China Miéville 2010 Interview
China Miéville was nominated for his novel The City & The City.
Tony: So, I’d just like to welcome on board China Mieville. China, hello sir!
China Mieville: Hi there, thank you for having me Tony!
Tony: The last time we spoke you’d just come back from India, you’re been in London, and now you’re in America. You seem to be all over the globe? Is that just part of everyday life now for China Mieville?
China Mieville: Uh, not really. It is slightly anomalous. The India thing was highly unusual. That was the first time I’d been to India and that was a special thing involving the British Council which organized a kind of cultural event in India including me and a bunch of other genre writers, but I spend quite a lot of time in the United States because my partner works here. She is a doctor here, so I come out to spend time with her as and when we can do that, so I’m back and forth to the United States quite frequently.
Tony: Are you one of the writers then, China? Can you fit in your day job writing anywhere in the world or do you like to get home and get settled back in your home in London? Can you just write in America, any time zone, or anything?
China Mieville: No, I tend to work mostly in the United Kingdom. There are plenty of other things I can be getting on with when I’m out here, so it’s not like I have nothing to do. In terms of the actual hard core writing, it is part of the reason I spend a lot of time alone because I tend to work best when I’m on my own and really sort of kind of focus in. But, I work in very intense kind of bursts of a few weeks at a time. I’m not somebody who has a regular writing routine. I don’t do you know six hours per day every day. There might be some weeks of the year when I’ll do very, very long hours like 12 to 14 hours or more per day, and there might be other days when I’m doing lots of other things but not sitting down writing, so I’m very uneven.
Tony: So your book, City and the City is up for a Nebula Award? Now, you’ve had a few books out now, you’ve been in this game awhile. Is winning an award still a little bit special for you, or do you just kind of like to put that behind you and just keep on trying to get your work out?
China Mieville: No, it really – it would be you know, maybe one could sort of pretend insouciance to prove how kind of cool and relaxed one is, but honestly I think it is still very moving and exciting to be listed for awards, let alone if you end up winning them. I mean, you know, you may know on one level that these things are – you know all the kind of horse trading and ins and outs that go into them and stuff, you don’t have to be sort of dewy eyed about it. You know, we can all think of times when we’ve disagreed with the decision of an award committee, but at the same time when you come up for them it’s lovely. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. It feels very exciting and yeah, particularly awards that you’ve never won before. So yeah, no, I’m not blasé about it at all to be frank. That doesn’t obviously mean that you sort of expect anything from it. I mean, it’s all gravy. You don’t write for awards but if something happens and you end up getting short listed or whatever, yeah, it’s lovely.
Tony: How long was it, I’m curious to find out, with City and the City, how much preparation before you can actually get into the nitty-gritty of the writing, how much preparation for a book like that did you have to do?
China Mieville: Well, I’m quite a careful preparer. I’m not someone who just kind of jumps into books. I’m someone who spends quite a long time doing planning and trying to work things out and so on. So, I can’t honestly remember in terms of number of days or number of weeks or anything like that, it doesn’t really work like that. But I certainly spent some time preparing the geography of the city, the histories, a certain sense of the kind of language, the background, and so on because I wanted to be writing something which felt very much embedded in real places even though they are imaginary places. The way to do that, paradoxically, because what I wanted to do was have a character who is from those cities, so who therefore does not explain it very much, but the way to kind of naught for ground explanation is to have it taken very much for granted. The way to have it very taken for granted is to have a pretty strong sense of it when you start. So, there’s a sort of paradox whereby it needs to have a certain presence in your mind so that you don’t have to explain it, if that makes sense. So I actually worked reasonably carefully to give the cities a sense of their specificity, their reality, and their history so that the narrative could get on with just living in them.
Tony: I think that’s what I liked about it as well. Soon as you open a few pages with it you’re left there really to work it out yourself as the reader. As you say, the narrator is just narrating the story and you’ve got to work out what on earth is going on there and I think that was an excellent kick-off for the book.
Is your research the same for every book, or is every book a different beast that has its own little complications you’ve got to tackle by themselves, or are they all basically the same? Do you have a kind of set little period of research and then you’re straight in with the writing a bit?
China Mieville: No, I mean – they’re all different. I always leave if you like sort of blank spaces on the map so there’s always stuff for each book further that I don’t know or decide in advance, that I don’t go into, then there’s stuff that I work out in some detail. But you know, obviously, this book for example, City and the City because it’s set in the real world although in a kind of nonexistent corner of the real world the research was quite specific because I had to think in terms of the intersection of these cities with real world flows of commerce and jet travel and history and things like that. Whereas with the more fantastic ones, I can kind of spin off and be a little more wild or so on. So – each one is different, but mostly I always have a strong sense of a different voice for each book and once I’ve got the voice sorted in my head the research to some extent almost follows from the voice, I’d say.
