Serious Fantastication: acclaimed novelist China Miéville in interview with Steve Haynes

It is late spring, early summer. I arrange to meet China Miéville at a cafeteria inside the Warwick University Arts Centre. The stainless steel-framed tables and high-tech lighting provide an airport lounge surrounding totally at odds with the baroque, gothic landscapes of China Miéville’s imagination. The author himself is a picture of muscular, brooding intensity. At 35 his shaven head, multiple ear-piercings and gym-worked body create an imposing presence reminiscent of a young Brando. This is an intellectual powerhouse of an author, respected not only for his fiction, but for his authoritative critical views on the art of writing.

China Miéville is twice winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award. His fiction includes King Rat, Perdido Street Station, Iron Council, Looking for Jake (short stories), and a children’s novel, Un Lun Dun. He has a degree in Social Anthropology from Cambridge, and an MSc and PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Miéville is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birckbeck School of Law, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. He is also Chair of the Warwick Prize for Writing panel of judges.

Throughout the interview Miéville is open and friendly, demonstrating a real desire to communicate both an intellectual rigor and a playful enthusiasm for his chosen genre. We begin by discussing the current state of fantasy writing.

In the past you were critical of fantastic fiction, but you could be seen as part of a renaissance in fantasy. How healthy and innovative do you see it now, and where do you think it’s heading?

I’ve never been intentionally critical of fantasy and fantastic fiction. I was, and still am, critical of various trends that achieved a position of default hegemony within the field. I come out of a fantastic tradition and fantasy, broadly conceived, is where I locate myself. I have nothing but love for the tradition of fantastic literature and I think it’s very good at the moment.

There was a real upsurge of really interesting stuff between eight and four years ago, around the turn of the millennium, and we’re now in the aftermath of that event. I honestly don’t know what kind of a state we’re in at the moment. I think the high point of that heady stuff has ebbed somewhat, as these things inevitably do. I think we’re finding our feet, working out what’s happening now. A lot of things got shaken up that needed to be shaken up and it’ll be really interesting to see where things will go in the next decade, but at the moment I feel too close to it to judge exactly.

I think a breath is being held, at least for me. But broadly speaking I’m extremely enthusiastic and optimistic about the field in general.

You were part of – or the leader of – a movement calling itself ‘New Weird’. Was this an attempt to create a movement for change that you and your fellow authors have outgrown? Does it still exist as a separate entity in fantasy fiction?

I made a commitment to not talk about ‘New Weird’ about three or four years ago, partly because these things become boring and one becomes a self-parody, particularly when those opinions are deemed by yourself and others as an attempt to be contrarian.

I like manifestoes. I like movements. I like moments. I found the reaction to that slightly frustrating, in the same way as I find the reaction to a lot of movements, be it ‘Dogme’ or the ‘New Puritans’ or whatever. It seems to me that manifestoes and statements of intent, and big bolshy claims about a literary moment, are always a formative thing; an intervention. I remember when the ‘New Puritans’ had their manifesto a few years before and people reading their collection were saying – ‘They’ve broken two of their rules!’ Its a mean-spirited way of reading, so I found that really annoying.

I thought a load of writers were doing some really interesting stuff, and there were certain similarities or relations you could track between them, and someone – not me – came out with the term ‘New Weird’, and I thought it was a terrific term. Part of any moment in the battle of aesthetics is, what do you call yourself? I thought it was fun and interesting and exciting and, crucially, I thought it was a useful heuristic. For me the question is does it help you think more interestingly about the fiction, or not? It’s a tool to think with, and I found it useful. At the point that it stops being useful and becomes a marketing term, a cliché, then you stop using it. At the moment I feel – like a lot of the writers that were lumped in, inevitably very crudely – that different things are happening. Everyone’s doing different stuff, and one of the interesting things is that I’m finding it very difficult to call where things are going to go, and that’s nice, that’s an exciting moment.

There’s a nice quote by [Marguerite] Duras about manifestoes, where she says a manifesto is not a contract and to treat it as one is to miss its point and I think that’s exactly right, whether you’re talking about the Dadaists or Surrealists or Negritude, or any of these manifestoes.

I see similarities in your work with the genre of science fiction, such as the work of Alistair Reynolds, in your modifications of humanity and use of dystopic decaying settings. I also see elements of science fiction mixing with magic in your books. Is that a conscious decision on your part? To what end?

