British writer China Mieville gives science fiction a sexier image

/Home/Science Fiction Authors and Personalities

British writer China Mieville gives science fiction a sexier image
January 7, 2011
By Sarah Lyall
The Record.com

If your idea of a science fiction writer is a scrawny guy with computer-glow pallor who’s a little too interested in whether warp speed is a realistic rate of travel, China Mieville is not that person.

Tall and buff, he has a shaved head, a row of earrings curving sharply around the edge of his left ear, a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and a mind that skips easily from Jane Eyre to welfare reform to the joys of bicycling around London. He is also a serious Socialist who ran for Parliament in 2001. The Evening Standard called him “the sexiest man in British politics.”

Mieville’s novels — seven so far — have been showered with prizes; three have won the Arthur C. Clarke award, given annually to the best science fiction novel published in Britain. And his fan base has come to include reviewers outside the sci-fi establishment.

Entertainment Weekly, for instance, gave Mieville’s latest novel, Kraken (Ballantine Books), an A- grade, praising the way he “lobs a grenade into the urban-fantasy genre, remaking it into wild comedy.”

Kraken fairly throbs with the fantastical: a squid-worshiping cult, oppressed magical animals on picket lines, a very bad man who is actually a tattoo on someone’s back, and a sorcerer who folds people up like origami and puts them into tiny boxes for easier transport. With its playful, densely pyrotechnic prose and its blizzard of references to other works, Kraken defies easy characterization as much as Mieville (pronounced me-AY-vill) does.

For the record, Mieville, 37, calls himself a science fiction writer — or, for those steeped in genre subdivisions, a purveyor of “weird” or “new weird” fiction. But he stands out for the quality, mischievousness and erudition of his writing.

“I’m not trying to distance myself from the genre I came out of, but it makes me really happy when people who don’t read genre fiction normally say that they really like my books,” he said recently over lunch at his handsome town house on a quiet street in Kilburn, in northwest London. Talking with a great deal of intense energy, he used three tea bags for a single cup of tea.

The book’s starting point is the kraken (pronounced CRACK-en), or giant squid. Huge scary squids have been an obsession of writers like Tennyson, Lovecraft and H.G. Wells for the past 200 years; Kraken is a homage to that tradition, bolstered by the happy fact that the Natural History Museum in London has a pickled one, which gets stolen in the book.

To call Kraken a squid-napping caper is about as accurate as saying that King Lear is about property rights. Among the topics that bubble beneath the wild imagination at play are millennial anxiety, religious cults, the relationship between the citizen and the state and the role of fate and free will.

“The book is intended to be kind of a romp,” Mieville said. “What happens if two apocalypses are scheduled to happen at the same time? How cosmologically embarrassing!”

Read one way, the book is part of a long insiders’ dialogue between Mieville and his genre friends.

For non-fantasy readers, there are references to works like The Crying of Lot 49, the Saki short story Sredni Vashtar, and the movie Fantasia. And Trekkies will be tickled by a long riff on teleportation, or travel by “beaming up,” a facet of Star Trek that has irritated Mieville because, in his view, it entails ripping people apart and then piecing them, inadequately, back together.

“I spent much of my youth soul-suckingly horrified by Star Trek and not understanding why no one else could understand that it was a charnel ship manned by ghosts, because you die every time you teleport!” Mieville said. “It freaked me out.”

Mieville grew up in Willesden, London; his first name, pronounced like the country, is Cockney rhyming slang for “mate.” As a child, he let his imagination run free in Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing games and, a little later, in a kind of competitive creative-writing club with a friend.

He wrote his doctoral thesis on Marxism and international law, and began submitting short stories, unsuccessfully, to science fiction magazines, before an agent took him on. He is more or less a full-time novelist now, though he still does academic research and attends conferences; he has an article coming out soon in the Finnish Yearbook of International Law.

While he manages to infuse his work with his political views, Mieville says what attracts him to the genre, as a reader and a writer, is the importance of the imagination — “that sense of the world blown apart, that sense of a crack in reality, that visionary sense, that ecstatic sense,” as he described it.

“At a certain stage some people end up not trusting their own imagination. You get this kind of baleful set of voices in your head that tell you, ‘That’s silly; you’re being silly.’

“But I think most people have more ideas in their heads than they think they do. It’s just that those of us in the fantastic fields — either we don’t listen to our own filters, or we have a much higher ridiculousness threshold.”

New York Times News Service