread the ground that the greats have trodden before, and that's fine. It simply depends on what you're able to do with it. That indeed is where artistic genius resides – not in the originality of the thought, but in what the artist does with the thought.

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