Literary Birthday – 6 September – China Miéville

Happy Birthday, China Miéville, born 6 September 1972.

Quotes

1. Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I’m not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.
2. My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
3. Some of the best literature of the last hundred years has come out of the genre tradition and of course the best of it challenges expectations, just as the best of literary fiction challenges those expectations.
4. I remember vividly what it’s like to read as a 10-year-old that passionate inhabiting of a book.
5. Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book – that’s part of what’s interesting to me.
6. Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.
7. I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.
8. Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy, and horror haven’t grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.
9. 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.
10. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.
11. Art is something you choose to make… it’s a bringing together of… of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.
12. Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

China Miéville is an English fantasy fiction author, comic writer, and academic. He describes his writing as ‘weird fiction’. His books include Embassytown and October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:China_Mieville.jpg

Ceridwen, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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