China Mieville

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: China Mieville welcome to The Book Show.

China Mieville: Thank you for having me.

Romana Koval: And congratulations on sharing the Hugo last night.

China Mieville: Thank you very much.

Romana Koval: And it's your birthday today as well.

China Mieville: It is my birthday, yes.

Romana Koval: Happy 38th.

China Mieville: Thank you very much.

Romana Koval: The Hugo has been won in the past by Isaac Asimov and Ursula Le Guin, amongst others. What does it mean to you to win it?

China Mieville: It means an enormous amount, I have to say, because if you're growing up in Europe, a kid who's into science fiction and fantasy, you see this word emblazoned on the cover; 'Hugo award-winning', 'Hugo winner' and so on. And for many years I had no idea what this strange, glamorous thing called the Hugo award was but I was excited by it. So to actually kind of reach a point and suddenly realise that you've got one is quite moving to someone who grew up in geek culture like me.

Romana Koval: What is geek culture? What was it like?

China Mieville: It was great, thanks. It depends...

Romana Koval: How could we tell if you were in geek culture? What would we have noticed about you?

China Mieville: Well, I'm sure you know all the clichés. If you were someone who didn't grow out of aliens and witches and monsters and stuff like that in your books...people often say, 'How did you get into science fiction?' and my answer is always, 'Well, how did you get out of it?' because a class full of six-year-olds are all into that stuff and then you come back when they're 12 and most of them are no longer reading that. But those of us who showed fidelity to our obsessions, we just have more rigour than the mainstream, that's my thinking.

Romana Koval: But you had a lot of rigour academically. You did a PhD in international politics, and you wrote about Marxism. And the science fiction remained strong in your heart as well, all through that rigorous political, economy, and other sorts of studies.

China Mieville: There's no contradiction I think. I'm interested in politics and social theory, that's my background, that's what I'm interested in, that's what I was intending to do professionally, was to be an academic and so on. But I was always also somebody who really loved these stories of strange things and the weird. The weird is the touchstone for this kind of culture, and there've always both been poles of my soul and they don't feel like they are in any contradiction with each other.

Romana Koval: Did they speak to each other, because a lot of science fiction as you were growing up perhaps was about utopian ideas and other worlds and what happens if we transfer what's going on here to somewhere else, out of space, out of time, but the same kinds of relationships.

China Mieville: Certainly there is a very strong tradition of philosophical speculation in science fiction, and sometimes science fiction and fantasy are grouped together under this title 'speculative fiction'. I mean, I don't get my knickers in a twist about what people want to call it, but I think that notion of social, philosophical, theoretical speculation, extrapolation, thought experiment...absolutely, and yes, that's the kind of science fiction I was particularly drawn to.

Romana Koval: So let's begin with...is it Architeuthis dux?

China Mieville: Architeuthis dux, yes, the giant squid.

Romana Koval: The giant squid. This sea monster...I mean, it is monstrous to us, this idea of this big thing that is slimy with very many tentacles. I know that whales are scared of them because they do really mean things to whales with those beaks, they stop up their breathing holes.

China Mieville: Sadly I think this is a bit of a myth. There is this notion of the epic battle a mile below the waves, whereas I think in fact mostly the epic battle consists of sperm whales eating squid which are frantically trying to get away.

Romana Koval: You're obviously on the squids' side because...

China Mieville: I am, I feel very melancholy about this, you know...

Romana Koval: I did an interview with the guy who wrote a book about whales, Philip Hoare was his name, and he was really on the whales' side and hated the squid, so this is obviously a political battle.

China Mieville: Oh yes, the politics of cephalopods is the whole issue, don't even get me into the debate between the giant squid and the colossal squid...

Romana Koval: Tell us.

China Mieville: Well, there's two contenders for largest squid in the world, the Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni versus the Architeuthis dux...my geek is showing, isn't it...

Romana Koval: No, no, go on.

China Mieville: The colossal squid has a larger mantle but shorter tentacles and is a more aggressive predator, it weighs more but it's shorter end-to-tail, it's not quite as culturally resonant, but if you actually know about the shape of its claws (because it has claws on its tentacles) it's probably meaner. So there is this kind of bickering between which is the more terrifying animal among those of us obsessed with cephalopods and tentacular things. I'm a giant squid man, myself. I think culture trumps biology ultimately.

Romana Koval: Let's talk about Tennyson and let's talk about the giant squid in poetry.

China Mieville: That notion of something strange under the waves is very, very old and goes back...you know, there is a Kraken thing in Beowulf. And then at a certain point in I think probably the late 19th century or the mid-19th century we started deciding that this impossible creature was actually a giant squid. That's a relatively recent innovation in squid culture. So now that's the association we make, and yes, as you say, it has inspired poetry, it's inspired many novels, this is part of the tradition.

