Top 25 China Mieville Quotes

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

Personally I don’t like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

Ever since I was two, I’ve loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.

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.

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.

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.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

I’d never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.

I remember vividly what it’s like to read as a 10-year-old – that passionate inhabiting of a book.

I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek.

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.

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.

I love monsters.

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.

I’m a very friendly socialist.

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.

‘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.

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction – and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves from the literati.

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.

‘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.

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.

I don’t like allegory.

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.