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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

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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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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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Anything for gold and experience.
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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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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.
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I feel fantastically geeky. [But] I'm not one of those people who's enormously proud of being a geek, but nor am I particularly ashamed of it.
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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.
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Subby Subby Subby, whispered Goss. Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we're silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic off together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.
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I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
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The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
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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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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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Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
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I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
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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.
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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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I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
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Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.
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Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
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Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
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