Romana Koval: There is an element of the unconscious about it though, isn't there, it's almost a Freudian idea of something buried deep that is threatening that will come out in some way.

China Mieville: My thinking is that in a way the tentacular creature is the opposite of a ghost, because the idea of a ghost is that it is the repressed which is returning, whereas I think the thing about the Kraken, these tentacular creatures, is that they are completely alien from us, so they're not something we've repressed, they're the eruption of something inconceivable, and I think there is a kind of very productive tension in speculative culture between the ghostly and the weird, the haunt and the tentacular.

Romana Koval: Tell me more about the weird. I know weird fiction is a classification, but what does it mean to you?

China Mieville: To me it means very much this...as I say, it's to do with trying to tap into a sense of something unknowable and inconceivable in human terms, and to that extent it is a kind of opposite, as I say, of the ghostly which is about something we would prefer to forget, that we know but we wish we didn't know, whereas this is about something that we are horrified to discover there is no way we can possibly really know. And of course you're always going to fail because you're describing it, you're a human being, you're using human language, so of course you're going to fail to describe the indescribable, but sometimes that failure can be quite fun and interesting and productive.

Romana Koval: The story is about the disappearance of this giant squid from the museum, and what happens to it, how it got out, who took it. And then a whole lot of people who are interested in finding out where it has gone. We just get more and more into the city of London as a place where...kind of like The City in the City, there are many realities going on in the city and there is a whole magical element of the city, and strange things happen.

Some of the strange things that happen are beyond explanation. For example, people get around by being origamied down into small packages and then sent off and then boinging into their true sometimes horrific personas, and this is a different way of transporting things than the old Star Trek 'beaming up'. There is a bit of a comment...there seems to be a bit of editorialising in this book about how impossible the 'beaming up' versions are to the (seemingly impossible too) folding of space by people and sending them off in the post.

China Mieville: If you are somebody who is not particularly religious and so essentially you're not thinking in terms of the soul, you're thinking in terms of the brain and the mind, then the Star Trek kind of beaming is terrifying because essentially you explode somebody and kill them and then you reconstitute them somewhere else, but of course it's not really them because they died, it's an identical replica that thinks it's them, it's these kind of strange, self-denying walking dead. As a kid I was always 'there is no way I would allow myself to be transported like that', you know. The USS Enterprise is a charnel ship.

Romana Koval: So you don't think that it is possible to just get the coordinates right and get them all happening...why not?

China Mieville: Because you took them apart. Even if you put them back together so they look exactly the same, if you exploded all their molecules, their brain was chopped into tiny little bits, and I don't think there was anything of them left. Essentially you exploded them...

Romana Koval: But this is very philosophical because what is 'them'?

China Mieville: Well, quite. I'm not somebody who thinks there's a kind of ineffable soul that would keep their personal integrity together until they were reconstituted. I'm not a person of faith, but you're right, that is a legitimate debate.

Romana Koval: You say that you're not a religious person. There are religious people in this book, you have a lot of fun with cults. I've had to go back to Google just about every second page on this book, and I had to check up...I can't even say this, is it 'Cthulhu'?

China Mieville: Yes, this is a classic piece of weird fiction by HP Lovecraft from the 1920s.

Romana Koval: A short story, and it was published in Weird Tales. This is like a horror story?

China Mieville: Yes, it's an immensely influential piece of short horror fiction which is, I think, a kind of centre of gravity for this weird tradition that we've been talking about, about the eruption of a strange tentacular monster and so on and so forth, but it is an extraordinary work, it's a kind of piece of pop modernism. I mean, I don't think he intended it to be but it's a patchwork text, it breaks apart narrative and has a very fractious relationship with language. It's doing many of the same things that some of the higher modernists like Eliot and Joyce were doing only with monsters and tentacles.

Romana Koval: And this was a monster god, wasn't it?

China Mieville: Yes...well, sort of, but again, that's a debate. We've already done the theology of Star Trek and then there's the whole other issue of the theology of the tentacular in Lovecraft. If I say one thing or the other then you're going to get 1,000 emails telling you how I've traduced him and I'm completely misrepresenting...there is a debate.

Romana Koval: That's all right, you're one man with one man's opinion.

China Mieville: Fair enough. I think Cthulhu is not a god, let's put it that way.

Romana Koval: Okay, but there is a Cthulhu cult somehow, a whole lot of people reckon that Kraken, this animal that has been preserved in the museum, is their god, and they are after the people who have liberated them basically. Melbourne gets a mention in this, I should say.

