Saturday, December 10, 2011

China Miéville

China is an award-winning English fantasy fiction writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction"  (after early twentieth century pulp and horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He has stood for the House of Commons for the Socialist Alliance, and published his PhD thesis as a book on Marxism and international law. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University.
Quotes

"I’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And 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... I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?"

"I don't think you can distinguish science fiction, fantasy and horror with any rigour, as the writers around the magazine Weird Tales early in the last century (Lovecraft in particular) illustrated most sharply. So I use the term 'weird fiction' for all fantastic literature - fantasy, SF, horror and all the stuff that won't fit neatly into slots.


Excerpt from Embassytown:
The children of the embassy all saw the boat land. Their teachers and shiftparents had had them painting it for days. One wall of the room had been given over to their ideas. It’s been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but it’s a tradition to represent them with such trails. When I was young, I painted ships the same way.
I looked at the pictures and the man beside me leaned in too. ‘Look,’ I said.
‘See? That’s you.’ A face at the boat’s window.
The man smiled. He gripped a pretend wheel like the simply rendered figure.
‘You have to excuse us,’ I said, nodding at the decorations.
‘We’re a bit parochial.’
‘No, no,’ the pilot said. I was older than him, dressed-up and dropping slang to tell him stories. He enjoyed me flustering him. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘that’s not…It is amazing though. Coming here. To the edge. With Lord knows what’s beyond.’ He looked into the Arrival Ball.
 

To read the full excerpt click here:  http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/05/embassytown-excerpt



Seattle's "action figure librarian"and best-selling author Nancy Pearl sits down with China.



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