“I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre.”
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.
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China Miéville 102
English writer 1972Related quotes
Jay Lemke. " Ecosocial Dynamics http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/ecosoc.htm," at academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu, Accessed 03. 2017.
Interview with Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph, 26 Sep 2009 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/6227400/PD-James-Queen-of-Detective-Fiction-Interview.html.
Other
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Address to Latin American diplomats at the White House (13 March 1962) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9100&st=&st1=
1962
Interview with Lidia Vianu http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/Michael%20Hamburger.htm
interview with 3am http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html
On his decision of what genre to write in in “Interview with Ariel Dorfman” https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/interview-with-ariel-dorfman/ (Dalkey Archive Press)
Simon and Jace, pg. 427
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)