Tony: Are you a private writer, China, or do you like get a first draft down and then pass it off to friends and say “Have a read of that, see what you think”, or do you like to really get it all done yourself and it’s basically all your work?
China Mieville: No, I have a group of people who are kind of my close readers. I have my partner and a couple of friends and my agent, and [other] people. I like to work in terms of drafts. In an ideal world what I would do is do the first draft completely on my own and then give people the second draft and then kind of work with them to get it to a third and fourth draft, but it doesn’t always work that way and sometimes, you know, I might want feedback on a particular chapter and then I might give that to various people, so it does kind of vary. In my head, theoretically, I don’t like giving things away too early because it is very misleading apart from anything, because you know you’re going to change a lot of stuff so it feels a bit perverse to be handing it over.
Tony: Are you a fan of the crime detective genre, or is this something that you’ve discovered yourself just recently?
China Mieville: I am, I mean it’s not my main kind of literary home which was always science fiction and fantastic fiction but I am an admirer of crime fiction. I mean, I think like a lot of readers in genre it is something that we have an admiration for it because there is a very strong sense of plotting and of rigors of narrative. In my case, it also has very much to do with my mum who was an enormous reader of crime fiction and that was really her main genre and so periodically she would, throughout my life, give me particular crime books and I would read them. So, although I would not consider myself by any means an expert in crime, it is a genre I’ve always been very interested in and very admiring of. I have tried to kind of keep up with a little bit of it over the years.
Tony: Was it daunting to write a little part crime detective novel? Just, you know, for the idea that you’ve got other people now, other critics looking at you, like the crime critics are now coming in and checking you out. Was that a little bit daunting as well?
China Mieville: Yeah, it was! I did not want readers of crime fiction to feel that I approached this without respect and honor to their genre. I mean, if you grow up reading science fiction and fantasy one of the things that always irritates you a great deal is when a writer from outside of the genre comes in and writes something and you get this really strong sense that they don’t particularly have any kind of love or feeling for the genre but they’re just kind of knocking it out and there’s a slight sense of – it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel embedded. I didn’t want to do that at all, so I was very concerned that crime readers wouldn’t feel that this guy had written this thing with no love for the genre and no respect for the genre. I was very anxious that the book read as a completely faithful crime novel as well hopefully as something that comes out of the fantastic tradition and tries to do something new with a crime novel using the tools of the fantastic. I was certainly very anxious because crime readers are very rigorous and vigorous readers, and crime readers are very unforgiving of books that for example they think “cheat.” You hear this a lot, you know, crime readers saying “I didn’t like that book because it cheated” and so I really wanted to make sure that crime readers didn’t feel that I was cheating any way. I very much wanted it to be a book that a crime reader who has no particular interest in the fantastic could read and not feel manipulated by in any unfair way.
Tony: Have you had any feedback from crime writers expressing if they liked it or they didn’t like it?
China Mieville: Well, the only feedback I’ve had has been very good. I mean, it got a couple of reviews in crime websites and so on and they were very nice. I’ve spoken to a couple of crime writers who have actually reviewed it online and always very positively, so I had a nice review by a crime writer in the Los Angeles Times and meeting crime writers at conferences and stuff where a couple of them have commented on it. I wouldn’t say that I’ve seen an enormous plethora of reviews or feedback but I’ve certainly had three or four very lovely pieces of feedback all from within – very much within the crime community. I haven’t seen any negative reviews. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but I’ve not seen any from within that milieu.
Tony: I’m just wondering, have you got a tough old skin when it comes to reviews? I mean, negative reviews – can you kind of take them on the chin or do they cut deep? I bet you haven’t had any, have ya?
China Mieville: Oh, I wish, I wish! No, of course I have. You know, I don’t enjoy them. I mean, certainly I read them, I’m not one of these people who claims never to read reviews. I do read reviews and I would be lying if I said that a negative review – you know, I would much rather get a positive review than a negative review, but I think you have to make distinctions because you have to try to maintain enough of a sense of I suppose almost humility in that sometimes a review might pick problems with a book or might make some criticisms and you have to be able to hear it and say “Well, actually, okay, they’ve got a point there.” There’s a difference between that, you know, and a review which is negative which you feel is unfair or which misses what you were going for or any of those things. But, obviously, it’s not your place to argue with a review – that’s a Bad Idea. That’s not a very sensible thing to do. So, even if you disagree with it, very, very occasionally you might feel outrageously misrepresented or something in which case it’s very difficult to bite your tongue. For the most part you have to just swallow it and deal with it and stuff. I do dislike the defensiveness of writers when it comes to negative reviews. Sometimes you can really learn from a negative review, you know? It is a difficult thing to do, but it is quite good to be able to hold on to it if possible.