I suppose it was conscious, but it wasn’t some kind of a really nefarious plan. I’ve never believed in the supposedly hard distinction between science fiction and fantasy. I’ve had more arguments about this at science fiction conventions and conferences than probably anything else. You know, there’s a big divide between those people who think that the two are radically distinct; that science fiction is based on scientific rationality combined with extrapolation, and that fantasy is essentially anti-rational and pulls in the other direction. I’ve never believed that.

It seems to me that both science fiction and fantasy are kind of heirs to a visionary tradition, and that they have more in common with ecstatic writing … and a certain kind of numinosity and sublime. And that science fiction, to use a very slippery category, uses a kind of default vernacular of science to explore that, and that fantasy tends to use another vernacular.

But that’s an incredibly unstable distinction and the supposed science in science fiction is such bullshit a lot of the time, and that’s not a criticism. Some science fiction is based on reasonable, plausible science, some of it’s based on complete gibberish (and that’s great), some of it’s really wonderful. And, you know, Wells and Verne had a big argument about this. Wells had a whole position where he said, I’m not interested in whether it’s accurate, I’m interested in whether it is plausible and whether it furthers the story.

As soon as you start thinking that science fiction is based on plausible science, rather than actual science, you’ve totally undercut this notion of supposed rationality. Instead they both become expressions of a kind of a different authority figure – the scientist and technician as opposed to the priest or the storyteller. But again that in itself is a very unstable division.

All of these attempts to hard-distinguish blur. I’m all up for using quick and dirty distinctions. I’m not one of those people who get their knickers in a twist about categorisation. It seems to me categorisation is a useful mental shorthand that we all do all the time and as long as we’re aware that these categories are not hard and fast taxonomic barriers, as long as we’re aware they’re shorthand, then there’s no problem with that. As soon as people start to try and theorise science fiction and fantasy as fundamentally distinct, I have a huge argument with them. So for me, writing stuff that blurs is less to do with trying to be some kind of a radical punk than trying to be quite matter-of-fact that those supposed distinctions always blur.

For me a lot of it was to do with a relation to Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and the weird fiction writers who were all about that blurring, and a materialist magic, a scientific horror – all that sort of stuff. So that distinction gets very graduated in the twentieth century. Before that the fantastic genres were somewhat more blurry. It’s more to do with a question of  the philosophy of  extrapolation and radical alienation in fantastic fiction. For me, so-called science fiction and so-called fantasy are different articulations of a fundamentally united subject.

You love and promote the value of fantasy fiction. There are authors who write it and pretend they don’t. Why do you think that is? Could you see yourself writing a mainstream literary novel?

Those are two different questions. In answer to the second question, I find it hard to imagine myself writing anything that had no fantastic or science fiction elements. I don’t read purely fantastic fiction, but as a writer it’s definitely my home and I don’t know that I would ever – you know never say never – maybe – but it’s not something I think of as terribly likely.

In terms of the first question, there is a very long-established, sort of, literary snobbery about genre, ever since George Elliot said it was more difficult to describe a lion than a griffin, and it’s particularly fantastic genres which are considered infra dig. I, like all science fiction geeks, get very irritated by that sort of self-disputing, but at the same time I would say two things.

One is, these things are cyclical and at the moment I think we’re in a good time in that there’s a lot of writers who are very much fêted by the mainstream, but have a very respectful and open relationship to genre. I suppose I think of people like David Mitchell and Toby Litt and people who have none of that sneering that one associates with, say, someone like Paul Theroux when he writes what is obviously a genre novel, Ozone , and proceeds to be very rude about science fiction.

But also I think that within the genre we have a kind of libidinal attachment to moaning about this, and we go on and on about how marginalised we are, and it’s not that I’m saying it’s not true, it’s a bit dull. At the moment people are being a lot more open-minded than has been the case for a long time and, yes, that might retrench again and we might … You know it happened a bit during Cyberpunk, it happened during the New Worlds, maybe it’ll happen again in about ten years’ time, but also I think one does get a bit tired of the whining.

Some people have done really interesting work getting into the history of that distinction. Something happened, I think, in the late nineteenth century whereby a particular image of what constitutes realistic fiction became privileged over other forms, particularly fantastic fiction, and as a matter of literary history that is very interesting, but I baulk slightly at endlessly recycling this moan all the time, even though I substantively agree with it.

You’ve said that you plan meticulously and are ‘Never surprised’ by your characters. This surprises me because I often feel there is something organic about your books, as though there is something playful about how the story evolves? How do you plan? Is there an element of rolling-the-dice or game play?

