Award-winning author China Miéville, considered by many the father of New Weird with his Baslag novels, is one of the best speculative fiction authors around. Post-Weird Thoughts had the pleasure to interview him and talk about internet, politics in fiction and his possible next novel. Or not. Thanks to Miéville for his patience and support. Enjoy!
PWT - I can't help but ask you first why you're not online? Contrary to many authors you don't have a website, or a blog, not even a Facebook account. Why's that?
CHINA - I don't have one for two main reasons: one is that I don't know what I would *DO* with it. If I was going to blog regularly, that might be different, but I don't think I would, so what would be the benefit? Anyone who wants to know anything about me can find out pretty much instantly online anyway. And the other thing is that I don't have the stomach for all the online discussions, flamewars, debates, chatting, etc. I have nothing against any of them, and know that many people find them invaluable and fascinating, but for me, i) I find the spiraling down into vicious flamewars really tiring, and ii) I find the way they operate as a time sink for me really stressful. Once or twice I've had people get *angry* with me for not having a website, on the grounds, I think, that I 'owe' it to readers, which I just don't get at all. I would have thought the very last thing the world needs is another half-arsed, pointless, uninteresting website, so I thought I would spare the universe it. The day I have something to put up that's worthwhile, I'll do so.
PWT - It seems there's been much interest in the New Weird worldwide, although the first wave has passed for almost a decade. What do you think of New Weird today?
CHINA - I thought the term New Weird was an excellent term - in any debate over literary movements or moments half the battle is having a kewl name, and I thought New Weird was superb. In addition to that I thought it genuinely pointed at something distinct that was happening. I thought lots of the arguments around it were ridiculous, ill-tempered, and point-missing. However, I also thought that it quite quickly reached the point where it ran the risk of becoming self-parody and/or merely a marketing term. At that point, I decided not to talk about it any more. Which is *absolutely not* the same as repudiating it. I repudiate nothing. I just felt like I was becoming a bore about it. So I stopped. As long as people think it's interesting or useful, more power them.
PWT - What about the New Weird antho? Did you like it? Do you think it has more importance than other anthos?
CHINA - More importance than others? Certainly not. Some anthos are very important, some less so, and if you're in the middle of one, you're uniquely badly placed to actually judge it's importance, so I'm the last person you should ask about that. Did I like it? Sure. It did a decent job of pointing at a moment. As I say, though, I'm a bad person to ask.
PWT - Speaking of the antho, you've got a short one in it called Jack. It was an interesting examination of the cultural hero and how the character can be used by those in power. Was that your intention when you came up with the idea of the character Jack? And what can you tell us about Jack Half-a-Prayer that isn't in the books?
CHINA - I won't say anything about stuff that's not in the books, because it's only in the books that it becomes interesting, in my opinion. As to the story, certainly it was in part about that. I was also aware - SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! - that I'd not really ever done a story about New Crobuzon from the point of view of someone in power, and wanted to try that. And I wanted to take seriously and respectfully but critically the notion of some sort of relationship between power and resistance of a certain type.
PWT - What about New Crobuzon? How did it come up and what did you want to say with the setting?
CHINA - I just wanted a setting that I could use as a ragbag, into which I could throw anything and everything I thought up, but still trying to conceive of it rigorously, legitimately, 'realistically' in its own terms. So New Crobuzon is the result of many years of accreted ideas, images, monsters, architecture. It wasn't planned, it coagulated out of a mess in my head. That was always its telos.
PWT - And what can you tell us about your writing process? How do you come up with ideas? Do you outline your novels? Do you research much?
CHINA - I outline very carefully, in a lot of detail, print out the outlines and refer to them throughout the writing process. I get very stressed indeed by the idea of writing without knowing what's going to happen. Of course things change in the writing, but with a plan in place, they change within parameters and the change cascades all the way down and you can follow through what'll happen. I research a reasonable amount, but I'm painfully aware that excess research can be i) a stalling mechanism to put off the actual writing, and ii) a way of making for a clunky book. So I tend to research but only at the level of, say, a children's encyclopedia, because it's a very rare book that needs more detail than that for whatever it's talking about. I have no idea where I get ideas from. I think ideas are easy, and I think most people have way more ideas than they think they do.
