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
thinking fiction science-fiction
I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.
sex fiction prestige
No one ever got into science fiction for the sex or prestige. They got into it because they love it.
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.
challenges traps ifs
A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.
hate ghetto self
Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.' 'Fascist,' Leon had said. 'Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?' 'Please,' Billy said. 'That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn't it?' 'Yeah, but you pass. You're like, you're in deep cover,' Leon said. 'You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.
writing way novel
The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
moving looks movement
Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
book thinking kraken
Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.
sorry kids mouths
I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair.
death doors knowing
There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.
opposites cities london
A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.
pain numbers way
There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.
tea stuff painting
There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.
jobs writing giving
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.