China Miéville's first novel, King Rat, was a horrific riff on the Pied Piper fairytale. In Perdido Street Station, Miéville invents New Crobuzon—a corrupt, sprawling metropolis populated by humanoid insects, walking cacti, grotesquely bio-engineered "Remades" and conscious machine life, as well as a couple of ordinary human types—under siege by soul-sucking creatures unleashed by an unwitting experiment. In crafting this fantastical world, Miéville doesn't flinch from depicting how flawed beings suffer in owning up to their shortcomings, even as they achieve noble ends.

Miéville's fantasy is permeated by the realism that rejects simplistic happily-ever-after situations. His next novel, The Scar, forthcoming in 2002, while set in the same universe, is a standalone narrative.Congratulations on winning the Arthur C. Clarke award for Perdido Street Station. Does it strike you as ironic or incongruent at all that your fantasy novel based in a "steampunk" ethos of whirling cogs and punchcards wins an award named after the preeminent hard SF writer of satellites and spaceships, in which prose sensibilities are typically not paramount?

Miéville: Thank you—I'm still quite delighted. There is an irony in it, yes, but it's not that unusual for the award to go to very "unClarkeian" SF. Clarke himself has been very generous-spirited about that, very supportive of the award no matter who it goes to.

As well as being personally delighted, I'm pleased because I've always felt that it is ultimately impossible to draw a sharp line between SF and fantasy—certainly I self-consciously draw on tropes from both—and I hope that the award going to a novel that's not "straight" SF might encourage a broad conception of the tradition. I've always liked to argue that I write "weird fiction," because that's writing which exists at the intersection of SF, fantasy and even horror, and clearly illustrates the blurred boundaries. I mean, it's easy to say that Niven is SF and Tolkien is fantasy, but what about David Lindsay? Lovecraft? Clark Ashton Smith?Although an argument could be made for some of the "science" in this novel, even though it is dependent on Victorian-era mechanics. Crisis theory sounds something like quantum speculations, and certainly the notion of artificial intelligence is a longstanding obsession of science fiction. There's also the "mad scientist" motif—the unleashing of disastrous forces as a direct result of arrogant and unthinking scientific manipulation without regard for the consequences. What's your take on such "yesterday's science fiction has become today's science fact" issues such as biotechnology and "thinking" machines that underpin your work?

Miéville: On the whole, I don't think we should look to SF for prophesying in science, or sociology, or anything else. I don't think that's what SF does well. Having said which, obviously there are scientists directly inspired by the SF they read as kids, and so I'm not arguing that there's no influence.

I'm very pro-science. I think it's very exciting. I tried to avoid the traditional "meddling with science" trope. I tried to argue that it's not the pursuit of knowledge per se which leads to problems, any more than it is (despite what's usually claimed) in Frankenstein. For Mary Shelley, it was refusing to take responsibility for the fruits of your research—in my book, as much as anything, it's bloody bad luck.

The problem is not science, but the ends to which it's put. Biotech is a good example. I have absolutely no problem, in the abstract, with research into genetic modification of food. However, I have a very, very big problem with that research being run at the behest of profiteers. So this stuff is released without nearly enough testing—we've still no real idea the long-term effects—and besides, loads of the research is into socially useless profit-driven nonsense like making plants responsive only to one brand of fertilizer. Obviously, things are going to really kick off in the next few years with biotech, and I'm excited. Partly it's just the grotesquerie of it appeals to my macabre nature. Mice with jellyfish genes that glow green ... cool! If I were an English major (and I was), I'd be tempted to draw a parallel between the similarity in your last name to Melville (in fact, if bookstores just shelved everything together as fiction instead of by genre, you might be next to one another). The protagonist of Perdido Street Station is named Isaac, who in the Bible is a son of Abraham and brother of Ishmael, the hero of Melville's Moby Dick.

Both works detail a maniacal revenge quest against an evil beast, in the course of which providing horrific details about the human condition while casting doubts about providential intention. Of course, the business of being an English major is to make tenuous connections even flimsier than this one. But did you as an Englishman derive any inspiration from the prototypical Great American Novel? And what significance do you attach to the name of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, which rolls off the tongue in an interesting way?

Miéville: Certainly Moby Dick is an inspiration—it has been on most of what I've written, in some way or other, ever since I read it more than 10 years ago. It's a quite stunning book. I wasn't consciously constructing parallels with Moby Dick in my book, but that certainly doesn't mean they're not there. I don't think we should get too hung up on authorial intention being the sole source of themes in a book. I think most writers learn a lot about their own work from intelligent reviews.

I chose Isaac's name because I wanted it to sound a little more familiar, more resonant, than the totally constructed names of a lot of epic fantasy. But it needed some of the suggestive, almost parodic feel of the names in Dickens and above all in Mervyn Peake.Thomas Disch, in his The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, argues for Edgar Allan Poe as the "grandaddy" of the science fiction genre in part because of his "gross-out aesthetic." As Disch defines it, "The gross-out artist does not aim to provoke laughter—or even a smile. The gasp of what he's after: the gasp of, This isn't happening!" There's a lot of grossness in your work, not just in Disch's sense but in the sense of things that are just, well, plain gross. In the hands of a lesser artist, use of the gross is for mere shock value. What are you aiming for?

