China Mieville
'I'm a fantasy geek'
For China Miéville, the question is not how he got into children's books, but how he got out of them in the first place. Michelle Pauli talks to him about monsters, the marginalisation of sidekicks - and evil giraffes.
Tuesday April 24, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
'I remember vividly what it's like to read a book as a 10-year-old ... China Mieville
According to fantasy fiction writer China Miéville, the world can be divided into two camps.
"When I was moving into my new house a few years ago we were having all our kitchen stuff delivered and my then-partner got off the phone, turned to me and said 'the fridge men are coming,'" explains Miéville. "Now, it seems to me that there are two kinds of people: those that hear that sentence and think 'oh good, delivery of the white goods', and then there's those people who imagine a kind of enormous cyborg thing..." Miéville trails off. There's absolutely no doubting which camp he falls into.
"I love monsters," he confirms enthusiastically several times during our interview. Fans of his adult "weird fiction" will already have met a number of his dark creations in his Arthur C Clarke award-winning novels Perdido Street Station and Iron Council.
Now it's the kids' turn. Miéville has turned his hand to children's fantasy fiction with a fast-paced firecracker of a book, Un Lun Dun. Set in a kind of upside-down London, an "ab-city" filled with all of London's lost and broken things, it tells the story of two girls who stumble upon the strange, alternate metropolis and must save it from a destructive enemy - a sinister smog. While the tale itself may have a familiar ring to it, everything about the world of Un Lun Dun and the characters that populate it is wildly, almost breathlessly, inventive. The imagery is surreal - characters have birdcages for heads, buildings shift around, words turn rebellious - and the wordplay adroit. It also strikes a rich vein of humour and fun. The Binjas are dustbins that sprout limbs and strike karate poses, the Black Windows are fantastic - in every sense - monsters at Webminster Abbey.
But - and blame Harry Potter, if you will - writing a kid's book has become something of a trend recently, with everyone from Jeanette Winterson to Jordan giving it a go. So what's Miéville's excuse?
"I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book," he muses. "I wanted to do something that was a kind of a homage to all those books I inhabited then, like Lewis Carroll, Joan Aiken, Beatrix Potter ... " He's been keeping up with the recent batch of top notch children's fantasy writers, too, namechecking Philip Pullman, Cliff McNish, Garth Nix, Clive Barker's kids books, Neil Gaiman and Philip Reeve (but not JK Rowling. "They weren't," he says, tactfully, "massively to my taste"). He argues that reading the writers at the forefront of the current resurgence in children's fantasy fiction helped galvanise him into getting started on what had been a long-held plan.
He had also, he says, come up with images and ideas which he felt found their natural level with a younger audience rather than his usual readership, as they were slightly whimsical, based on wordplay and punning. Or games: Un Lun Dun contains some truly evil giraffes, and when I ask Miéville what giraffes have ever done to him he explains that they were the result of a test he'd set himself. "It's almost like that Oulipo thing of Georges Perec's where you set constraints. I wanted to think of an animal almost universally considered adorable and make them a really scary baddie. So it had to be either giraffes or pandas ... You couldn't do that in an adult book."
His delight in the possibilities of children's fiction adds to Miéville's curious but appealing mix of the boyish and the donnish. His declaration that "I've been accruing image capital for a younger book for a long time and then I coagulated it" sounds completely natural coming out of his mouth; it is only when written down that it appears unwieldy. He is, in fact, full of words you don't tend to hear in run-of-the-mill chats with children's authors, or with many people for that matter - inchoate, concatenation, epiphenomena ... - so it comes as no surprise to learn that he was bound for academia before becoming a full-time writer and that he still has a foot in the door with what he describes, diffidently, as a "vague relationship" with Birkbeck (he is a fellow of the college).
Originally, he studied social anthropology at Cambridge followed by a Masters in international relations at LSE. His PhD was published as Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law in 2005 and he continues, he says, to read academic journals, go to conferences and write the odd paper. His politics don't just remain on the page, either. A committed socialist since his university days, he stood for Parliament in 2001 for the Socialist Alliance in North Kensington, winning around 500 votes. It also won him the epithet "the sexiest man in politics". He's laughed it off in the past - "Who's the big competition? Paddy Ashdown?" But there's no denying that Miéville's distinctive looks - muscular, shaven-headed with a quantity of ironware in one ear - are not remotely donnish.
And the boyish? Well, says Miéville, "If you write fantasy or science fiction you're often asked 'how did you get into it?' I actually always think the question is the wrong way round. It should be 'how did you get out of it?' And I never did. "
Born in 1972 in Norwich, Miéville's parents separated when he was young, and he and his younger sister were brought up in north London by his mother, a liberal ex-hippie. There were lots of books in the house and she wasn't a literary snob, so there was never a sense of being told it was time to "put aside childish things".