PWT - You've said many times that your political views do not play a major role in your fiction. "They're there if one looks, but one can also enjoy the monsters". How do you separate your beliefs from your fiction as not to make them pamphletary. And more, do you think one can separate the author from his beliefs?
CHINA - I wouldn't say that they don't play a major role, exactly: I'd say that the fiction is not reducible to the politics, and has to be its own end. That doesn't mean that it could exist without my politics. But the point is that without my politics, I wouldn't be me, so it becomes a rather recursive and, to my mind, not very helpful question: where do the politics end and 'me' or the fiction begin. In answer to the question how do I 'separate' my beliefs from my fiction, I simply don't. It's simply not an issue for me. When I want to tell a story, that's what I'm doing. I don't have to make an *effort* to keep the politics out, because what I am wanting to do is tell a story - into which, inevitably, some politics will come, because I'm interested in that, but which will certainly not be *about* the politics, because if I wanted to write about the politics, I'd write about the politics. I'm aware that that's probably not a very helpful answer, and I'm sorry about that. The thing is, I get asked this question and I have no idea how to answer. It simply never feels like an 'effort' or something I have to 'do' to 'separate', that' just not how it feels in my head. I don't think you can separate an author from her or his beliefs, nor should you. However, their fiction is neither reducible to those beliefs, nor extant in isolation from them. I don't mean to sound defensive, if I do - my apologies. I just am very aware that I don't give a satisfactory answer to this. That's because in my head it's not a question, so I'm always a bit bewildered and fumbling about how to respond, I guess.
PWT - You mix genres a lot. Scifi, fantasy, horror, etc. What do you think of genre as a whole? Is it that different from mainstream? And do you feel any pressure about being labeled fantasy, scifi, horror or, ultimately, New Weird?
CHINA - I don't much care how other people label me. If asked, I tend to say I write 'science fiction' to people that don't know much about genre, and 'weird fiction' to those who do. I'm not one of those people who says that they think all literary pigeonholes/genres are limiting and pointless. (To be honest, I'm never convinced that people who say they think that really do, though I'm sure they mean it when they say it.) In my opinion there *is* a meaningful aesthetic / ideological distinction of some kind between 'realistic' 'mainstream' fiction and 'fantastic' fiction broadly conceived - fiction with a non-realist setting. I think that the fantastic aesthetic does have a specificity. For me, I'd draw the boundaries quite wide - I'd say that SF and Fantasy and supernatural horror are variants of a fundamental fantastic, rather than opposed categories, but I do think that they are distinct from 'realism'.
PWT - Your last book, Un Lun Dun, was your first attempt in the young adult field. Why the change? And what do you think of today's YA in general? Can you give us any opinion on Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Eragon, etc?
CHINA - I think that now is an outstanding time for YA fiction. There's an amazing amount of incredibly inventive, well-written work out there. The writers I've been particularly admiring recently are David Almond, Philip Reeve, Philip Pullman, Garth Nix and others who join earlier greats for me like Joan Aiken, Norton Juster and Lewis Carroll. I haven't read Eragon or Artemis Fowl, so can't comment on them. I read a couple of the Harry Potter books, and they weren't particularly up my street.
PWT - I've heard you've been working on a new novel called Kraken. What can you tell us about it? Is it in New Crobuzon or something different? Any details on the story or when it will be released?
CHINA - This is what happens in a world of rumor. I never talk about work in progress, and then the next thing you know some hint gets released, some misunderstanding generalizes, some whisper fractals, and then Amazon is trying to sell a non-existent book. My position is as follows: Kraken may or may not exist. If it does, it may or may not be called Kraken. Whether it exists and whatever it's called, it may or may not be out next year or the one after or another time. Sorry to be a pain!
illustration by Fabio Cobiaco