Miéville: Partly I think that's a reaction against the tradition of mainstream, post-Tolkien fantasy. I know it's a generalization, but the setting tends to be sort of "feudalism lite"—without a lot of muck, blood, piss or shit. So this was a response to that. Also it's very much a Lovecraftian sense—so to that extent, yeah, it's about grossing people out. But in, you know, a good way. Fantastic literature shouldn't try to avoid ordure, or realistic grit and unpleasantness.

Critics often bemoan the Big Fat Fantasy Phenomenon of multi-volume sets of medievalistic characters in magical settings doing battle against the forces of Evil. Although you do have a map (a key characteristic of Tolkienesque derivatives), and another novel in the same "universe" as Perdidio Street Station, there's nary an elf, a wizard or a magical sword to be found. Is there a dedicated conscious intent on your part to distinguish your "world building" from the clichés of the genre, or are you just simply following your own muse?

Miéville: Both. My own tastes in fantastic and weird fiction have always tended towards the macabre, the surreal, the oneiric, and I never really got on well with Tolkien or most of the post-Tolkien writers. And yes, I was very deliberately trying to subvert some of the assumptions that characterize a lot of genre fantasy, precisely because I love that kind of subversive work.

I loath, for example, the kind of essentialism in fantasy that defines characters by reference to their race. You know, dwarfs are solid and unimaginative, elves are fey and clever, trolls are evil. I tried to play with ideas of racial essentialism in Perdido—in my world, characters are certainly treated as if their race defined them, just as people often are in the real world, but that doesn't mean that it's accurate. It's simply racism. What a lot of fantasy does is claim that racial stereotyping is—within the imagined world—true.

Another thing I wanted to do was have a fantasy book that was not based in some never-never-land version of feudalism, but where the social relations were those of industry and capitalism. And yes, that was a direct response to some of the fantasy cliches.

The problem with much "traditional" fantasy, is that it's become comfort food. It's precisely about mollycoddling the reader by sticking to certain conventions. Tolkien talks about "consolatory fiction," an idea which I really hate. I think that the fantastic aesthetic is precisely good at subverting expectations, rubbing the world the wrong way, problematizing, alienating the reader. Just look at surrealism, surely the high point of the fantastic in the arts. To make fantasy consolatory is to betray it—the problem with that kind of fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough.Gabriel Chouinard has described your work as belonging to the "Next Wave" of fantasy—a play on the New Wave of 1960s science fiction that sought to distinguish itself as a literary form built on SF pulp motifs—comprising such authors as yourself, M. John Harrison, Matthew Stover, Jeff VanderMeer, Mary Gentle, among others, and, of course, Michael Moorcock, who has feet firmly planted in both movements. But is it fair to say there is any kind of formal "movement?" You guys exchange e-mail in developing anti-Tolkien manifestos? Drink brandy-laced coffee, smoke weird cigarettes and bemoan bestseller lists? Or is it just another label that people put on you that you never bother to think about?

Miéville: Well, a lot of us certainly exchange e-mails, and discuss ideas, and argue about "traditional" fantasy (and other stuff). Brandy-laced coffee? More of a tea man myself. But no, there's no formal movement as such. How many formal literary movements are there? With a couple of important exceptions (surrealism and OULIPO, and maybe others) most literary "movements" are labels applied to disparate writers, rather than self-conceptions. But I think it's important to stress that that does not mean that it's useless to talk about movements. They exist as much in their reception as in any explicitly shared project. The point is not whether we all agree on everything, but that there seems to be a group of writers whose work dovetails in certain interesting aesthetic aspects (even though, of course, it differentiates in others). I would never ever alter what I write because of thinking about my putative membership of such a group, and I'm sure none of those others would either, but the point surely is that thematic links can be traced between writers who are writing precisely what they want. They don't have to be formal links.

For example, I read Michael Swanwick's Iron Dragon's Daughter after I'd written Perdido Street Station. It's an absolutely stunning book, and one that I think has many thematic links to my own. It would be completely reasonable, reading them both, to think that I'd been influenced by Michael's book. It's surely not enough to say, "Well, actually he didn't read it till afterwards, so there's no connection." The interesting point is just that there's stuff going on in the world, and in the world of fantastic literature, which made two writers write in certain similar ways.Your book jacket blurb states that you're a Ph.D candidate at the London School of Economics. First off, how does a graduate student have time to write novels? And once you get your doctorate, do you intend to work in the field of economics? Or is this just an intellectual sideline to your literary pursuits?

Miéville: My Ph.D isn't in economics. The LSE is a social sciences university. I'm working on the philosophy of international law.

The time thing is a big problem. All I can say is that I do it by rigidly and carefully dividing my time. Doing a lot of the writing during vacations and making sure that I operate with a reasonable amount of self-discipline. I'm due to finish my Ph.D at the end of September, so I'm hoping my time issues will get far more easier after that.

