‘Kraken’ is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it’s more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It’s London as a kind of fantasy kingdom. – China Mieville
My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate. – China Mieville
In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences. – China Mieville
Personally I don’t like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books. – China Mieville
I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today. – China Mieville
I’ll tell you, I’ve never particularly been a ‘Trek’ person. I feel about ‘Trek’ the way one feels about known, vaguely liked, but rather distant members of one’s family. – China Mieville
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. – China Mieville
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. – China Mieville
‘Kraken’ is a very undisciplined book. That’s a gamble. If it doesn’t come off, it’s disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can’t get the other way, and vice versa. – China Mieville
But I do think it’s important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books. – China Mieville
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. – China Mieville
I remember vividly what it’s like to read as a 10-year-old – that passionate inhabiting of a book. – China Mieville
Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction – and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves from the literati. – China Mieville
Well I don’t feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing. – China Mieville
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. – China Mieville
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. – China Mieville
I’d never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer. – China Mieville
In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart. – China Mieville
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. – China Mieville