"Millions of kids love dinosaurs and monsters and rocket ships and all that stuff and then at a certain point they start to move towards a more 'realistic' - which I think is a very misleading term - kind of thing, possibly endogenously, possibly because of outside pressures," Miéville explains. "So I think you do have a licence to enjoy that fantastical stuff in fiction for younger readers. For many of the adult readers of Pullman and Rowling it's a kind of valve, you're allowed to indulge in it 'because it's for the kids, it's OK ... '" He is keen to emphasise that he's not advocating any kind of heavy-handed maintenance of a sense of "childlike wonder" as an adult but he does get impassioned about what he feels are unstated assumptions about what is and is not suitable fiction for different age groups.
In fact, Miéville seems to get impassioned about many things, which makes him very engaging company. Take sidekicks, for instance. They're a familiar sight on the fantasy scene - Batman has his Robin, Frodo his Sam - but it wouldn't be giving away too much of the plot of Un Lun Dun to reveal that the "funny sidekick" ends up playing more of a hero's role than one might expect.
"I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid," Miéville says. "They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair. And so for a long time I've been wanting to write a book in which the sidekick got their day. That," he adds, "is one of the things in Harry Potter I did have a problem with - the whole house system in the schools where the Hufflepuff house's whole role is defined as 'sidekick' and the quality it is lauded for is loyalty. It's that kind of nostalgic dream of a butler class - I really, really don't like that".
It is this acute sense of justice that fires Miéville's politics but, while Un Lun Dun and its smog monster may tap into the key environmental issue of the day, he is emphatic that politics was never the starting point.
"I didn't set out to make smog an issue. I was trying to think up cool monsters - which is what I spend most of my time doing - and I had various candidates for the monsters in the book and then one of the monsters that occurred to me was a giant, sentient, malevolent cloud... So the monster came first and that said, having done so I wanted to look at some of the issues about environmentalism in a non-hectoring way.
"I'm interested in politics so inevitably that stuff is going to be in there, but it's not the point of it."
As seems to be the way with Miéville, in the end it really does come down to monsters. He laughs: "I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. I spend most of my time loving monsters - that's what I do."
For China Miéville, the question is not how he got into children's books, but how he got out of them in the first place. Michelle Pauli talks to him about monsters, the marginalisation of sidekicks - and evil giraffes.
Tuesday April 24, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
'I remember vividly what it's like to read a book as a 10-year-old ... China Mieville
According to fantasy fiction writer China Miéville, the world can be divided into two camps.
"When I was moving into my new house a few years ago we were having all our kitchen stuff delivered and my then-partner got off the phone, turned to me and said 'the fridge men are coming,'" explains Miéville. "Now, it seems to me that there are two kinds of people: those that hear that sentence and think 'oh good, delivery of the white goods', and then there's those people who imagine a kind of enormous cyborg thing..." Miéville trails off. There's absolutely no doubting which camp he falls into.
"I love monsters," he confirms enthusiastically several times during our interview. Fans of his adult "weird fiction" will already have met a number of his dark creations in his Arthur C Clarke award-winning novels Perdido Street Station and Iron Council.
Now it's the kids' turn. Miéville has turned his hand to children's fantasy fiction with a fast-paced firecracker of a book, Un Lun Dun. Set in a kind of upside-down London, an "ab-city" filled with all of London's lost and broken things, it tells the story of two girls who stumble upon the strange, alternate metropolis and must save it from a destructive enemy - a sinister smog. While the tale itself may have a familiar ring to it, everything about the world of Un Lun Dun and the characters that populate it is wildly, almost breathlessly, inventive. The imagery is surreal - characters have birdcages for heads, buildings shift around, words turn rebellious - and the wordplay adroit. It also strikes a rich vein of humour and fun. The Binjas are dustbins that sprout limbs and strike karate poses, the Black Windows are fantastic - in every sense - monsters at Webminster Abbey.
But - and blame Harry Potter, if you will - writing a kid's book has become something of a trend recently, with everyone from Jeanette Winterson to Jordan giving it a go. So what's Miéville's excuse?
"I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book," he muses. "I wanted to do something that was a kind of a homage to all those books I inhabited then, like Lewis Carroll, Joan Aiken, Beatrix Potter ... " He's been keeping up with the recent batch of top notch children's fantasy writers, too, namechecking Philip Pullman, Cliff McNish, Garth Nix, Clive Barker's kids books, Neil Gaiman and Philip Reeve (but not JK Rowling. "They weren't," he says, tactfully, "massively to my taste"). He argues that reading the writers at the forefront of the current resurgence in children's fantasy fiction helped galvanise him into getting started on what had been a long-held plan.