Tony: I found your book had this sort of post-Soviet East European feel. Totally lovely and rich there – and yet, it’s got these elements that had me writing little notes when I was listening to it. It has for me, the Sweeney, the flying squad, and all them kind of elements that are coming in as well. Especially Dart, the protagonist, you know, Inspector Borlu’s counterpart in Ul Qoma – I thought he was The Sweeney’s Jack Regan. Just his mannerisms, his actions, his vocal language – was there anything like that in your mind when you were writing it, the likes of the Flying Squad and the Sweeney?
China Mieville: Yeah, well I mean – it’s an attempt to write something that is very much within the tradition of the police procedural and so it was kind of riffing off a load of different police procedurals and one of the things I was trying to do – you know the book has three main parts – and I wanted it to move through three different ways of doing a crime novel. So the first part is a classic kind of police procedural whodunnit with the kind of lugubrious cop and his intelligent young side kick. Then the second part when he goes to Ul Qoma and meets that is much more in that tradition of the 48 hours movies or with the mismatched cops who have very different methods and don’t like each other but then end up with a grudging respect for each other. Then the third part moves into almost a kind of political thriller, a kind of conspiracy thriller. So yes, I mean – the Flying Squad and the Sweeney and so on and so forth did sort of loom over it, but it was quite consciously a kind of riff on a whole bunch of different police traditions so they’re certainly part of it, but not the only ones by any means. “Charmed”, well obviously, is a very big influence as well.
Tony: Like I say, when I was listening to it, you’ve got all these elements and then you realize just how many strings you’ve got going on [in] this little story. Because it’s only I think 300 pages long, but there’s LOTS of elements there. Was it a difficult beast in itself, to keep hold of the story and try to get it to the end without wandering off too much?
China Mieville: Uhm, not as much as you might think because I’m a very neurotic planner, so you know – I have my timelines, I spent as I do with all books several weeks and possibly even months before I start writing. You know in my room I’m surrounded by paper. I’m surrounded by timelines, I’m surrounded by little snips of paper, I’m taking little cards with events written on them and moving them around and drawing lists of characters and trying to make sure I know who is where at what point and so on and so forth. So, it is quite important that I try to dot all the i’s and cross the t’s before I get to the point of writing. Now, inevitably you drop a couple of balls and you realize it through the course of the writing. You think “Oh, shit!”, you know....
Tony: That was going to be my next question, was it this “Oh, DAMN!”
China Mieville: I mean, it’s inevitable, and you’re like “Oh, I haven’t mentioned so and so for 60 pages – what’s happened to him?” and so on and so forth, and that is where the process of editing comes in and that is when other people can be very helpful because sometimes you miss things yourself. So, you think you’ve got it all sorted then you always learn you’ve missed this, you’ve missed that, and that’s when you have to kind of come back over and tweak it into shape post facto.
Tony: I think one of the best little bits of this book was this unseen element, where they cannot really look directly at characters. I found that really amazing, that little part or device to get the story – was that not even difficult? I mean, you know, you can’t have your characters looking at each other, which I thought was fascinating?
China Mieville: Well the whole idea of this book was that, you know, my other books have been very kind of dramatically and exaggeratedly fantastic in the sense of the way I’m trying to use the fantastic is to really quite vigorously estrange the reader from the everyday, whereas with this book I wanted to do something different which was to try to exaggerate a difference but through very nearly familiarity, so the sense is supposed to be one in which this is almost completely familiar but a little bit skewed, a little bit twisted. So what that means is both geographically the cities are an attempt to seem like they are concrete East European or Asian cities, but equally the logic of the cities so that what you’re talking about like unseeing is not a new fantastic logic. It is simply the logic that we all have every day in the way we live our lives because we filter out enormous amounts of information and we ignore enormous amounts of information. What we choose to ignore and not ignore is not innocent – it is something we get trained into politically. So, it is just that logic sort of extrapolated and exaggerated and you know, brought out a little bit further. I’m glad it worked so well for you, and it’s something really that we all do all the time, just sort of exaggerated that little step.
Tony: You know, this book is just full of politics, East-West relations, all this kind of history of cold war and everything like that, and all your political views. Is this the book you’ve always wanted to write?
China Mieville: Well, no, it’s more kind of more specific than that. I mean, the book that I’ve been working up to for a very long time was more The Iron Council really, that’s my previous two books. This book was something that came up quite strongly in the last few years and it is funny that you think that it is highly political because I sort of felt like although there is an awful lot of politics in it, it’s less overtly sort of political than some of the other things I’ve written I think. The effort is always to write stuff which anyone who is interested in politics can find bits in there that they can kind of have a conversation with, but that if you’re not interested in it, that’s okay and you can still hopefully get a lot out of it and get a good story out of it. So this was a book that I’ve been working on. It felt really lovely to do something that was quite different, that was quite distinct from a lot of the other stuff I’ve done, but it isn’t something that I sort of felt like I had been working years and years towards. It was very much something I had to write within the last couple of years, it was very strongly a part of the last couple of years.
