China Miéville Quotes

“It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity.”

Interview with Joan Gordon
Context: There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.

“Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now.”

“But I prefer to think of it as a quantum Hugo and that Paolo Bacigalupi and I oscillate between between Hugo particle and wave form, this year. So it's properly science-fictional.”

interview with Joan Gordon
Context: Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being Utopian, nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk.

“Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”

on winning the Hugo Award in 2010, asked in a conference in France http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o70YRXlhopY&feature=related <br class="br">Context: But it's a prize that... if you're into science-fiction and fantasy you grow up reading books with "Hugo [Award-winner]" on the cover. And this is very, very moving, to be in that position oneself. It's an odd situation [too], because, as you say, it was a tie, which is very rare with the Hugo, which has happened, like three times over sixty years, or something. But I prefer to think of it as a quantum Hugo and that Paolo Bacigalupi and I oscillate between between Hugo particle and wave form, this year. So it's properly science-fictional.

“Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.”

Source: The Scar

“Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.”

“Art’s something you choose to make … it’s a bringing together of … of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”

“Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 82

“If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.”

Source: The Scar

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

Source: Un Lun Dun

“People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.”

China Miéville book Railsea

Source: Railsea

“Any moment calledis always full of possibles.”

China Miéville book Kraken

Source: Kraken

“Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.”

“My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.”

Source: The Scar

“… where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?”

Source: Perdido Street Station

“Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.”

Source: Un Lun Dun

“We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge”

China Miéville book Kraken

Source: Kraken

“Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.”

China Miéville book Looking for Jake

Source: Looking for Jake and Other Stories

“A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.”

“My Google-fu is strong.”

Source: Perdido Street Station

China Miéville book Kraken

Source: Kraken

“It is more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?”

“Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war.”

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 13 (p. 141)

“She shouted, “Arms and tongues, Spiral?” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. “He’s for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. “Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.’””

Part 4 “The Hainting”, chapter 15 (p. 314)
Iron Council (2004)

“It had some allies. Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it.”

Part 2 “Returns”, chapter 8 (p. 85)
Iron Council (2004)

“My dad hates umbrellas,” said Deeba, swinging her own. “When it rains he always says the same thing. ‘I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society’s usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.’”

Source: Un Lun Dun (2007), Chapter 22, “History Lessons” (p. 90)

“He tried to grin but it did not go well.”

Source: Un Lun Dun (2007), Chapter 3, “The Visiting Smoke” (p. 11)

““History…” Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. “Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible.””

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 28 (p. 297)

“Before the humans came, we didn't speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came, we didn't speak so much. Before the humans came, we didn't speak.”

Part 4 “The Hainting”, chapter 15 (p. 319)
Iron Council (2004)

China Miéville Embassytown

p 148-149
Embassytown (2011)

“Throw something away and you declare it obsolete.”

“Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.”

Source: Un Lun Dun (2007), Chapter 12, “Safe Conduct” (p. 52)

“She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.”

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 553

“The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.”

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 32

“When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. We say: A government for need not greed!”

Part 3 “Wineland”, chapter 12 (p. 130)
Iron Council (2004)

“Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up.”

“Anamnesis” (p. 222)
Iron Council (2004)

“She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine.”

Part 3 “The Compass Factory”, chapter 20 (p. 241)
The Scar (2002)

“Lin realized that she was living in an unsustainable realm. It combined sanctimony, decadence, insecurity and snobbery in a weird, neurotic brew. It was parasitic.”

Part 2 “Salt”, chapter 6 (p. 78)
The Scar (2002)

“To take the choice of another … to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to … for all we individuals to have … our choices.”

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 188

“I’m not waiting to die, I don’t believe I’ll die, I am waiting for something else.
To arrive. To understand. To be at my destination.”

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 607

“There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it.”

Part 1 “Channels”, Interlude II (p. 65)
The Scar (2002)

“We’re all racing,” he said.
“Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction.”

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 4 (p. 38)

“Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.”

Part 6 “The Caucus Race”, chapter 20 (p. 364)
Iron Council (2004)

“We have watched mutant creatures crawl from sewers into cold flat starlight and whisper shyly to each other, drawing maps and messages in faecal mud.
I have sat with the wind at my side and seen cruel things, wicked things.
My scars and bonestubs itch. I am forgetting the weight, the sweep, the motion of wings. If I were not garuda I would pray. But I will not obeise myself before arrogant spirits.”

interview with Joan Gordon

“I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege.”

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 51

“The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism.”

China Mieville: "My job is not to try to give readers what they want..." http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2012/sep/20/china-mieville-interview, theguardian.com, Thursday 20 September, 2012.

“This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her.”

interview with 3am

““She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”
“You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”
“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.””

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 188

“Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.”

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 13 (p. 139)