China Mieville

I have only read one book by China Mieville - Un Lun Dun - and am about to start my second, The Scar. But I have to say this - I love this writer. Not only was his book Un Lun Dun wonderful - creating a dark, steam-punk world which a homage to characters such as Alice and Dorothy, but his understanding of his genre, his experiments with his novels are really very interesting. Below is a video of him talking about his latest book, Embassytown. Listening to him shows just how much he has thought about his novels. A lot of people I know either write or started out writing fantasy. It's easy to start with this, in a way, as you can make up your own rules and don't have to abide by laws - you simply make them up.


However, when you expand and actually think about what kind of fantasy novel - or novels - you're going to create you have to think of everything. What are the laws? What are the creatures (if any)? What are the races? Why is this fantasy? There's a lot of work to be done with fantasy, a lot of understanding. Mieville does not just write fantasy, however, he writes science fiction which he has a clear understanding of (you may want to check out his speeches on science fiction on Youtube.) Another reason why I love this man is not just because he is a fantasy/science fiction writer but he is more than that, he has published a book of essays on Marxism, he is an academic. He is the kind of writer I want to be.


I was recently having a conversation with my roommate Dom about labels. Do writers get labels? Yes. That's how we know what we're getting when we read them.  But what label do I want? Honestly, I don't want one. I feel - I may be wrong as I must admit I'm only young - that I have three horror novels in me but others novels, I don't know, all I know is what I want to write. I want to write a trilogy of Gothic children's books, I want to write a series of fantasy, I want to write a book of short stories, maybe poems, I want to write a non-fiction book on the suburbs in literature, I want to write a musical, I want to write some 'literature' for want of a better word or contemporary fiction being even better. I want to write these things and I feel that by experimenting with some of this stuff I will get the tools to accomplish what I want to do. Time will tell, eh?