Born China Tom Miéville
6 September 1972 (age
54)
Norwich, Norfolk,
England
Education
Clare College,
Cambridge (BA)
London School of
Economics (PhD)
Occupations Short-story writer, novelist, essayist
and comic book author
Writing career
Period 1998–present
Genres
Urban fantasy
Weird fiction
Steampunk
Notable works
Perdido Street
Station (2000)
The City & the
City (2009)
October: The Story of
the Russian Revolution (2017)
Movement New Weird
Website chinamieville.net
China Tom Miéville
(/miˈeɪvəl/ mee-AY-vəl, born 6 September 1972 is a British speculative fiction
writer and literary critic. He often describes his work as "weird
fiction", and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers
called New Weird.
Miéville has won
multiple awards for his fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, British
Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Awards.
He holds the record for the most Arthur C. Clarke Award wins (three). His novel
Perdido Street Station was ranked by Locus as the 6th best fantasy novel
published in the 20th century During 2012–13, he was writer-in-residence at
Roosevelt University in Chicago. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature in 2015
Miéville is active in
left politics in the UK and has previously been a member of the International
Socialist Organization (US) and the short-lived International Socialist Network
(UK). He was formerly a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and in 2013
became a founding member of Left Unity. He stood for Regent's Park and
Kensington North for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 United Kingdom general
election, gaining 1.2% of votes cast.
Early life and
education
Miéville was born in
Norwich and brought up in Willesden, and has lived in London since early
childhood. Miéville's parents separated soon after his birth, and he has said
that he "never really knew" his father He grew up with his sister
Jemima and mother Claudia. His mother was a translator, writer and teacher, and
the daughter of Leo Claude Vaux Miéville, whose wife Youla (née Harrison) was
granddaughter of Edward Littleton, 4th Baron Hatherton. His parents chose his
first name, China, from a dictionary, looking for a beautiful name. By virtue
of his mother's nationality, Miéville holds US citizenship in addition to
British citizenship. In 1982 his mother married Paul Lightfoot, a maternal
descendant of George Charles Mostyn, 6th Baron Vaux of Harrowden; they divorced
in 1992.
Miéville boarded at
Oakham School, a co-educational independent school in Oakham, Rutland, for two
years. He subsequently attended University College School. At the age of
eighteen, in 1990, he taught English for a year in Egypt, where he developed an
interest in Arab culture and in Middle Eastern politics. Miéville studied for a
BA degree in social anthropology at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in
1994, and gained both a master's degree and PhD in international law from the
London School of Economics in 2001. Miéville has also held a Frank Knox
fellowship at Harvard University. After becoming dissatisfied with the ability
of post-modern theories to explain history and political events, he became a
Marxist at university. A book version of his PhD thesis, entitled Between Equal
Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, was published in the UK in 2005
by Brill in their "Historical Materialism" series, and in the United
States in 2006 by Haymarket Books.
Literary influences
Miéville's works all
describe fantastical or supernatural worlds or scenarios. Miéville has said he
plans to write a novel in every genre. To this end, he has "constructed an
oeuvre" that ranges from classic American Western (in Iron Council) to
sea-quest (in The Scar and Railsea) to detective noir (in The City & the
City). His work has been described as new weird fiction.
Miéville has listed
M. John Harrison, Michael de Larrabeiti, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch,
Charles Williams, Tim Powers, and J. G. Ballard as literary "heroes";
he has also frequently discussed as influences H. P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake,
Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gene Wolfe. He has said that he would like his novels
"to be read for [his imagined city] New Crobuzon as Iain Sinclair does for
London". Miéville has admitted that his books contain some allusions to Russian
writers, including Andrei Platonov, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Evgeny
Voiskunsky [ru] and Isai Lukodyanov [ru].
Miéville played a
great deal of Dungeons & Dragons and similar roleplaying games (RPGs) in
his youth. He has attributed his tendency to systematisation of magic and
theology to this influence.[7] In his novel Perdido Street Station, he refers
to characters interested "only in gold and experience". The February
2007 issue of Dragon magazine interpreted the world presented in his books
according to Dungeons & Dragons rules. The Player's Handbook for the fifth
edition of Dungeons & Dragons cited his novel Perdido Street Station as a
source of inspiration for the game's designers.
