Writing about China Miéville in The Guardian, Ursula Le Guin opined :“Miéville... is equally comfortable in the worlds of politics and academia. Combining his skills as a storyteller and Marxist theorist... Miéville discusses the intersections between his creative oeuvre and the political projects of utopia and dystopia."
Boston Review: You are often quoted as saying that you want to write a book in every genre. Nonetheless, many of your books have centered around themes of utopia and dystopia. Do you feel as though dystopia has finally, well-and-truly slipped the bounds of genre?
China Miéville: Dystopia and utopia are themes, optics, viruses that can infect any field or genre. Hence you find utopian, dystopian, and heterotopian aspects in stories across the board: westerns, romances, crime—let alone, more obviously, in science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.
There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. We live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours.
To the extent that, before anything else, texts are -topias (particularly utopias) narrowly conceived—warnings, suggestions, cookbooks, or proposals—they are mostly uninteresting to me. Still, the often-repeated slur that utopias are “dull” has never been politically innocent: it bespeaks reaction. When Emil Cioran attacks utopias for lacking the “rupture” of real life—“the totality of sleeping monsters”—
OTOH, he may be the Greatest Living Surrealist - The Last Days Of New Paris is a real tour de force.