I have a set of images or scenes in my head in my head, or a certain kind of emotional tone which I know I want to put in. I make a list of those scenes and then I try and string a narrative between them. The characters emerge from that. Then I plot all that out and then go through it. As it changes, as I go down, if I realise I’ve got something wrong, then I’ll stop for it and cascade that change all the way down, so that I’ll change it as I go along if necessary. There is an element of, I wouldn’t say rolling-the-dice exactly, but I do like randomness and I like that kind of element of spontaneous chance. It’s quite like an Oulipo strategy where you put restrictions in place before you go. So for example, in one of my books I’ll ask my partner to invent an alien and present it to me as a fait accompli and then I have to put that in, so that sort of thing. I like those restrictions and then a lot of ideas come from … I’m working on something at the moment which is entirely pegged upon a misheard word. I got really excited about it, realised I misheard it, but decided to take that word very seriously. So there’s an element of  trying to tap into those spontaneous moments which I suppose, if you wanted to be self-important about it, you’d say it was a surrealist strategy because it’s that kind of chance juxtaposition.

I like the fact that you have to make a structure out of images that are pre-structural. I think it is really interesting.

Planning doesn’t mean precluding chance. You read sometimes about crime novelists who have this incredible rigid structure – not rigid in a bad way, really rigorous sub-plots. Other crime novelists would say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen till the last page’ and they’ll write it completely randomly. Then they’ll go back and revise. You also have people whose books feel sprawling and sudden and chaotic, who plan out really rigorously.

When I said that I was never surprised I was talking about a relationship with character, which is that I’ve never empathised with the way some writers relate to their characters as if they’re real people who have independent existences and have arguments with them. I try and take characters very seriously and do as good a job of characterisation as I can, but I’m always very aware of it as part of an overall act. I don’t feel like a shaman channelling stuff – images, yes, but not narrative – that’s just not how it works for me. I think there’s absolutely no right or wrong here. Lots of writers who don’t plan, I love their stuff and some people who plan, I think are unreadable. But for me it’s a question of anxiety; I’ve always been a control freak. Rigorous planning does not preclude surprise, chaos, all that stuff. The trick is to deal with it in the writing process, but not make it feel drab when you’re reading it.

I’d like to focus on your collection of short stories in Looking for Jake. Are short stories still a good way for new writers to learn their craft and get into the business (considering they can be so different from genre novel structure)?

I think they are, but I think there’s a very big difference here between different fields of writing. One of the things that always amuses me is, a couple of years ago, I think it was the Arts Council, supported a campaign called ‘Save Our Short Stories’ that had a website and ran a competition and was talking about the dearth of short story publishing in this country, and so on. I know that’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time they had statistics about how very difficult it is to get published in a short story form and I’m thinking, well, not in science fiction!  It’s a huge difference between genre and mainstream here, and I think it’s very hard if you write mainstream literary short stories to get published. There are very few venues, even on-line there are very few venues, you’ve got the ‘New Yorker’ and maybe ‘Granta’ and a couple of others, whereas as within fantasy and science fiction, and to a lesser extent horror, there’s been an absolutely thriving short story scene and has been for years. Maybe it’s not quite at the high point it was, but there’s still plenty of magazines and venues and websites and small press and collections and anthologies. It’s a very established part of that field.

So from within that perspective, yes, lots of the main writers from within the genre at the moment cut their teeth on short stories and made their names as short story writers before they became novelists. Not me in particular; I wrote very few short stories, I love them, but I find them very difficult to do. The fact that they’re very different from novels is not a bad thing as long as you’re aware that you’re flexing different muscles. I think that’s a good thing.

You once said Fantastic + plot = pulp, Fantastic – plot = literary. When writing short stories you’ve said you’ve indulged in a mood as opposed to a plot – making your short stories more surreal / strange / dreamlike.  In Looking for Jake your use of place and psychological uncertainty reminded me of early Ballard and Ramsey Campbell? Could you see yourself writing a novel in such an experimental form – in the same way as Moorcock and his Cornelius Chronicles?

You could make a claim that M. John Harrison’s done that. I think there’s a very strong case that the Viriconium books precisely represent a kind of increasingly embedded attempt to write a secondary fantasy world as a set of linked, but discombobulated short stories. – Do you see yourself doing that? – I don’t know, I don’t remember saying any of those things! – It was probably a good idea at the time. – You know, I’ve been doing this for a decade, you say all sorts of stuff! I hope that I said them at two different times because otherwise it sounds like I’m saying I think my short stories are literary which is an awful self-important thing to say.

I’m very interested in experimental fiction in general and a lot of  writing I like to read is, to varying degrees, what you’d describe as avant-garde or experimental. I enjoy the surrealist writers, Russian experimentalists, and people like Ellis Sharp. I am interested in all that but I also really love pulp. As a writer I tend more towards plotted stuff.