In 2010, Miéville
made his first foray into writing for RPGs with a contribution to the
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game supplement Guide to the River Kingdoms.
Miéville once
described Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature".
Miéville is also indebted to Moorcock, having cited his essay "Epic
Pooh" as the source upon which he is "riffing" or even simply
"cheerleading" in his critique of Tolkien-imitative fantasy.[20]
Despite his criticisms, Miéville has praised Tolkien for his contributions to
fantasy, especially in a 2009 blog post where he gave five reasons why Tolkien was
praiseworthy.
He has cited Michael
de Larrabeiti's Borrible Trilogy as one of his biggest influences, and he wrote
an introduction for the trilogy's 2002 reissue (the introduction was eventually
left out of the book, but appears on de Larrabeiti's website).
Politics
Miéville has
previously been a member of the International Socialist Organization (US) and,
until 13 March 2013, was also a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP,
UK). He stood unsuccessfully for the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in
the 2001 general election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance, gaining
459 votes, equivalent to 1.2%, in Regent's Park and Kensington North, a Labour
constituency .
In January 2013, he
emerged as a critic of the SWP's leadership and in March resigned over the
leadership's handling of rape allegations against a leading SWP member.
In August 2013,
Miéville was one of nine signatories (along with veteran film-maker and
socialist Ken Loach, academic Gilbert Achcar, General Secretary of the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament Kate Hudson, fellow novelist Michael Rosen, and actor
Roger Lloyd Pack) of an open letter to The Guardian announcing the foundation
of a "new party of the left", to be called Left Unity. The letter,
which claimed that Labour policies on austerity and the breaking of ties with
trades unions amounted to a "final betrayal of the working-class people it
was founded to represent", stated that Left Unity would be launched at a
"founding conference" in London on 30 November 2013 and would provide,
as an "alternative" to Labour, "a party that is socialist,
environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination".
In 2014, together
with Richard Seymour and others, Miéville quit the International Socialist
Network, a Left Unity faction, over a dispute concerning the acceptability of
sexual "race play" that was prompted by discussion of a controversial
art piece owned by Dasha Zhukova.
In 2015, he was
announced as one of the founding editors of a "bi-annual journal of
revolutionary arts and letters", Salvage. He has been the director of
Salvage Publications since 2014.
October, published in
2017, documents the dramatic events of the Russian revolution. Jonathan Steele
reviewed it for The Guardian. Steele considers it an ideological though nuanced
retelling: "Known as a left-wing activist, [...] Miéville writes with the
brio and excitement of an enthusiast who would have wanted the revolution to
succeed. But he is primarily interested in the dramatic narrative – the weird
facts – of the most turbulent year in Russia's history".
In a letter to
Joybrato Mukherjee on 22 April 2024, Miéville rejected his nomination for a
DAAD fellowship, citing Mukherjee's role in the cancelling of Jewish-American
political theorist Nancy Fraser's Albertus Magnus Professorship at the
University of Cologne because Fraser signed a pro-Palestine letter during the
Gaza war, and his lack of "faith that the institution will stand against
such a shameful program of repression and anti-Palestinian racism."
Personal life
In the early 2000s,
Miéville lived in London with his partner Emma Bircham. They were both cast as
extras in the 1999 film Notting Hill, which he jokingly described as a
dystopian alternate history of an ethnically cleansed city.
In 2013, Miéville denied
allegations of emotional abuse made by an ex-girlfriend. He acknowledged having
had a brief affair with the woman, but stated that her account of it was
untrue. According to Miéville, he was in a non-monogamous relationship at the
time, about which she was aware.
Since 2018, he has
taken steps to defend his privacy, following what he described as a campaign of
harassment and online defamation.
Miéville is married
to artist Season Butler.