He had also, he says, come up with images and ideas which he felt found their natural level with a younger audience rather than his usual readership, as they were slightly whimsical, based on wordplay and punning. Or games: Un Lun Dun contains some truly evil giraffes, and when I ask Miéville what giraffes have ever done to him he explains that they were the result of a test he'd set himself. "It's almost like that Oulipo thing of Georges Perec's where you set constraints. I wanted to think of an animal almost universally considered adorable and make them a really scary baddie. So it had to be either giraffes or pandas ... You couldn't do that in an adult book."
His delight in the possibilities of children's fiction adds to Miéville's curious but appealing mix of the boyish and the donnish. His declaration that "I've been accruing image capital for a younger book for a long time and then I coagulated it" sounds completely natural coming out of his mouth; it is only when written down that it appears unwieldy. He is, in fact, full of words you don't tend to hear in run-of-the-mill chats with children's authors, or with many people for that matter - inchoate, concatenation, epiphenomena ... - so it comes as no surprise to learn that he was bound for academia before becoming a full-time writer and that he still has a foot in the door with what he describes, diffidently, as a "vague relationship" with Birkbeck (he is a fellow of the college).
Originally, he studied social anthropology at Cambridge followed by a Masters in international relations at LSE. His PhD was published as Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law in 2005 and he continues, he says, to read academic journals, go to conferences and write the odd paper. His politics don't just remain on the page, either. A committed socialist since his university days, he stood for Parliament in 2001 for the Socialist Alliance in North Kensington, winning around 500 votes. It also won him the epithet "the sexiest man in politics". He's laughed it off in the past - "Who's the big competition? Paddy Ashdown?" But there's no denying that Miéville's distinctive looks - muscular, shaven-headed with a quantity of ironware in one ear - are not remotely donnish.
And the boyish? Well, says Miéville, "If you write fantasy or science fiction you're often asked 'how did you get into it?' I actually always think the question is the wrong way round. It should be 'how did you get out of it?' And I never did. "
Born in 1972 in Norwich, Miéville's parents separated when he was young, and he and his younger sister were brought up in north London by his mother, a liberal ex-hippie. There were lots of books in the house and she wasn't a literary snob, so there was never a sense of being told it was time to "put aside childish things".
"Millions of kids love dinosaurs and monsters and rocket ships and all that stuff and then at a certain point they start to move towards a more 'realistic' - which I think is a very misleading term - kind of thing, possibly endogenously, possibly because of outside pressures," Miéville explains. "So I think you do have a licence to enjoy that fantastical stuff in fiction for younger readers. For many of the adult readers of Pullman and Rowling it's a kind of valve, you're allowed to indulge in it 'because it's for the kids, it's OK ... '" He is keen to emphasise that he's not advocating any kind of heavy-handed maintenance of a sense of "childlike wonder" as an adult but he does get impassioned about what he feels are unstated assumptions about what is and is not suitable fiction for different age groups.
In fact, Miéville seems to get impassioned about many things, which makes him very engaging company. Take sidekicks, for instance. They're a familiar sight on the fantasy scene - Batman has his Robin, Frodo his Sam - but it wouldn't be giving away too much of the plot of Un Lun Dun to reveal that the "funny sidekick" ends up playing more of a hero's role than one might expect.
"I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid," Miéville says. "They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair. And so for a long time I've been wanting to write a book in which the sidekick got their day. That," he adds, "is one of the things in Harry Potter I did have a problem with - the whole house system in the schools where the Hufflepuff house's whole role is defined as 'sidekick' and the quality it is lauded for is loyalty. It's that kind of nostalgic dream of a butler class - I really, really don't like that".
It is this acute sense of justice that fires Miéville's politics but, while Un Lun Dun and its smog monster may tap into the key environmental issue of the day, he is emphatic that politics was never the starting point.
"I didn't set out to make smog an issue. I was trying to think up cool monsters - which is what I spend most of my time doing - and I had various candidates for the monsters in the book and then one of the monsters that occurred to me was a giant, sentient, malevolent cloud... So the monster came first and that said, having done so I wanted to look at some of the issues about environmentalism in a non-hectoring way.
"I'm interested in politics so inevitably that stuff is going to be in there, but it's not the point of it."
As seems to be the way with Miéville, in the end it really does come down to monsters. He laughs: "I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. I spend most of my time loving monsters - that's what I do."
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