China Mieville: Yes, absolutely, a respectful mention as one of the few places in the world that has had a giant squid on display.

Romana Koval: A Kraken on ice or, as you put it, a 'god-sicle'.

China Mieville: Yes, there's a thing in the book about the debate between the philosophy of different preservation methods, and whether you plastinate squid or whether you put them in ice or whether you, as I think is the only respectful way to do it as we did in London, which is put it in a big tank of formaldehyde.

Romana Koval: What does it look like when you go there?

China Mieville: A big, extraordinary, awesome, pinkly scabby thing in an enormous tank of very, very weak tea-coloured broth. It's quite extraordinary.

Romana Koval: And how big is the exhibit?

China Mieville: It's not an exhibit. The beginning of the book is very faithful to what is actually the case. The Darwin Centre in the Natural History Museum is a working set of laboratories, and in the middle there is this place called the Tank Room which is this completely extraordinary room full of, in many cases, centuries-old preserved specimens in jars. And in the middle of it is this enormous specially made tank, made by the same people who made Damien Hirst's tanks, and so when you walk to it to you're walking past these laboratories, scientists in white coats chopping things up, weighing them and measuring them, and doing the arcane things scientists do, and then there's this awesome creature in the very middle. It's quite extraordinary. So it's not really an official exhibit but they do do tours because people desperately want to see it.

Romana Koval: How long have you been going to see it?

China Mieville: It's only been around a few years. The book was born in my head when they announced that they had it, which I think was about five years ago, and they announced that it was possible to go along on these tours because there was a sudden arrival of lots of squid things; there was this giant squid that got filmed in the wild the first time ever, a colossal squid got washed up in New Zealand...

Romana Koval: And we bought it.

China Mieville: I can't remember...there's the giant squid here, but the colossal squid in New Zealand...

Romana Koval: I'm mixing up my giants with collosals.

China Mieville: Yes, shocking, indeed you are. You'll annoy the specialists.

Romana Koval: That's always fun to do. China, why don't you read us a little bit of this book? We need to just mention that there are some baddies in this book and some of the baddies are really, really bad, and these two, Subby and Goss... which sounds like a vaudeville team...

China Mieville: Yes, there is a strongly performative element to their terrorism. This is them approaching somebody who they feel has betrayed them.

[reading from Any moment called now... to ...let go of his phone and gasped.]

Romana Koval: We gasped there too. So we can hear rozzers and rhyming slang, and there are all kinds of references to many, many traditions in this book, of crime novels and television series.

China Mieville: My previous book was very disciplined and very controlled. It's shorter and it was quite pared down for me. In this book what I wanted to do was be much more expansive. This is a very risky strategy I know and I'm not saying necessarily it was successful, that's up to the readers, but there is something you can do I think with a certain kind of rumbustious ill-discipline that you lose with a more controlled book. When I think of somebody like...for me Pynchon is a very big touchstone, he's somebody I really admire, and part of that is there is a kind of chaos, a kind of unfolding, churning chaos to it, so that I always feel like you're walking through a book dreaming itself. And that kind of hopefully productive undiscipline is something I really wanted to try for.

Romana Koval: 'A book dreaming itself', it's sort of like a riff on a riff on a riff.

China Mieville: Riffing is a big thing within a lot of cultures that I'm interested in, and referencing and referring to traditions and so on. And you're right, and it becomes kind of endlessly recursive. But I am not particularly interested in the way of doing that by kind of winking at the reader and distancing yourself from the text, you know, that very kind of knowing breaking of the fourth wall. The thing I like about the idea of the book dreaming itself is that you don't break the fourth wall, quite the opposite, if anything you fall further and further in through these kind of fractal curlicues.

Romana Koval: Fractal curlicues and mathematics, it makes me wonder what your study looks like. How do you keep tabs on everything that's going on in a book like this? Or is it all done on computers?

China Mieville: No, I'm very anal and very organised as a writer. When I'm writing a novel I'm not one of these people who just starts writing...the book, as I say, hopefully has a kind of undiscipline but it is not just a splurge, it was very carefully planned. I have flowcharts, I know who is doing what at what point, and the idea of writing a book without having spent a fair bit of time plotting and working out what happens when brings me out in hives, I'm terrified of the idea of not knowing where you're going as a writer.

Romana Koval: And how do you check back, when you've made it, you've built the architecture of the book? It's very, very complex to know who is doing what to whom and where did they come out and what happens then. You're constantly introducing new scenarios and keeping people on the edge of their seats as well.