Tony: Now, I think I’ve got this right – both those cities were the fantastical – I hope I’ve got that right? Were you ever tempted to make one of those cities real, like Berlin or somewhere like that? Did you specifically want these two cities to be fantastical?
China Mieville: Well, I mean, they’re fantastical to the extent that they don’t exist, but because I wanted this to be the notion of these two cities that had been in this long running complicated relationship for many years and which were defined in part by that relationship, for that reason I invented them both because they were both invented to be defined by each other over many centuries. If I had had one city say, I don’t know, be Budapest or Prague or Berlin or whatever and then invented a second one which existed in this strange kind of overlapped relationship with it, I would be quite radically changing the real nature of Prague or Budapest, or whichever that city was. I didn’t want to do that – I wanted it to be very much a question of not changing those cities. If I did that, people would be sort of thinking “Well, in what way is this different from the real Berlin?” and I didn’t want them to feel that they had to be looking for differences. What I wanted to do was to have people have a sense of exploring a city which felt reasonably familiar but which was new.
Tony: You know, it’s funny, because I was honestly thinking “Is one of those cities real?” I was on the Internet one night in the middle of the night looking, you know, on Wikipedia and everything.
China Mieville: Oh, well, I’m honored!
Tony: I was thinking “Is this a real city?”
China Mieville: Well that’s perfect! I consider that the great vindication because I really did want it to have the sense of semi-familiarity.
Tony: Well yes, like you said, I had to get it right because I was thinking “If I ask China this and China says ‘Well, of course! Ul Qoma, it’s just next door to Prague, did you not know?’ and I was like ‘Oh.’” You know, you hinted on it a little bit, or you say you wrote City and the City for your mom, but she never got to see the completed book. Was that hard thing for you as well?
China Mieville: Yeah, well I mean – it was a very tough year. It was a very tough few years. She was very ill for a long time and part of the reason the book was written was because she was, as I say, a great reader of crime novels. She admired my other books and she always read them, but she wasn’t someone who particularly grew up on science fiction or fantasy, so part of what I wanted to do was write a book that was very, very much a book for her, like a present to her, and so to make it as completely straight a crime novel as possible. I was writing it while she was ill, and then, as you say, she died before I finished it, so obviously I was very – I mean it sounds silly to say I was sad about that, I wasn’t – in a sense at the time she died that was the least of my worries. I was just, you know. The fact that she died was devastating and was a very difficult time for me and my sister, so she was ill for a long time. But certainly I do wish she had had a chance to read it because I think she would have really loved it and I think she would have been very touched that I was writing it for her, because I didn’t really kind of go into that because you know, we had other stuff on our minds. So yes, I wish I’d finished in time for her to read it, but not nearly as much as I wish she hadn’t died or that hadn’t been the situation in the first place. So it is melancholy, but I still feel very much, you know the book is dedicated to her, and it feels very much like her book and everything that has happened to it and all the good responses feel very much to me like they have a lot to do with sort of honoring her memory I guess. So, yes, it’s sad, but within the context of things there were a lot of things very difficult about that time.
Tony: Well, it was like I say, for me just a great crime book. I loved it for that point of view as well.
China Mieville: Well, good! I’m very pleased.
Tony: I’ll tell you what, I’m interested because I’ve read your Un Lun Dun about two years ago in Italy on holiday and I actually left the book in a villa over there, hoping someone else might pick it up and read it there. [China: Ah, Cool!] My next question was: Did you have to write Un Lun Dun first to get the ease of it, as that’s got a hidden city in there as well, or is Un Lun Dun just out of your imagination as well and that has nothing really to do with The City and the City?
China Mieville: No, it felt – I mean, it felt very different. I mean, most of my books end up sort of percolating in my head for a good two or three or four or five years before I write them, so Un Lun Dun was something I’d been thinking about for a long time and so Un Lun Dun is much more, you know, more of a kind of traditional hidden city story and that is a very classic tradition particularly with London but with lots of series there is a whole idea of kind of, you know, the under city, the unknown city, the hidden city, the magic city, the interstitial city, and so on. Un Lun Dun was an attempt to do that kind of down the rabbit hole alternate London thing. The City and the City feels a bit different to me because it felt you know, like in a sense it’s not hidden cities. There’s this possibility about the third city that obviously we can’t go into without spoilers, so there are elements of that, but it doesn’t feel like part of that tradition so much as an attempt to kind of try to honor a tradition of Eastern European fantastic writing cross-fertilized with a kind of noir-y tradition of city crime writing. So, it felt quite different in my head, but I do always think that the writer is often not the most sensible person to talk about these things. So the fact that it felt different in my head doesn’t mean that there is not necessarily any truth to what you say, it’s just that that’s not, you know, writers are often the last people who know what is going on in their own work I think.
