| China Miéville | |
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China Miéville |
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| Born | 6 September 1972 Norwich, England, U.K. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Genres | steampunk, New Weird, weird fiction |
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China Tom Miéville ( /ˈtʃaɪnə miˈeɪvəl/; born 6 September 1972 in Norwich, England) is an award-winning English fantasy fiction writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction" (after early twentieth century pulp and horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird. 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 his PhD thesis as a book on Marxism and international law. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University.
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Miéville was born in Norwich and brought up in Willesden, northwest London, and has lived in the city since early childhood. He grew up with his sister Jemima and his mother Claudia, a translator, writer and teacher. His parents separated soon after his birth, and he has said that he "never really knew" his father. He attended Oakham School, for two years. 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 achieved a 'Bachelor of Arts' degree in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1994, and a Masters' degree and PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics 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 United Kingdom in 2005 by Brill in their "Historical Materialism" series, and in the United States in 2006 by Haymarket Books.
Miéville has indicated that he plans to write a novel in every genre,[2] and to this end has 'constructed an oeuvre' that is indebted to genre styles ranging from classic American Western (in Iron Council) to sea-quest (in The Scar) to detective noir (in The City & the City). Yet Miéville's various works all describe worlds or scenarios that are fantastical or supernatural and thus his work is generally categorized as fantasy: Miéville has listed M. John Harrison, Michael de Larrabeiti, Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, Charles Williams, Tim Powers, and J.G. Ballard as literary "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. In 2010, Miéville made his first foray into writing for RPGs with a contribution to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game supplement Guide to the River Kingdoms.[3]
Miéville has explicitly attempted to move fantasy away from J. R. R. Tolkien's influence, which he has criticized as stultifying and reactionary (he once described Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature"[4]). 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 the trilogy's 2002 reissue. The introduction was eventually left out of the book, but is now available on de Larrabeiti's website.[5] Miéville's position on the genre is also indebted to Moorcock, whose essay "Epic Pooh" Miéville has cited as the source upon 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?[6]
Miéville is a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and stood unsuccessfully for the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in the 2001 general election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance, gaining 459 votes, i. e. 1.2%,[15] in Regent's Park and Kensington North, a Labour constituency.[16] He became a Marxist at university, after becoming unsatisfied with the ability of postmodern 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. Therefore, he states: "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."[17]
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