Weird Science

King Rat was a vision of London above and below, where the lords of birds and rats and spiders are threatened by a mad musician; Perdido Street Station creates a city of dreadful night, New Crobuzon, where weird science rules. China Mieville talks about his two novels to Roz Kaveney.

Amazon.co.uk: Perdido Street Station is a novel in the great English tradition of Urban Gothic. How do cities work, and why do you want to write fantasies set in them?

China Mieville: I am interested in cities because they are where social conflict is sharpest, where social tension and resistance are strongest. It is a political choice but also an aesthetic one - cities are places where different sorts of architecture, different sorts of social mapping, coincide and conflict. I also wanted to write urban fantasy because of my debt to other writers--Mervyn Peake, and Mike Harrison and the Mary Gentle of Rats and Gargoyles--writers who write fantasy with real politics and economics in them. I don't have a taste for the sort of historical fantasy which is set in an unreal countryside with a hierarchical system that is not even real feudalism. Part of this is that I just don't like the countryside--rural idiocy and sacks of potatoes, as far as I am concerned. In our real world, the country has become just an adjunct of the town and is of less interest as a result. Books about cities are just more exciting--when my surviving characters escape New Crobuzon at the end, it is to go to another city.

Amazon.co.uk: So you like the complexity of city life?

Mieville: It means that you can assemble disparate alliances of different sort of people and play off many voices against each other. I wanted to break down the racial essentialism of a lot of fantasy--I hate the way that in Tolkien elves have fate instead of free will--and create a lot of species not all members of whom act in the same way as the others. The vodyanoi, the riverfolk, have a culture in which people tend to be curmudgeonly, but I have one vodyanoi who just isn't like that. The city is a place where reality can be complex.

Amazon.co.uk: Your work is quite, shall we say, unsentimental.

Mieville: It is an overcompensation for my gross sentimentality in real life; I wanted to be stern with myself about not drifting into the default sentimentality of a lot of the fantasy I don't like. If the dynamic of the story means that terrible things happen to nice people, I am not going to chicken out.

Amazon.co.uk: So part of what you are doing is taking a revisionist approach to classic fantasy?

Mieville: Cities are places where the arts are made new time and again, partly because they are such brutal places. Dickens always wants to write sentimentality, but the dynamic of his realism takes him constantly towards the brutal; of course there are brutal novels set in the countryside--Jane Eyre is a good example.

Amazon.co.uk: This is a book which does a lot of movie riffs.

Mieville: When I imagine a scene, I imagine it visually, but above all cinematically--I often find myself panning through a scene like a camera. This is how I work--and it means that I am drawn to movie imagery. This means that sometimes you have to work hard to police the cliches and then come back and decide that the cliche is what you need and what you can get away with. I have scripted and cast both my novels in my head--King Rat is always Robert Carlyle.

Amazon.co.uk: Particularly in the case of Lin, you are very good at seeing non-human characters from the inside.

Mieville: I think that this is partly because I do see people as moulded by culture and environment; if I am going to do that massive exercise in role-play gaming that we call the writing of fiction, I have to be able to get inside my characters' heads. Difference has to be cultural rather than ineffable--even when we are talking a woman with a scarab beetle for a head. I did write one character who really is completely alien--the Weaver, my giant spider; by comparison, the vodyanoi and the garuda, the flying people, have areas of empathy. And of course the book does have some completely alien beings who are probably just smart animals with no inner life--but how can you tell? The Weaver is incomprehensible, but is part of the economic realm and has an interest in at least trying to communicate; it was my riff on giant spiders--Shelob is one of the very few things I like in Tolkien.

When I write about the life of Lin's people, the khepri, it is not just local colour; it is a discussion of the allure of metropolitan life. The city garuda are very different from the desert garuda; they are marginalised within the city, but they have been co-opted into human society and culture to a very large extent. The point about Lin is that she is in several layers of revolt against her culture--she has been drawn to human bohemia as a revolt against her mother's attempt to create a fundamentalist khepri identity as opposed to the accommodations that main-stream khepri have made with human society.

Amazon.co.uk: What have you taken from your influences?

Mieville: We have already name-checked Mike Harrison and Mervyn Peake and the whole alternative history of fantasy they are examples of; it is not all epics and quests. I like their sense of the weird, the way that Harrison remorselessly punishes his characters for being in a fantasy. I love the grotesquery of Clarke Ashton Smith and William Hope Hodgson--there are no smooth edges there, just cruelty, decadence and loss. I like Dunsany and the early Dunsany-influenced dream books of Lovecraft.

I did a lot of role-playing gaming when I was young, and though I don't any more, I still sometimes buy the source books for their frustrating blend of the cliched and the creative, and the way they represent an attempt to systematise inherently unrigorous fantasty worlds into hit- points and combat statistics, and write out the assumed back history of fantasy worlds. No matter how much I diss Tolkien for being dull and for reactionary politics, he did teach us how to use all that stuff as scaffolding.

Amazon.co.uk: What about Angela Carter?

Mieville: I loved Nights at the Circus and I respect her as a mainstream writer who did not despise or ignore the strengths of genre fiction. I found Heroes and Villains a bit clunky. I think of her as a positive influence on fantasy in the way I think punk and reggae were positive for popular music--I just don't like them all that much.

Amazon.co.uk: King Rat has a lot of music in the plot. I have a sense of music as quite important to the way you write...

Mieville: King Rat is a Drum and Bass book--when I thought of it, I was surprised by how little writing had come out of Drum and Bass, and Jungle --except for this wonderful piece of Black writing Junglist by Two Fingers and James T. Kirk, which no one very much noticed or reviewed. Obviously I listened to the music when I was writing King Rat . People who like the book say it almost makes them regret not liking the music.

The musical influences on Perdido Street Station are much less direct--I mostly listened to the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, for that Expressionist moment, that sense of a culture taking itself apart from within.

Amazon.co.uk: You are very influenced by classic surrealism...

Mieville: Both books have surrealist namechecks--Loplop in King Rat is a direct reference to the bird creature in Max Ernst and the Weaver's chant when he rescues our heroes--SAVAGE AND IMPENETRABLE...BLACK AND RUSSET--comes from Max Ernst's descriptions of the forests he painted. Ernst is one of my heroes--he did so much in his paintings and his cut-up novels.

Amazon.co.uk: Let's talk about your intellectual background.

Mieville: I did degrees in social anthropology and international relations. I want to present other ways of being as lived daily experience and that comes from social anthropology, as does my anti-essentialism--and from Marxism as well of course. I like having an intellectual hinterland because it means I can give my writing more texture--there are Gramsci references tucked into King Rat for example.

Amazon.co.uk: And your next book?

Mieville: Not a sequel or part of a trilogy, but set in the same world as Perdido Street Station , mostly on a ship at sea. There are characters in common, but not the major ones.

Amazon.co.uk: What are you reading? Listening to? Watching?

Mieville: I always read a lot of fiction and non-fiction at the same time--I'm reading a Polish fantasist, Grabinsky whose Dark Dominion is published by Daedalus--I found him in the Daedalus Book of Polish Fantasy. I am also reading Vampires of Alfama by Pierre Kast, a vampire novel from the 70s by a Nouvelle Vague film critic who would probably be horrified to be thought of as genre horror. As for non-fiction, The People's History of the World by Chris Harman and Book Three of Marx's Capital. My current musical obsessions are Bran Van's 3000 Glee and Ganja Crew's Fuck the Millennium . I haven't been to see anything since Fight Club , because anything after that work of genius might be a disappointment.