Interview with China Mieville pt.1

Being able to interview China Mieville was one of the most amazing and frightening experiences I’ve ever had. “Amazing” because his work doesn’t just encompass that word, but it surpasses it, redefines it, and then makes it moot. “Frightening” because I had no clue what to ask him.

Certainly, I had some ideas of things I had always wanted to talk to him about, but I began to second-guess each question that I prepared. I contacted Caleb (frequent Popgun Chaos contributor) and asked him what he would ask China Mieville. Caleb’s response was absolutely priceless –

“What do you ask the man who knows everything?”

Interviewing China Mieville was an enlightening experience and I am immensely grateful that he took the time to speak with me. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I do.

Popgun Chaos: What has been your experience with RPGs?

China Mieville: I started off like probably a lot of us with D&D basic. I was probably 10 or something and it achieve this semi-mythical status within my school. It was this weird thing because it didn’t have a board and you could do anything. So I got that and I sort of DM-ed it. I DM-ed the keeper on the borderland which I still have intense affection for. I DM-ed it very very badly because I was new and I was very young, and none of my friends whom I press-ganged into playing were interested in doing it seriously, which was intensely frustrating. Then, I discovered this other thing called “AD&D” and I had no fucking clue what that was so I moved on to that.

I was a big fan of Chaosium engine, so I ended up playing a lot of RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu and I had a long running campaign with Middle Earth Role-Playing which is sort of paradoxical and ironic because I never particularly loved the Middle Earth setting. I preferred playing to DMing on the whole. If I was going to DM, all I really wanted to do was invent the world. I was never particularly interested in people tromping around in it.

We played Traveller, and Star Frontiers. We played a lot of Star Frontiers – very underrated, I thought. We played a lot of games. I played Paranoia a couple of times. I was really big into Bushido for awhile. And since then, I’ve kept on top of it, I wouldn’t say top of it, I’m by no means an expert, but I kind of occasionally try and see what’s going on. I ended up buying a reasonable amount of the White Wolf games, although this is fully 20 years after I played. I don’t think I’ve played a game since I was 14, maybe 15 or 16.

My playing experience was all front-loaded with D&D, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, and Villains and Vigilantes. I was really big into Villains and Vigilantes. I loved it.

Anyway, yeah, I’m rambling now. I’m reminiscing.

PC: No, it’s okay. It’s cool.

CM: Are you recording this or are you frantically making notes?

PC: I’m recording this.

CM: Okay, good. I was afraid I was speaking a little quickly.

PC: I’ve always been fascinated with how much history has been built into the Bas-Lag books and the whole idea of world building, and I was wondering where do you start?

CM: I did it, I would say, like many others and indeed like people who role-play; you spend a lot of time with your notebooks and you put together a history and a timeline and a map and things like that and you sort of fill in the gaps.

Different people do it differently. There are different things that are important to people in that process. I’m not someone who gets fantastically nerdy about alluvial flows and specifics of geology and geography and I say that with no sneering if that’s what flows their boat.

I was reading a book a couple of years ago by Ricardo Pinto called the Stone Dance of the Chameleon and in the acknowledgments, he thanks someone for telling him what color was a flamingo’s tongue and I thought, “Now there is a person who has a different relationship to research than I do.” I mean, more power to you if that is what you want to do but I don’t mind as long as it creates a sense of cohesion, then I don’t need to be completely neurotic about scientific accuracy. That’s just not something that worries me too much.

And the other thing with the question of creating maps and so on is that, personally, I leave spaces on maps. It would be impossible even if you wanted to, to map every single thing in your world. So instead, I kind of map out the world and I have a sense of anywhere that is relevant and anywhere that may impinge on the story and the other bits of the map may get filled in or they may not. I may even drop in a reference or a name without necessarily having an decided what it is.

I should say that I’m also very interested in a sort of alternative tradition of the fantastic which I associate with the writer M. John Harrison. He has written several books, but perhaps the most relevant here is a book called Viriconium which is a collection of three novels and a book of short stories and it’s set in a very fantastic world which is probably in the very far future of Earth. He has a great antithesis to world building. He wrote a very controversial post on his blog a couple of years ago about world building as being an antithesis of literature so he deliberately constructs a world that refuses to obey those worlds. So the names of places change or the layouts change from story to story or even mid story partly doing it to provoke an effect that’s quite interesting. He’s creating an argument and an anxiety among those readers who are really concerned with how things pin down very precisely like in a roleplaying game.

Now, that’s not exactly in the tradition that I write in. I tend to come from a style that is very much like a D&D style but I think it’s an extremely interesting and provocative tradition and I like to try and learn from it even if it’s not exactly the same as I do and I thought some of the responses to his post were terribly bone-headed.

I’m sure you can find it if you Google the phrase “clomping-foot of nerdism” and “Harrison” you will almost certainly find it. I know it’s something that a lot of people won’t agree with, but I think it’s something we should all agree with and consider.

PC: I’ve recently come into the idea of internet fans being needlessly critical of things that they consume, as far as pop culture is concerned, so that sounds really interesting to me.

CM: In some ways, I would say that the opposite is true that fans aren’t critical enough. I think you end up with this weird self-hating (and I say this as a fan, so I’m not being dismissive, I’m critiquing myself) is that you end up with this weird kind of self-hating thing where you criticize something, but you will also always go see it. I’m very into the idea at the moment of rather than criticizing something – like when everyone was kind of raging about Transformers 2 or Transformers (that terrible film), I was like “of course they’re terrible. They’re by Michael Bay. What exactly did you think you were going to see? Why would you go and see that and be frustrated that it wasn’t like Gene Wolfe.” This is not to let the films off the hook, I think they’re a fucking embarrassment. I think that they are an abomination, but I think we have this weird thing where in the fan world, we’re so hungry for anything that touches our sweet spot so if it has monsters in it or time travel in it or sort of magic or horror or aliens then we’ll go and see it and then we’ll criticize it when it’s not very good and in fact if we would have made a critical judgment right off the bat and said, “this is essentially designed to take a lot of money off of people who aren’t particularly interested in narrative structure. I don’t think I’m going to like this. I’m not going bother to  go see it.”

It doesn’t bother me that people are overly critical but that they are constantly surprised that they should be critical. Of course it was rubbish. Most things are.

And the other side is that when something is good then it gets an incredible amount of praise possibly to the extent that it hurts it. Like that Swedish film, Let the Right One In, I thought that was a lovely film. I really liked it, but I did not think it deserved it when people were saying, “the most extraordinary and original film in 20 years” which they were saying and I think they hurt the film by exaggerating it like that. I think they did it because the status has become so degraded and that anything that isn’t shit, we get incredibly excited about.

It’s like Moon, I thought it was a good film, but there were things wrong with it, but it was an interesting first film, but the savior of cinema, by far not.

That kind of incredibly intense, fannish rage that we get seems to be misplaced not because stuff is better than that, but because we shouldn’t be surprised that most of it is as bad as it is and in a sense, who is more fooled? The fool who produces an incredibly profitable piece of shit or the fool who gives the money out for the piece of shit when the last ten things they’ve seen by that person were a piece of shit. I think we should be super critical, we should be more critical. I think we’re much to soft on our stuff, but I think we should also vote with our pocket books.

Be sure to check out pt. 2 of my interview tomorrow!