China Mieville: Well, you can mess it up. You do your best. I guess with me it's just a question of crossing off as I go along in my outline and trying to make sure I haven't left any dangling threads and so on, and occasionally you may make a mistake, and I've had letters from readers saying what about this or this, and sometimes you have to hold up your hands and say, 'I missed that, fair enough.' But hopefully you don't do it too often, but it is a risk, it is true.

Romana Koval: Have you had to do a rewrite because of that sort of stuff?

China Mieville: I think there's one thing...and I'm not being disingenuous, I genuinely can't remember exactly where it is, but somebody did point out something that...I think there's a sentence which occurs about half a page too soon then it could have done. So that I need to excise...

Romana Koval: Does that drive you mad?

China Mieville: Oh God, I hate it, I absolutely hate it.

Romana Koval: Do you look at your book and go 'I know that somewhere in there there's that sentence that just needs to be moved'?

China Mieville: I do. I think probably most writers...but down to punctuation. You know, you do your very best to copyedit it and then you come out and the first thing...you know, you throw the book down the stairs and it will fall open at a page where you will see an incorrectly placed semicolon, and you're like, that's it, the whole thing is ruined, the entire project was pointless.

Romana Koval: The baddies that we heard about, Subby and Goss, they are very, very bad, and there is another called Tattoo who is literally a tattoo, and I mentioned this sort of surreal origami that is used to wrap big things up and send them off to people. There is a cartoonish feel to some of this fantasy, and cartoons are mentioned in the book too a couple of times. So are cartoons relevant when we're talking about making these kinds of things happen in books?

China Mieville: This particular book was very, as you say, explicitly influenced by one particular cartoon called Bottles, but in general that logic of the cartoon, a kind of absurdism I think is something which does permeate certain kinds of fantasy. And I feel like what you want to do or what I want to do is take these really patently ridiculous ideas and then have a straight face and not just kind of mock yourself all the time. It is a comedy but not like that, so you say, okay, we're going to take something which is clearly ridiculous and then try and extrapolate it as rigorously as possible and not take an easy way out of just winking and gurning and saying, well, let's take this absurd thing and see how that fleshes out. So to that extent that kind of cartoon logic I think absolutely is something that I was trying to tap into.

Romana Koval: Because cartoons are always having people die and then coming back again and people being impossibly banged into different shapes and animals talking.

China Mieville: Yes, and I think there's the cartoon logic and there's also a kind of folklore logic which is, I think, a fairly ridiculous logic of allegory, you know, 'this is like that', and if you read folklore...you know, you're being chased by the witch so you throw a comb over your shoulder because a comb is a bit like a forest, so there's a forest in the way. Crazy stuff but sort of taking that logic...and this is something else Pynchon talks about, he calls them cute correspondences...and try and extrapolate that and take this absurd childish thing and treat it within the confines of this book as if it is a rigorous logic.

Romana Koval: Like, for example, the familiars, the animals that belong to magic people, who are on strike because they've been oppressed, and there's a picket line.

China Mieville: The notion of the animal companion of a magic user is obviously a very old tradition, but that...

Romana Koval: The witch's cat.

China Mieville: Yes, absolutely. And actually that particular thing of the unionised familiars came more out of (talking of cartoons) Fantasia, the scene where Mickey magics the broom to carry these water buckets.

Romana Koval: And they do that walk of the brooms or something...

China Mieville: Exactly, and in the end he loses control of them and you feel like, okay, maybe he lost control because he didn't have the magic or maybe he lost control because they were on a kind of agitational program because their working conditions were so terrible.

Romana Koval: And this is where Marxism comes into it.

China Mieville: In a hopefully humorous fashion in this particular book. But yes, I'm very interested in politics and in union politics and so on, and so I wanted to bring that into this.

Romana Koval: And you ran for parliament in 2001. On what sort of platform?

China Mieville: It was for an organisation called the Socialist Alliance which, as you can imagine...this was at a time when 'new Labour' was really, really beginning to show its colours and we felt it was extremely important to put an alternative agenda because the mainstream parties were all essentially singing from the same hymn sheet and we wanted to put forward a different agenda. So it was that kind of oppositional stance, and talking about grassroots politics and about democratisation and about not...opposing neo-liberalism and privatisation. I'm sure you can imagine.

Romana Koval: What's the climate now for writers in your country?

China Mieville: Economically it's a tricky time, but within our field particularly I'm kind of cautiously optimistic. There's a lot of really interesting things going on. I think it's a very good time to write as long as you don't have illusions about how sumptuous your palace is going to be.

Romana Koval: China Mieville, congratulations, and happy birthday again.

China Mieville: Thank you very much.

Romana Koval: China Mieville's new novel is called Kraken and it's published by Macmillan

Publications

Title: Kraken

Author: China Mieville

Publisher: Macmillan