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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.

China Mieville

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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
Academic
Anthropologist
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Fantasy Author
Literary Critic
Novelist
Political Scientist
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Norwich
Norfolk
China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
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More quotes by China Mieville

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So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
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I love it when people want to interpret my books.
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My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
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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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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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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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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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Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
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I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
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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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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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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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Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
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Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.
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Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
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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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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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I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
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Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
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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