China Mieville
China Mieville
China Tom Miéville FRSLis an English fantasy fiction author, comic writer and academic. He often describes his work as "weird fiction", and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth6 September 1972
fighting winning secret
Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
cutting dancing mad
I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
ideas ridiculous fantastic
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
slightly
'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.
came cockney dictionary few nearly pages rhyming slang
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.
lack vice
'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.
although norm notion resent
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.