China Miéville: Quotes about the trip

China Miéville is English writer. Explore interesting quotes on way.
China Miéville: 204   quotes 0   likes

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.”

China Miéville

interview with Joan Gordon http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm

World , Way , Game , Strong

“Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.”

China Miéville book Iron Council

“Anamnesis” (p. 191)
Iron Council (2004)

Way , Home , History

“I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is. The one-sided celebration of the ego-driven contextually constrained instrumentally rational (as opposed to rational in a broader sense) is bureaucratic: the one-sided celebration of the subconscious, desire/fantasy driven is at best utopian, at worst sociopathic. The best fantasies—which include sf and horror—are constructed with a careful dialectic between conscious and subconscious.”

China Miéville

interview with Joan Gordon

Way , Game , Sense

“Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle? Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what’re the forces you’re investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like, but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), pp. 145-146

People , World , Way , Mathematics

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.””

China Miéville

If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.

Interview with Joan Gordon http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm

Way , Strong , Game

“A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: “And there aren’t any.”
“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”
“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”
Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 0.3 (p. 37)

Way