I hope to write fiction full-time, for as long as I can make a living at it. But I'd like to keep working in academia too, in my spare time. I'm on the editorial board of an academic journal and I'll keep doing that, as well, hopefully, as well as publishing non-fiction essays and books as I find time.I also can't help but think of another famous Englishman who attended the same school as yours, Mick something-or-other, had this blues band. Got real good at merchandising things with tongue logos. Any chance we'll be seeing action dolls based on the characters in Perdido Street Station any time soon?

Miéville: Oh, I would love, I would so, so love that. I've always thought that there's a real gap in the merchandising market, which is to make figures from books. You look at the beautiful stuff put out by the Spawn toys people, for example, and I wonder why they don't put out a bunch of figures from Lovecraft books, say, or King, or others. And if any figure-sculptors out there feel inspired by Perdido, then please tell me.

It does seem to me that there is potential for a celluloid version of Perdido Street Station, but my fear is that it would focus on producing spectacularly gross special effects that would leave any literary intent behind. Has Hollywood come calling about your book, and would you be willing to leave them to their own devices to interpret your work?

Miéville: I'd be delighted to see films made of my stuff. I actually think my first book, King Rat, is more immediately filmable than Perdido. There's some discussion going on, and I'm open to and excited by all suggestions. Certainly, I'd like a lot of creative input, and I'd feel very protective of my stuff. I love the world I've created, and I'd be pretty gutted if the film screwed it up. But at the same time, you have to remember that it's not your project, and the kind of story you can tell in a two-hour film is very different to that you can tell in a book, so you can't be too poo-faced about it. I have very particular ideas about what would work, filmically, but I'm not dogmatic about it.You've also run for a political seat as a member of the Socialist Alliance, a point of view that would seem particularly out of favor in these days of global capitalism. What's your take on the recent re-election of Tony Blair and England's fate in the new Euro-union?

Miéville: I think it's in this time of global capitalism that radical and dissident views are precisely on the upsurge. Seattle, Washington, Prague, Nice, Bolivia ... The dissent and the anti-capitalist movement keeps growing, and I'm immensely excited by that.

Tony Blair's re-election was absolutely no surprise, and nor was the program he unveiled. Attacks on the unions, attacks on public service, more and more privatization. Just like all over the world, the British government is sucking up to big business. People are not going to stand for it—there's more and more grassroots revolt going on. I've been a socialist activist for several years, and things have never been so exciting for me.

I'm an internationalist, and have every desire to link up with workers and activists in other countries, but that doesn't mean I support the EU. The European Union has been designed by bankers, for the interests of bankers and big business. The criteria you need to fulfill to join are designed to drive down workers' wages and curtail public spending on public services. Those of us who support people before profit can't support the EU. The underbelly of the city seems to be a theme of your work—a place haphazardly designed to cordon off undesirables, segregate races and suppress the rebellious while providing both overt and covert avenues for the powerful and the criminal to exert their influence and control their domains. Anything you actually like about the cityscape?

Miéville: I do live in London, and it's a massive influence on pretty much everything I write. And I love cityscapes! Just because I'm cynical about the power dynamics going on in cities doesn't mean I don't love them! I love big cities, like London, New York, Cairo. I find them very inspiring and fascinating. Everything that goes on within is so intense, the press of social relations and pressures, the creativity, the architecture. Everything's more exciting in cities, from politics, to art, to the physical environment. I see myself as a very urban writer. In a tradition of London writers like Thomas de Quincey, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and others.Your next novel, The Scar, shares the same setting as Perdido Street Station. Can you give us any clues as to what we can expect?

Miéville: It's set in the same world, but it's very much a stand-alone book. It's not a sequel in any direct sense, though if you've read Perdido there'll be references and riffs in The Scar that hopefully will resonate. The intention is to write a book that you don't have to have read Perdido to enjoy, but that if you do, you'll get certain things out of it.

It's a very different book from Perdido. The response to Perdido has been so overwhelming, and incredibly gratifying, that I can't help being very nervous about the response to The Scar. In many ways, I think it's a bleaker book, more challenging, and I think that it makes more demands on the reader, but hopefully in a good way. I'm always very aware that the first job is to tell a story.Do you intend to return to New Crobuzon for additional tales? If so, how does this particular worldview provide you with a palette that a more realistic, or even a more "traditional" fantasy setting wouldn't?

Miéville: Absolutely, I'll be returning. I'm very into that world. I tried to create it with an eye to the kind of macabre and baroque and surreal that I love to read, so it's no surprise that I find it fertile. I have maps and timelines detailing the history of a lot of the world, and I'm not stuck to New Crobuzon itself—there are places beyond that city. I look forward to writing more stuff set there because there's an almost limitless potential for the grotesqueries I enjoy creating, and the exploration of the themes I find interesting. The more stuff written about that world, the more texture and detail I can create, the more all of the pieces feed into each other, riff off each other, add texture to each other. I love the whole process of world creation. I'm having a really good time.