Tony: I read somewhere as well about your sketches, your personal sketches for Un Lun Dun. You said it was quite a daunting experience as well. These were your drawings, fair enough everyone knows you’re writing, but now you’re actually showing another side to yourself. What was that like, then?
China Mieville: Well I liked it! It was very simple – I mean, I’ve always drawn. I’ve never drawn professionally before but I’ve always drawn, and then what happened was while I was chatting to the publishers for Un Lun Dun and they said “We want to get this illustrated” so I said quite shyly almost, that well, you know, if you’re interested I do have some of my own illustrations and I could show them to you because I didn’t want them to feel trapped. I didn’t want them to feel like they had to say yes to be polite and they thought they were shit, you know, so I was quite nervous about that. I kept saying to them look, if you don’t like them, it’s okay, it’s no big deal. I didn’t want it to come across like a vanity project. Because, you know, you’re not necessarily the best judge of your own work. I thought they were good, but I didn’t know if I was right. But they liked them and most of the feedback on them has been good so I think it was a challenge that paid off is the theory anyway, so yeah, no, it was a bit nerve wracking but I figured by the time they were published I was reasonably assuaged. My anxieties were assuaged because I figured the publishers would not have let me put my name to them, or put them in the book, if they didn’t think basically they could hold up.
Tony: Again with like writing Un Lun Dun, did that throw up its own difficulties? I’m just thinking – did you have to change your style of writing because it was a children’s book? Did you sometimes have to put the brakes on the thing and think “Wait now, I’m getting a little bit too heavy and a little bit too deep here for this story.”
China Mieville: Well, I think that it probably reads like it has its own voice and stuff, but as always – it’s not really a question of deliberately changing your voice because I don’t really think that one has necessarily a default voice and then things deviate from that. I think that the voice is quite different between Perdido and Iron Council. I mean, you can see continuities as well, but there are certain differences, different between that an King Rat, different between that and Un Lun Dun. I think what it is, is that obviously there is a certain element that is shared and that you can always see, but with each book one of the ways I work is that I spend quite a long time before the book is started trying to get into a voice, trying to sort of create that voice, and by the time I write I am kind of in that head space so that the writing of it is reasonably natural, so it doesn’t feel like an effort. It’s not like “well, left to my own devices I would write all books like Perdido Street Station, but by a herculean effort I’m going to try to make this one a little bit more suitable for children.” By the time I write Un Lun Dun I’m in the head space that that’s the voice I’m using so it’s not an ongoing effort. Now, you know, when you go back and you edit you might say “Well, this is a little bit not it. I’ll change this.”, but not that much because for each book you’re in that head space, you’re in that voice when you’re writing it, kind of pretty much definitively for me.
Tony: I thought in Un Lun Dun , the imagery in there, especially the Spider Windows crawling around and going into lost rooms and you get all distracted and lost in them rooms. I thought was an excellent little part of the story as well.
China Mieville: Well, thank you, I’m glad you thought so. A lot of that book was just a question of indulging in really stupid puns! So, you know, I like these kind of really idiotic puns, so I just took a kind of really simple idea like you know, black widow spider, just add an end, Black Window, and then you’re like okay, what would that be? How would you make a window both half spider and really scary? How would yo do that? So a lot of it I would start with a really stupid pun and then try to take that very seriously and try to kind of forget that it was stupid for a minute and really work out how that might work.
Tony: I thought it came over! They were scary! Like you say, my daughter read it as well, and that is how these things were picked up. These were kind of scary windows, these things!
China Mieville: Actually, how old is your daughter?
Tony: She’s 14.
China Mieville: Fourteen, okay, so she was probably about 12 at the time. Well, that’s great! I mean, I’m very pleased. I know when I was a kid I liked being scared by books. I think sometimes as adults we worry about whether a book is too scary for a child or so on, and I think that obviously I do think that some books are not necessarily appropriate for younger readers, but on the whole I think readers are pretty good at having a sense of how scared they need to be, you know? So I think kids like being scared. I liked being scared. They’re quite good about policing so they get to be as scared as they need to be. My figuring was I didn’t mind it being scary because I was trying to write the sort of things that were scary in places that were the kind of scared that I liked being when I was younger.
Tony: I’ve heard as well you like all genres? You’d like to tackle them all maybe one day, so – are we going to see a China Mieville lovesick teenage vampire story kicking around lately?
