China Mieville
China Mieville
China Tom Miéville FRSLis an English fantasy fiction author, comic writer and academic. He often describes his work as "weird fiction", and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth6 September 1972
children thinking youth
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
regret cowardice understood
I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...
love-you men animal
We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.
book writing voice
Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.
heart dragons dungeons
In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart.
thinking interesting vision
I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.
book people way
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
book years passionate
I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
book writing names
In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
way organized
The dead are way more organized than the living.
mean facts minimalist
I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.
strong google
My Google-fu is strong.
jobs fiction pieces
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
ideas ridiculous fantastic
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.