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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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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
Many
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Specifications
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Almost
Initially
Pain
Distinct
Experience
Limitless

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In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
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Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
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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.
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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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My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
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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.
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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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A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
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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 have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
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For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.
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I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
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So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
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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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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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Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
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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.
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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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Anything for gold and experience.
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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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