China Mieville: I think I’m probably on vampire strike. At the moment my feeling is I’m on vampire, zombie, and steam punk strike, because there are simply too many of them. It’s not that I don’t like these things – I love them! - but because I love them I think we should give them a bit of a break so I’m sure some people could do wonderful jobs with them but for me I think it’s time to knock that stuff on the head for awhile. Maybe when things have calmed down a bit, you know, maybe in a few years, then I’ll write my pretty sparkly vampire novel but until then I think I’ll be objuring the undead for awhile.
Tony: That is my next question, I was going to say what do you think of the current industry? You must get asked this all the time, but you know, it moves on, and now we’re in this little bit where it is teen vampire weepy kind of things. Is it a little bit sugar sickening for you?
China Mieville: I’m not the police – people can read what they want, people can watch what they want. I mean, I have my opinions about them. I haven’t read the Twilight novels so I can’t comment on them specifically. I saw the film and I understand why people are pretty appalled by some of the gender politics in it, but you know, I think I’m kind of appalled by the gender politics in washing up ads, so I don’t think – not that it’s not a real thing, but I sort of think sometimes singling those things out can be a little bit misleading. I get depressed – well, I wouldn’t say depressed – I get a little bit sort of flat about the kind of herd like nature. You know, you’ve got this kind of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which is kind of quite a funny one liner spun off into a book and now spun off into books after books after books, these kind of mashed up things, and this kind of herd like nature of publishing so that now everyone is doing an adolescent vampire novel. You know, we had the whole kind of wave of zombie novels, and you can see these trends coming up so at the moment there’s a big trend for fallen angel books. And you know - some of these might be really wonderful ideas, but there’s something slightly exhausting about the way they simply become so fashion driven, and so one of the things one wants to try to do is not fall straight into all these fashions if possible. So, yeah, I mean I think it’s always been that way, but publishing is an industry of… it’s like a herd of bison. If one of them gets a sniff of something and then one goes rumbling off in one direction, they all follow. Herds of bison can be very powerful, but they can also be kind of stupid.
Tony: [laughing] That’s why you’re the writer! We talked last time about has science fiction ever disappointed you, and you kind of said a lot of science fiction films have come around and disappointed you. Why do you think a lot of the films do just miss the mark?
China Mieville: Well because their mark is not our mark, you know? I think in a way when we talk about films and we talk about culture we need to be a little bit more exact than we are. You know, we have to be kind of argumentative at times. To take an example, look at a film like what’s it called, Transformers, you know?
Tony: Yes?
China Mieville: Lots of people including me hated that film. I thought it was offensive, tedious, narratively incoherent gibberish consisting of a succession of bangs strung together. But when people sort of turn around and say “That was a really bad film.” I sort of want to say “Yeah, well, you know, what do you mean by bad? You know, it didn’t do what you wanted it to do – and I would agree with you, it didn’t do what I wanted it to do – but who is to say that is what it was designed for?” I mean it was Michael Bay, you know? It was Michael Bay, designed to make an enormous amount of money as quickly as possible. They don’t care about narrative coherence. They don’t care about character development. They don’t care about those things. Those were not part of what it was trying to do. So criticizing it for not doing it seems to me to be a little bit missing the mark, you know what I mean? I mean, this is not to say I don’t think it should be criticized – I think it was a piece of shit! But I don’t think criticizing it on the basis that it didn’t do what we wanted it to do is necessarily the most sensible thing. So, this is a long winded way of answering your question why do they miss the mark – well, I don’t think they do miss their mark. You know? Transformers did exactly what it was intended to do. Avatar, I think Avatar is ludicrous. Ludicrous, tedious, and offensive. But – it did what it wanted to do. You know, it didn’t care about trying to do something interesting with development or plot or writing or characterization or alien design or anything. What it intended to do was showcase a new kind of computer generated imagery and make wheelbarrow loads of money. It did it! So for me to criticize it as having been tremendously you know, having a very poor script is true, but is irrelevant. It didn’t think it had a good script. It didn’t care about having a script, you know what I mean? So I guess basically the reason I think so many of these films are not terribly good is because within the terms that we’re interested in, they’re not designed to be good. They’re designed to make an awful lot of money, and most studios are going to play safe in terms of making money. What that means is they don’t even need to be films that – studios don’t even particularly care whether or not people enjoy the films as long as they pay to see them. That’s it. Now obviously in the long run it might be good if they enjoy them because then they’re more likely to come to the sequels or buy the DVDs or whatever, but basically all you actually need is to get paying bums on seats, and that means that even if a studio executive is a huge fan of James Joyce and the Bicycle Thieves and Eisenstein and Vertoven, all kinds of tremendously interesting culture, they’re not going to use that as their touchstones when they pour 300 million dollars into a film because it’s risky. They’re going to play very safe because what they have to do is make a big ass return on their investment. That’s why – there’s no mystery to this. This is completely obvious and probably they would admit it. That’s why these films disappoint so many of us, I think, because in their very nature their makers are going to play very safe.
