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Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

China Mieville

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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
Academic
Anthropologist
Blogger
Fantasy Author
Literary Critic
Novelist
Political Scientist
Politician
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
Appeals
Absurd
Fantastic
Seriously
Ridiculous
Taking
Part
Appeal
Ideas
Pretending

More quotes by China Mieville

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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.
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If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.
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A lot of geeks are pale, bespectacled, wear dark clothing and don't get out much - the stereotype exists because it is very often true. I could pass for a non-geek but it would be inaccurate.
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The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.
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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.
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The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
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One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.
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Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek.
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What I always try to do in all my books is to make the stories such that if you don't agree with me politically or you're not interested in the thematics, the story will still keep you turning the pages.
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London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
China Mieville
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My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.
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Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
China Mieville
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While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.
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So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
China Mieville
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Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
China Mieville
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Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
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I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
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To take the choice of another ... to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to ... for all we individuals to have ... our choices.
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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.
China Mieville
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A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
China Mieville