Search Results

“... these elements will be familiar, almost liturgical, to anyone versed in science fiction, but for China Miéville the tradition’s tropes are the keyboard, not the performance. Embassytown is a tiny, isolated human settlement, on a remote planet at the fringe of a spacefaring empire, that goes for years between relief missions and survives on the ...”

“... from me to you.’ The idiom of the record sleeve is one option open to writers of club fiction: China Miéville concludes his acknowledgments in King Rat with ‘awe and gratitude especially to A Guy Called Gerald for the sublime Gloc: old, now, but still the most terrifying slab of guerrilla bass ever committed to vinyl. Rewind.’ In the central club ...”

“... of the revolution, the number of Communist states in the world is down to a handful, with China’s status ambiguous and only North Korea still clinging to the old verities. Nothing fails like failure, and for historians approaching the revolution’s centenary the disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall. In the rash of new books on the ...”

“... a translation from 1684 by the Scottish Anglican divine Gilbert Burnet with an introduction by China Miéville and a series of concluding essays by Ursula Le Guin. Miéville decks More in punk garb while arguing, plausibly, that capitalism by its nature rules out effective curbs on anthropogenic environmental ...”

“... Science fiction​ isn’t new to China, as Cixin Liu explains in Invisible Planets, an introduction to Chinese sci-fi by some of its most prominent authors, but good science fiction is. The first Chinese sci-fi tales appeared at the turn of the 20th century, written by intellectuals fascinated by Western technology ...”

“... Some​ of M. John Harrison’s books have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi ...”

“... the son of a medical missionary, was born just over a hundred years ago in Kiang-Hsi Province, China. The family moved back to England when he was 12. He attended the Royal Academy and served in the British army in the first years of the Second World War. He suffered from severe mental illness periodically from that time on, spending various spells in a ...”

“... power and the cult transforms, but survives. Okorafor kept her award, but adorned it with cowries; China Miéville kept his too, but turned it to the wall. It seems the question isn’t whether we should strike Lovecraft from the record, but what exactly we should do with him.Jemisin is clear-eyed about all this: she sees through Lovecraft and his ...”

“... by smooth-cheeked, bare-headed acolytes – Tony White, Stewart Home, Steve Aylett, Steve Beard, China Miéville. What you are getting is a frame from Moorcock’s comic strip, The Metatemporal Detective, showing a traditional ‘hell’s kitchen’ where ‘Old Man Smith’, the piratical ruler of the underworld, lounges on a raised chair to receive ...”

“... drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my own compulsive ...”