China Miéville was born on September 6, 1972. Miéville is one of his generation’s most popular and critically acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy.

Miéville identifies himself as part of the “New Weird” literary movement. Like most literary genres and movement, The New Weird is hard to define precisely. It often blurs the genre lines between fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and sets out to address political and social issues without losing sight of the need to entertain. New Weird writing is likely to be set in relatively urban worlds rather than in the romantic countryside often associated with fantasy, and it seeks to think about the issues that lie in our future, rather than to look back in nostalgia. In particular, Miéville says that his goal in writing is to challenge and provoke the reader, rather than to comfort or console.

Miéville grew up in London. In 1994, he received a BA in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. His first novel was published in 1998. King Rat (print) is an urban fantasy in which a young man is caught up in a battle between the Rat King and the Pied Piper.

King Rat was well received, and Miéville’s second novel received even more glowing praise. Perdido Street Station (e-book | e-audio | print) is the first of three novels set in the world of Bas-Lag, which mixes magic, steampunk, and multiple alien races. The novel was nominated for both of the major American science fiction awards, the Hugo and the Nebula, and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best British science fiction novel of the year.

The three Bas-Lag novels share some characters and background plot elements, but they can be read independently. The Scar (e-book | e-audio | print) is a tale of interstellar intrigue; it was nominated for the Hugo and Clarke awards. Iron Council (e-book | e-audio | print) focuses on political conflict in Bas-Lag, with elements of classic westerns mixed into the plot; it was also a Hugo nominee, and won Miéville his second Clarke award.

In 2001, Miéville received a master’s degree and a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics. During his studies there, he became a Marxist. His PhD thesis was on Marxist interpretation of international law, and he later co-edited a volume of essays on Marxism in science fiction.

His politics do influence his fiction, Miéville says, but he is not “trying to smuggle in [his] evil message.” The story comes first. “I'm trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that's fantastic. But if not, isn't this a cool monster?”

Miéville has said that he wants to write a novel in every genre. We’ve already seen that there are fairy tale elements in King Rat, and Western tropes in Iron Council. Miéville takes his stab at detective fiction in The City and the City (e-book | e-audio | print), in which a police detective is involved in a murder investigation in the neighboring city. The killer appears to have violated the complex rules regulating the border between the two cities. The City and the City was nominated for the Nebula, and won both the Hugo (in a tie) and the Clarke awards.

Also nominated for all three awards was Embassytown (e-book | e-audio | print), set on an alien planet where issues of translation lead to a diplomatic crisis between the native species and the human colonists..

Miéville has made occasional ventures into writing for comics. His major work in that genre was the 2012-13 run of DC Comics’ Dial H (e-book | print), about a man who is briefly transformed into a superhero by a mysterious phone booth, with unpredictably different powers each time he transforms.

Miéville’s most recent work of adult fiction is The Last Days of New Paris (e-book | e-audio | print), an alternate-history novella in which World War II is still going on in 1950, with surrealist artists playing a major role in the French Resistance. His other recent work includes the picture book The Worst Breakfast (e-book | print), co-written and illustrated by Zak Smith; and the non-fiction book October (e-book | print), a history of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Miéville is one of several science fiction authors who are interviewed in Chatting Science Fiction (e-audio), a collection of episodes from a long-running radio show on science fiction.

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