Tony: Did you by any chance see, and what are your views on, the film called Moon?
China Mieville: I did see Moon. I quite enjoyed it. I didn’t think it was absolutely, you know, I didn’t think it was flawless, but I quite enjoyed it. I liked the fact that it didn’t revolve around CGI. I liked that very much. I wasn’t – you know, it struck me as a film that was trying to do more interesting things than most and I thought it was a very good first film and I hope that the director goes on to do more stuff like that. I think one of the problems we have is films, because I think the standard is pretty poor at the moment, films which are decent get exaggerated so that films get described as “Absolutely amazing!” when they’re just decent, they’re good, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong especially with a starting out director with making a good film. It doesn’t have to be the best film in the world. It doesn’t have to have nothing wrong with it. I think that sometimes we don’t help films by getting excessively excited. I felt the same way about Let the Right One In. I thought Let the Right One In was a really good film, but I didn’t think it was this kind of absolutely revolutionary thing that some people were talking about, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, you don’t help that film by exaggerating its innovation or its amazingness. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to be a very good, interesting film, and I thought those two were.
Tony: I want to talk about the Internet now, China, if that’s all right.
China Mieville: Okay.
Tony: Are you Internet savvy or are you finding its passing you by too quick, you know what I mean?
China Mieville: Well, on the whole I’m internet savvy to the extent that – I’m not quite sure that I 100% understand. I mean, I’m Internet savvy in terms of I use it all the time – I’m a huge fan of research on the Internet, I read a lot of blogs, I spend a lot of time online, I use e-mail all the time, so to that extent I’m not a Luddite at all. There are things that move too fast. There are aspects I don’t get. I’m not on Twitter, I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on any of those things. I make no aspersions to those people who are – I know people get a great deal of pleasure and use of them, but they don’t do anything for me. I didn’t you know have a web site for many, many years, and my web site at the moment is extremely lo-fi and not designed to have forums or discussion or anything like that. So, I’m not someone who’s particularly interested in using the internet as a writer to create a kind of online brand identity. That is not something I’m interested in doing.
Tony: I wanted to ask you as well, it was actually Charles Tan who asked the question, he says “Why have you started your blog up again?” Have you just started writing in your blog?
China Mieville: Yeah, I just started I mean, I wince. I wished it weren’t called a blog. I don’t think of it as a blog. I mean, I know it is, but I much prefer thinking of it as a scrapbook. Basically, that’s just me being cowardly. Basically I didn’t have a web site for years until about two or three months ago and what happened was I was on a book tour last year, or maybe it was even the year before, for The City and the City, and a reader came to one of the readings, and – you know, I’ve had a few readers who were kind of exasperated with me for not having a web site and sort of saying you know you really need a web site, you owe it to us to have a web site, which I just did not understand – but this guy anyway basically he had bought chinamieville.net and he gave me the login details and he basically said to me, I can’t remember his exact words, but basically in a kind of more or less polite way he said “put something online for God’s sake, you’re a disgrace.” I was very touched that he bought it for me and gave it to me, and I was also, I felt a bit cowed, and like I owed it to him to put something online. So for months I didn’t do anything and I just kind of dithered, and then I sort of decided, you know, I like taking these kind of very sort of simple photographs and putting together little juxtapositions and little snips from like my notebooks, little snips of things that I’ve read that I think are really interesting or whatever and I just decided to sort of do that. But, you know, I think a lot of people who had been badgering me to have a web site will probably be disappointed with it because it’s not the kind of web site that you can really sort of interact with in that way. I don’t think there’s any reason anyone in the world should be remotely interested in it [Tony laughs]. I don’t expect anyone to ever care about it, but I hope if anyone does look at it I hope they enjoy it. It’s a little ongoing scrapbook artwork I suppose and hope.
Tony: We’ll get a link up there as well once this interview comes out, send some people over.
China Mieville: Sure!
Tony: Now, this is a nice one and you’ll probably shy away with embarrassment here, but Michael Moorcock says “China Mieville is perhaps the current generation’s finest writer of science fantasy.” Is that – did you ever get to meet Michael Moorcock? Are you friends with Mike Moorcock?
China Mieville: I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, but we’ve met several times and he’s always been very lovely to me about my stuff, and we’ve sort of had dinner and chatted about a lot of things because we share a lot of interests not just in terms of fiction but also sort of politically and so on and so forth, so I – yes, he’s a friend and obviously that was an extraordinarily kind thing for him to have said. He’s a very generous writer, he’s very generous about other writers, which is a quality I really, really like – not just because he’s being nice about me! But I just think he’s been a wonderful thing for the field because he’s extremely excited about other people. He’s not someone who just kind of constantly refers stuff back to himself which I think is a wonderful quality. But yeah, I mean, of course, that was a wonderful thing for him to have said.
