China Miéville - City Animal

by Kimberley Bradford

China Miéville is a rare sort of guy. One of those kinds of people that only come along every few decades, proceed to astound the world with their brilliance, and leave the rest of us stunned and speechless in their wake.

Just to give an inkling -- his first novel, King Rat (1998), was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and the International Horror Guild awards. His second novel, Perdido Street Station (2000), won the British Fantasy and Arthur C. Clarke awards. His latest novel, The Scar (2002), is being praised as his best yet -- which it is.

Beyond being one of the best writers in the genre, he's also a scholar. He has a B.A. in social anthropology from Cambridge, a Master's with distinction, and a PhD in the Philosophy of International Law from the London School of Economics.

How intimidating.

Yet in person, China is just about the sweetest person you'll ever meet. I know, because I met him at this year's World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose. He graciously agreed to this interview, conducted over email sometime later.

Part the first - in which I ask China about his newest novel, The Scar.

I think the writing of my third novel The Scar was enormously useful in my development as a writer. It was so much more ambitious structurally than anything else I've done, and I learned a hell of a lot from doing it.

I tend to start a novel with various images - a specific monster, a setting, a somewhat surreal vision - and then construct the plot by stringing those together, trying to concretise them while sustaining a particular emotional tone.

The first image [for the novel] was a city of ships, lashed together in the sea. From there, you get pirates, from there you get maritime colonialism - and all the time, a variety of very cool sea-monsters is occurring to you. Basically, I knew I wanted to do a sea-monster book, and this one grew out of the conundrum of a city, that's a real city, but that's in the middle of the sea.

I'm very much a city animal - specifically, I'm a London animal. I find cities simply more interesting, more exciting and intense than rural environments, on the whole, and that reflects itself in the writing. But it's not just real cities - it's the influence of cities as refracted through fiction. There are plenty of cities that saturate my work - London obviously but also Cairo, Havana and New York - and there are countless city books in there too. It's extremely difficult to be specific about the impact of a particular city on me or the characters, because it's precisely the stuff that's so hard to put your finger on that's so interesting: the influence of cities can be nebulous, but it's intense.

Part the second - in which I wonder if China's years teaching English in Egypt influenced the portrayal of how Shekel in The Scar learned to read.

Actually the influence was more myself learning to read Arabic. I remember it very well - I didn't set out to learn the script, but when I lived in Egypt, I remember looking at signs for particular famous brand-names, and realising that if that was the Coca-Cola sign, this symbol must mean this sound. And that awareness accumulated, until one day (and it really did feel quite sudden) without having set out to, I could read the street signs around me. Obviously, it didn't mean I understood them, but having sounds suddenly sort of well up in my head from what had previously been incomprehensible squiggles was really exciting, and giddying.

I put that plot in there partly because it was important for the structure of the book, and partly because it was very important in terms of that character, who both is and is not an adult - it struck me as simultaneously a fairly localised skill, and something completely fundamental and life-changing.

Part the third - in which I ask China what he means by the term "Weird Fiction"

When I use the term, I'm referring to the tradition which seems to me to have reached its high point in the works of writers such as Lovecraft. The point for me is that this is writing which blurs the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy and horror. It's that celebration of the Weird, combined with a disrespect for what I think is an arbitrary distinction between fantasy and sf, that I really love.

The fantasy I admire draws much more directly on fantasy's surreal and baroque traditions - it may play fantastic games with its form, as much as with its content, and it generally marshalls the fantastic in a somewhat combative mode, to challenge expectations. I like writing that's aesthetically ornery.

I think for the genre to develop the continuing cross-fertilisation with other fantastic modes - science fiction and horror - is crucial. I also think we need to look outside the genre - without ever apologising for the genre, I stress - and learn from the best writers in other traditions. We have to take ourselves seriously as literature, as well as as fantasy.

Epilogue - in which I ask China about his new novella, The Tain.

All I'll say about The Tain is that it's the first novella I've written, that I'm extremely pleased with it, and that it's not set in Bas-Lag. It is, sort of, a homage to the New Worlds writers like Moorcock, Ballard, Aldiss, Harrison, et al. I can't talk about it without spoilers, though, so I'll stop there.

© 2002 Kimberley Bradford