Quotes from 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.

The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it." -Amazon.com interview

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

His fidelity to the cliche transcended the necessity to communicate.

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

What can we get on with while our consciousness rests? A researcher into the mind, a psychonomer , a thought-mapper , might claim this a meaningless question: that we are nothing without our consciousness.When it rests so do we" -Railsea by China Mieville

The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.

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.

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.

I don't like allegory.

'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 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.

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

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.