Tony: Just what you said there, about he’s kind to the whole genre and the internet, the whole science fiction world there – we flew over to Paris when he was there when we first started StarShipSofa and we were lucky enough one of the listeners like owned a TV crew, so when we did this video, like to spend a day with him, like “A Day in the Life of Michael Moorcock”, and it’s actually up on Youtube, and what a lovely guy he was, do you know what I mean?
China Mieville: Yeah, he’s a diamond! He’s an absolute diamond, and he’s you know a great writer – not just a great science fiction writer, a great writer in any field. He’s one of our most important literary figures I think. He’s a thoroughly good, important thing in the world. I think he’s wonderful.
Tony: Now, just getting back to The City and the City, China, just for a second there, you know I was saying I found it very Sweeney-ish and it’s all the old fashioned style, but I’ve just been to see Green Zone today with Matt Damon and directed by Paul Greengrass and I loved that as well. It does, you know, your novel does ramp up there at the end. Is there anything like that, any kind of Hollywood action movies coming about with this, or any hints that it might get made into a movie?
China Mieville: Well, you know, we have discussions, you know. I think like probably any writer I’ve been in discussion with some film producers at various points over the last couple of years – I’m sorry, I mean over the last several years. One of my short stories is currently under option and we have discussions ongoing about a couple of the novels. Uhm, you know, maybe something will happen. I think the trick is to not hope too hard or you’ll make yourself go crazy, but sure! If it happens that will be a nice thing and you might even hope that they manage to make a good film which would be even better, so yeah – no, I mean, it’s one of those things that yes, there are discussions, they are ongoing even as we speak, but I don’t hold out – it’s not something I kind of set out too much store by, but if something happens I’ll be delighted.
Tony: Is this the last we’ll see of this universe, The City and the City? Is that it, you move on now, or do you ever think you’ll go back – with any of your books – go back and write a sequel?
China Mieville: Um, no, I mean – I might. I suppose I could go back there. I honestly don’t know. I mean, The City and the City was conceived of as part of a series, but it was conceived of - I had this plan in my mind. Basically the idea was that it was the last of a series. That was the idea. Originally, what I had was the subtitle for that book – it has a kind of invisible subtitle – when I first wrote it was called The City and the City and then subtitle was The Last Inspector Borlu Mystery. The idea was that there was a whole series of previous ones, or previous mysteries in this city which you hadn’t read but which were there, and then you finally pick this one up and it happens to be the last one in the series. That was my kind of conceit. When I told my publisher and agent that, they said “No, you can’t do that, because what will happen is people will pick it up and they’ll say ‘Oh, it’s the last one. I’ll buy the first one. Oh I can’t find the first one. Okay, I’m not going to buy it at all.’ So I was kind of strongly dissuaded from doing that. But, to me there are a couple of references in the book to previous cases, and those cases in my mind are previous volumes within this series. They’re just volumes that haven’t been published yet. So, for me, this book was always part of a series – just a series that kind of was written in an alternate reality and this is the only one that’s come out in this reality. So – I might do. I don’t know, there’s also a strong drive and desire to do something new, so – never say never.
Tony: Well you hinted there – are you working on anything new at the moment or is there anything new that’s coming out soon?
China Mieville: Well I’m just on the final edits on a book that will be out this time next year called Kraken which is a big fat fantasy novel set in London. I am working on a book for younger readers which I will hope come out at some point in the next two or three years, and then there’s a couple of other projects I’m working on which I don’t… On the whole I’m a bit superstitious about talking about work in progress so I sort of don’t tend to do so, but yes, there’s plenty of stuff going on in the background, yeah.
Tony: China, it’s been lovely speaking to you again. Thank you so much for taking the time out.
China Mieville: Not at all, thank you Tony!
Tony: And good luck with the award!
China Mieville: Oh, geez.
Tony: Take care.
China Miéville has published several novels, a collection of short fiction & one book of non-fiction. He lives & works in London.
Tony C. Smith is the host/producer of StarShipSofa. The audio science fiction magazine has been running since July 2006 with new episodes weekly. Each week the show delivers a full package of SF related audio material all free including audio fiction, fact audio essays, flash fiction and poetry, by leading names in the SF field. Starting in 2010 Tony C. Smith began StarShipSofa Interrogations. Its mission, to immortalize the immortals. Fifteen standard questions were compiled by listeners and staff of the StarShipSofa and put to the great writers of science fiction. Writers who have been interrogated are among others: Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Jack Vance, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K Le Guin and Gene Wolfe plus many more. On April 4, 2010, StarShipSofa became the first podcast in history to be included on the Hugo Awards ballot. It was nominated in the category Best Fanzine.
China Miéville’s City And The City supplied by Audible
