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
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.
couple book writing
When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I've fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I've focused on can fit.
book writing ideas
I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.
book writing names
In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
writing horror-stories creating
When I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.
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.
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.
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.
moon long soul
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.