Writings
A comprehensive list
of Miéville's work is available at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
Fiction
Bas-Lag series
Perdido Street
Station (2000)
The Scar (2002)
Iron Council (2004)
Stand-alone novels
King Rat (1998) ISBN
978-0312890735
Un Lun Dun (2007)
ISBN 978-0230015869
The City & the
City (2009) ISBN 978-1405000178
Kraken (2010) ISBN
978-0333989500
Embassytown (2011)
ISBN 978-0230750760
Railsea (2012) ISBN
978-0230765108
The Book of Elsewhere
(2024), with Keanu Reeves
The Rouse (2026) ISBN
978-1509847396
Novellas
The Tain (2002)
This Census-Taker
(2016)
The Last Days of New
Paris (2016) ISBN 978-0345543998
Short story
collections
Looking for Jake
(2005)
Three Moments of an
Explosion: Stories (2015)
Children's picture
books
The Worst Breakfast
(2016), co-written and illustrated by Zak Smith
Comic books
Hellblazer (1988
series) – #250 "Holiday Special": "Snow Had Fallen" (Feb.
2009)
Justice League (2011
series) – #23.3 "Dial E #1: Dial Q for Qued" (Nov. 2013)
Dial H (2012–2013
series) – #1-#15
Other
Pathfinder
Chronicles: Guide to the River Kingdoms (2010), with Elaine Cunningham, Chris
Pramas, and Steve Kenson. Paizo Publishing.
In an anthology
"Watching
God" (first publ. in Three Moments of an Explosion, 2015), in Out of the
Ruins, edited by Preston Grassmann, Titan Books, 2021 ISBN 978-1789097399
Nonfiction
Books
Between Equal Rights:
A Marxist Theory of International Law (2005). Leiden: Brill. ISBN 1-931859-33-7
Red Planets: Marxism
and Science Fiction (2009), with Mark Bould. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press.
October: The Story of
the Russian Revolution (2017). Verso.
A Spectre, Haunting:
On the Communist Manifesto (2022). Head of Zeus. ISBN 1786692031
Essays
"London's
Overthrow" (2011). Reprinted in a shorter version as "Oh, London, You
Drama Queen", The New York Times Magazine 2012-03-01: 42.
"Preface to a
Book not yet Written nor Disavowed" (2015). China Miéville: Critical
Essays, eds. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia.
Adaptations
In 2006 Miéville's
short story "Details" (collected in Looking for Jake) was adapted as
a screenplay by Dan Kay, and subsequently picked up by the studio Paramount
Vantage.
In February 2013, a
stage adaptation of The City and the City, written by Christopher M. Walsh and
directed by Dorothy Milne, made its world premiere at Lifeline Theatre in
Chicago, Illinois. Miéville attended 16 March 2013 production of the
adaptation.
A television
adaptation of the novel The City & the City was broadcast on BBC 2 in 2018.
American artist
Mariam Ghani's The City & The City (2015) is a loose adaptation of the
novel The City & the City as a video artwork which "maps the
conceptual framework of that novel onto the cityscape of St. Louis, melding
some of the fictions of the novel's world with elements drawn from past and
present histories of the city."
The short story
"Estate" (collected in Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories) was
adapted into a 25-minute movie, released on August 14, 2020,[49] that was
described by a review in SciFiNow as "a 25 minute blast of striking
imagery, earnest performances and intriguing themes."
Honours
Miéville has won
numerous accolades in speculative fiction; he holds the record for the most
Arthur C Clarke Award wins (three). Perdido Street Station was featured in
Locus's poll of all-time best 20th century fantasy novels, where it ranked 6th
place
Miéville's first
novel, King Rat (1998), was nominated for an International Horror Guild, a Bram
Stoker award and a Kurd Laßwitz Award.
The Scar received a
Philip K. Dick Award special citation.
"Reports of
Certain Events in London" (featured in the anthology McSweeney's Enchanted
Chamber of Astonishing Stories) was nominated for a 2005 World Fantasy Award
and tied for the 2005 Locus Award for Best Novelette.
Miéville has been a
Guest of Honour at multiple science fiction conventions, including Orbital 2008
the British National Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) in London and
Readercon 2006.
He was a 2018
Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.
