China Mieville

I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer. ”

Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek. ”

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction. ”

In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart. ”

Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings. ”

I don't like allegory. ”

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real. ”

My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate. ”

I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. 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. ”

I love monsters. ”