China Mieville

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

“I love it when people want to interpret my books.”

“I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.”

“I'm a very friendly socialist.”

“I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.”

“I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.”

“In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.”

“I love monsters.”

“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.”

“A lot of geeks are pale, bespectacled, wear dark clothing and don't get out much - the stereotype exists because it is very often true. I could pass for a non-geek but it would be inaccurate.”

“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.”

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

“I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.”

“Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.”

“I'll tell you, I've never particularly been a 'Trek' person. I feel about 'Trek' the way one feels about known, vaguely liked, but rather distant members of one's family.”

“Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.”

“There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.”

“But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.”

“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.”

“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.”