Phillip Pullman sings the praises of plot, almost a lost art in ‘literary’ circles.

I think that’s true but I think there’s two different issues there. I’m thinking on my feet here, but I think, in a way, straight narrative doesn’t have one opposite, it has a failure of narrative and on the other hand it has successful experimentalism. What he’s talking about in terms of the mainstream literary novel, I think there’s a great deal of truth to that: I think a lot of what passes for high literature at the moment is in real crisis. The literary novel in many ways in really bad shape, I think it’s kind-of fucked. A lot of that is to do with an antipathy, a vague and untheorised notion of narrative as vulgarity, which defaults to a kind of tremendously insipid interiority and a notion of a rather trite kind of psychologism of profundity. And I suspect that is the kind of thing that Phillip Pullman is talking about. On the other hand when you’re talking about self-consciously experimental novels or short stories, they’re never going to be as easy to read. They might involve more effort from the reader, but I don’t think they can be put in the same pigeonhole as failed narrative, or wanness.

I think sometimes that those sort of things, when they succeed, are terrific because they really crack the world and make you look at it differently. When they don’t succeed, at their best, they can be really inspiring failures.

I like the idea of writing much more experimental stuff, but I think you have to be very straight about the fact that that’s never going to be something which is popular. You may very well be talking about a minority audience who are interested in that stuff and there’s nothing wrong with that, and this is not about sneering at narrative per se. I think part of the problem in the literary market is publishers get very scared if you’ve had a certain number of sales and then, with another book, you have many fewer sales. That’s the sort of thing that causes a lot of crisis meetings in publishers. And that’s a real shame because it would be nice if we had a model of publishing whereby writers might be able to say, ‘Well, I wrote this Pulitzer-winning crime novel last time and now I’d really like to do an experimental prose-poem which is going to have one-tenth the number of readers.’ It would be nice, but that’s a difficult thing to do at the moment. A long rambly answer, but yes, I’d like to try.

No, you answered my question. I think you answered several of my questions in one go!

Your first novel was King Rat. This is closer to the mood of the Looking for Jake stories . It has a London setting, Drum and Bass was an important element. What was your intended readership? What inspired you to follow this direction? And to what extent were you influenced by Neil Gaiman and his novel, Neverwhere?

This is a terribly dull answer, but the intended audience was me. You write the books you want to read. I wanted to write a book about werewolves and I was very into the whole Jungle scene, Drum and Bass music, and over the course of the book the werewolves disappeared, the Drum and Bass came up, and a different supernatural figure arrived. So that was how it happened.

In terms of the Neverwhere thing, I’d never seen Neverwhere, but I read it after I’d written King Rat – there are a lot of parallels. Neil Gaiman is a hugely important and a very inspirational figure, and particularly for me in a lot of his comic writing and his children’s fiction. He’s someone it’s an honour to be influenced by. That said, he’s also part of a tradition and Neverwhere itself was part of a tradition of dissident London writing – London Phantasmagoria. Neverwhere could not have existed without Michael Moorcock, couldn’t have existed without Iain Sinclair, couldn’t have existed without Peter Ackroyd, Thomas DeQuincey, even Dickens seen from a certain perspective.

London is a very fantasticating city, there are certain cities which lend themselves extremely well to fantastication, acting as a sort of hallucinatory prism through which you see the world. I think those of us who love London, we see everything through London to some extent. King Rat was not on any explicit or conscious level a riff off  Neverwhere but you can be influenced by things without having seen them. That’s perfectly possible and equally it also sups from the same cup.

Your main character is highly politicised and you end up creating a republican King. Were you already setting out to subvert the “chosen one” influence?

Sort of yes and no.  Not explicitly with King Rat. I never liked “chosen ones” as a trope, even as a kid. So to that extent there was always an ornery relationship with it. You can see a relationship with “chosen ones” becoming more and more dismissive through the books, so that Un Lun Dun is more dismissive of the “chosen one” than King Rat, and so on. I was more aware of it in, kind of, having a political hinterland for the book because I’m interested in that, hopefully without being sloganeering. So I was conscious of that.

What I wanted to do with King Rat, more than anything, was write a novel that took Drum and Bass seriously as a kind of fantastic setting. And the politics wasn’t particularly programmatic, I think it was more embedded.  There’s been more of a programmatic notion of engaging with certain ideas in later books.

I should also say – whatever writers are conscious of doing with a particular book is often the least interesting thing. I mean what the fuck do writers know?!

Interview continues