For a conversation between a writer and an English professor, China Mievelle’s conversation with Joshua Miller was surprisingly unwriterly. Typically, conversations with writers focus on the details of the book and the writing and research process employed, and while China of course discussed his work, the discussion seemed more focused on the ideas contained within the work and not the work itself. China shied away from the more writerly aspects, the questions about what it is like to write and what it is like to be a writer, the questions that all writers are asked all the time. He does not seem to care for such questions and would rather talk about the things he thinks about.
The conversation started, of course, with a discussion about genre and experimentalism. For those unfamiliar with China’s work, he writes within a genre called “New Weird,” which combines aspects of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. On this subject, China talked about how he has had this fascination with monsters since he was a kid. He explored this fascination with the monsters he created in Perdido Street Station, named Remades. These monsters allowed him to work with “impossible specificity,” combining humans with all sorts of bits and scraps of animals, each more unorthodox than the last. After all, a monster according to China is something non-human implanted in the human. The discussion then veered to the sociological, since Remades aren’t just any humans mixed with animal parts, but criminals. He described them as “sadistic imagining of the criminal’s body,” after first discussing how people are obsessed with the bodies of criminals, how we see them as less than human.
From there, the conversation shifted to how China utilizes language (as a concept) in his work, particularly in his novel Embassytown. China has an interest in sociolinguistics and how language shapes the way we think and act. He describes his interest in language as more abstract than specific, as in unlike Tolkien, he doesn’t desire to create his own language, merely work with the theories behind it. In fact, in this book, he plays with Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states the grammatical structure of our language shapes how we see the world. Though he acknowledges that this theory is defunct, he still enjoyed exploring its application.
One of the more interesting parts about the conversation for me, was China discussing science-fiction’s obsession with aliens. After all, no matter how they choose to depict them, science-fiction can never truly depict aliens, for “definitionally, the alien cannot be depicted.” Since we are not alien, we are native to our own ways of thinking, we cannot truly imagine an alien being, let alone an alien thought process. In the same way that we cannot say the unsayable definitionally, we cannot show an alien creature.
The last question of the night was asked by a member of the audience and it was “how do you think Brexit will affect the writers and artists living in England (China is British). Though we were long out of time, China could not help but go on a bit of rant about Brexit, which he characterized as the “butchers versus racists” and said that “the EU is as much as a war fetishist as Donald Trump.” As a socialist, China is not particularly attached to either side in the Brexit debate, which allowed him to call out both sides for their hypocrisy. It was great.
