China Miéville

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China Miéville

China Miéville at Picadilly Waterstones, April 26, 2006
Born: September 6, 1972
Norwich, Norfolk, UK
Occupation: Novelist
Genres: Weird fiction, New Weird
Influences: J.G. Ballard, Michael de Larrabeiti, Thomas Disch, M. John Harrison, H.P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, Mervyn Peake, Gene Wolfe

China Tom Miéville (born September 6, 1972, Norwich) is a British "fantastic fiction" writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction" (after early 20th century pulp and horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird who consciously attempt to move fantasy away from commercial, genre clichés of Tolkien epigons. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He has stood for the House of Commons for the Socialist Alliance, and published a book on Marxism and international law.

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[edit] Early life and education

Miéville was born in Willesden, a neighbourhood in northwest London, and has lived in the city since early childhood. He grew up with his mother, a teacher, and his sister; his parents separated soon after his birth, and he has said that he "never really knew" his father. He is an alumnus of the public school Oakham School. When he was eighteen, in 1990, he lived in Egypt teaching English for a year, where he developed an interest in Arab culture and Middle Eastern politics. Miéville acquired a B.A. in social anthropology from Cambridge in 1994, and a Master's with distinction and PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics, the latter in 2001. Miéville has also held a Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard.[1] A book version of his PhD thesis, titled Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, was published in the UK in 2005 by Brill in their "Historical Materialism" series, and in the U.S. in 2006 by Haymarket Books.

[edit] Politics

Miéville is a member of the British Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization, and stood unsuccessfully for the British House of Commons in the 2001 General Election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance, gaining 459 votes, i. e. 1.2% [2], in Regent's Park and Kensington North, a traditionally Labour constituency [3]. He became a Marxist at university, after becoming unsatisfied with the ability of postmodern and feminist theories to explain history and political events.

In Between Equal Rights, his only major political writing, Miéville advocates a revised version of the legal theory of the Russian Marxist Evgeny Pashukanis, as applied to international law and synthesized with ideas drawn from the Critical Legal Studies movement, particularly Martti Koskenniemi, as well as U.S. international legal theorist Myres McDougal. Miéville argues that the form taken by the law, a process of deciding disputes between abstract, formally equal subjects, can only be explained as essentially related to capitalism's system of generalized commodity exchange, which requires participants with equal rights to property. However, he argues, just as the symmetry of commodity exchange conceals class division and exploitation, the symmetry of law conceals violent power relations. Law is structurally indeterminate as applied to particular cases, and so the interpretation which becomes official is always a matter of force; the stronger of the contesting parties in each legal dispute will ultimately obtain the sanction of law. International law, therefore, is not only genuine law despite the lack of an overarching sovereign, but is a more basic type than domestic law, with states taking the role of individuals, with "property rights" in their territory. This analysis leads Miéville to be skeptical that international law can ever live up to its promises; rather, he concludes, "The attempt to replace war and inequality with law is not merely utopian but is precisely self-defeating. A world structured around international law cannot but be one of imperialist violence. The chaotic and bloody world around us is the rule of law."[4]

Miéville is an infrequent blogger at the blog Lenin's Tomb, where he signs his posts as China.

[edit] Literary influences

Miéville's style is influenced by pulp science fiction, ranging from early 20th century serials to modern television shows and movies, as well as by a number of writers of fantasy and horror. He has listed M. John Harrison, Michael de Larrabeiti, Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, and J.G. Ballard as "heroes"; he has also frequently discussed as influences H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, and Gene Wolfe. He has said that he would like his novels "to read for [his imagined city] New Crobuzon as Iain Sinclair does for London." Miéville played a great deal of Dungeons & Dragons and similar roleplaying games in his youth, and includes a specific nod to characters interested "only in gold and experience" in Perdido Street Station as well as a general tendency to systematization of magic and technology which he traces to this influence. In fact, in the February 2007 issue of Dragon Magazine, the world presented in his books was interpreted into Dungeons & Dragons rules.

Miéville has explicitly attempted to move fantasy away from JRR Tolkien's influence, which he has criticized as stultifying and reactionary (he once described Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature" [1]). This project is perhaps indebted to Michael de Larrabeiti's Borrible Trilogy, which Miéville has cited as one of his biggest influences and for which Miéville wrote an introduction for trilogy's 2002 reissue. The introduction was eventually left out of the book, but is now available on de Larrabeiti's website [2]. Miéville's position on the genre is also indebted to Moorcock, whose essay "Epic Pooh" Miéville has cited as the source off of which he is "riffing" or even simply "cheerleading" in his critique of Tolkien-imitative fantasy.

Miéville's left-wing politics are evident in his writing (particularly in Iron Council, his third Bas-Lag novel) as well as his theoretical ideas about literature; several panel discussions at conventions about the relationship of politics and writing which set him against right-wingers ended up in heated arguments. He has, however, stated that: "I’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have... I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?"[5]

[edit] Awards

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Short fiction

[edit] Collections

[edit] Nonfiction

  • Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (nonfiction, 2005)
  • "The Borribles": An Introduction, 2001 [4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm
  2. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/vote2001/results_constituencies/constituencies/474.stm
  3. ^ http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/a168.html
  4. ^ Miéville, China (2006). Between Equal Rights. Haymarket Books. ISBN 1931859337.  Pg. 319.
  5. ^ http://www.believermag.com/issues/200504/?read=interview_mieville

[edit] External links

Novels of China Miéville
King Rat (1998) | Perdido Street Station (2000) | The Scar (2002)
Iron Council (2004) | Un Lun Dun (2007)
Collections
Looking for Jake (2005)
Related articles
Bas-Lag | New Crobuzon | Races of Bas-Lag | Remade
Persondata
NAME Miéville, China
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1972
PLACE OF BIRTH Norwich, Norfolk, UK
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
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