By A.C. Thompson and David Martinez

CHINA MI& eacute;ville is an incorrigible overachiever. At 31 the London native has single-handedly murdered a forest's worth of trees, churning out four hefty novels – 2,151 pages in total – while simultaneously pursuing a full-bore academic career, earning a B.A. from the University of Cambridge, doing a stint at Harvard studying Arabic, and completing an M.A. and a doctorate in international relations at the London School of Economics.

Book number five, a treatise on the philosophy of international law – a timely subject given the current vogue in conquest and torture – is due out later this year.

Obviously, it's too soon to tell how Miéville's first foray into nonfiction will be received, but the dark alternate universe of his lit has already gained a devout following among connoisseurs of phantasmagoric fiction. It's easy to understand why: Miéville – no hyperbole here – is easily one of the most skilled and audacious writers currently generating fantastic fiction, a storyteller who convincingly collapses genre barriers by weaving elements of horror, fantasy, and even western cowboy pulp into a tapestry of the grotesque. His characters are, for the most part, three-dimensional and compelling; the seamless plots are propulsive and undergirded by strong lefty political currents.

At the center of Miéville's world is New Crobuzon. It's a seething Dickensian city where Victorian-era technology – coal- and steam-powered engines, oil-burning lamps, etc. – coexists with robotics, as if some glitch in the space-time continuum caused well-separated historic epochs to meld, Terry Gilliam-style.

Comparisons between Miéville and Lord of the Rings sire J.R.R. Tolkien are inevitable. Both are British. Both created compelling whole-cloth worlds inhabited by bizarre creatures. However, the similarities pretty much end there. At heart, Tolkien's merry band of adventurers simply wants to swap an evil king for a wholesome monarch; Miéville, by contrast, often seems skeptical of all leaders. Also unlike Tolkien, he's consciously set his stories in a capitalist economy, giving him plenty of opportunity to comment, without hijacking the narrative, on the boot-on-the-neck power dynamics of the 21st century.

We spoke to Miéville at the Prescott Hotel last month while he was in town on a promotional tour for his latest tome, Iron Council, a 485-page hardcover published by Del Rey; it's the third book in a trilogy that includes Perdido Street Station and The Scar. His first novel is King Rat.

Bay Guardian: What cities inspired New Crobuzon? London, obviously.

China Miéville: London's the obvious one, but London as filtered through art, really, as much as the real London. It's almost like two cities: there's London where I've always lived, which is a big influence, and there's also Michael Moorcock's London and Iain Sinclair's London and Charles Dickens's London and Thomas de Quincey's London and Neil Gaiman's London. For some reason London is a city that refracts particularly intensely and hallucinatorily through fiction. And then a bit of New York, a bit of Cairo, a bit of Havana. My mother lives there [in Havana] – or she did; she's moved back.

BG: How much of New Crobuzon and the rest of the world – the rules, characters, political economy, or whatever – did you come up with before you plunged into actually writing the books?

CM: Quite a bit, actually. I'd been chewing over inventing this world for, well, certainly eight years or so. I started off with monsters, basically. I started with the bestiary and then expanded out from there. By the time I knew I wanted to write Perdido Street Station, I was very consciously trying to write something with a nonfeudal political economy, a sort of Victorian capitalist fantasy novel. So I sort of mapped all that out in some detail before actually writing the story.

And the story, in some ways, for Perdido in particular, is kind of secondary. Not saying I didn't take it seriously, but the way I layer things, it almost always starts with the setting, and then there's certain set pieces like fight scenes or pieces of architecture, and then it goes up and up from there. And the narrative is the last thing that gets layered on top. It doesn't mean I don't work on it or it's not important, but in the process it's the final thing that gets laid on top of the bed of the setting.

So I have reams of notebooks and all the geeky stuff you'd expect – maps, timelines, you know.

BG: Each of the books has a really distinct landscape – the first one is city, the second is sea, and the third isn't unlike Cormac McCarthy's American West.

CM: Cormac McCarthy is definitely an influence, particularly on the third book, but earlier as well. The monologue at the beginning of Perdido Street Station is heavily influenced by the monologue at the beginning of Suttree. Whereas in Perdido I was influenced by McCarthy at the level of language, when I was writing Iron Council, I wanted to write a western, and he's the high priest of the revisionist western, so I was trying to draw on him. But I also wanted to do more straight western stuff – so there's a lot of Zane Grey landscape in there.

You're right. The settings are very different, and that's partly because of the relationship to the readership. When I wrote Perdido Street Station I was really blown away by the reception. Everyone was being really nice about it. People really loved the city of New Crobuzon, and said, "I can't wait for the next book set in New Crobuzon." So it was in a spirit of contrarianness that I set the next book thousands of miles away in the middle of the sea. In the third book I wanted to go back to the city, partly for my sake and partly for readers. But I didn't want to focus it there, so it sort of oscillates between there and the wilderness.

BG: You seem to be skeptical of technology – in one book a scientist unleashes mayhem on the city, in another the wilds are devastated by the railroad, etc.

CM: I'm not at all technophobic. In fact, I dislike the technophobic critique of modernism. What I was trying to do was go back to Frankenstein. You often hear that Frankenstein is about meddling with powers that shouldn't be meddled with. Bullshit. It's about taking responsibility for your actions. The crisis in Frankenstein doesn't arise from doing the science; it arises from turning your back and walking away and not engaging with it.... It's not the science that's at fault; it's the way it's being pushed.

In Iron Council there is ecological catastrophe, but there are two points: One, that's just historical fact – I was riffing off 19th-century railroad construction, and it was not a clean business. But there's also great beauty to those reconfigured landscapes, as well. One of the things I try to imply throughout the book is to move away from this idea that we're fucking up pristine nature.

And don't forget that this is a world where magic is a science.

BG: In your universe, criminals are reengineered into horrific creatures, a class of untouchable monsters called the Remade. In our world, criminals are sent to prisons that turn them into monsters. What do you think about current trends in crime and punishment in your country or ours?

CM: The Remade have two purposes for me: One is that I love strangeness, and they give me license to create a constant array of different monstrosities.... And it's the monstrosification of the antisocial. If you look at the way the media in Britain talk about teenagers, it's the most savage, vicious, animalizing thing – they talk about these "young thugs roaming the streets." They're talking about 15-year-old kids, bored, poor 15-year-old kids who play football in the streets and write stupid words on walls and who are aggressive and leery and all that. But rather than try to understand them, they talk about them as if they were monsters.

BG: We read in your bio that you ran for Parliament on a socialist ticket ...

CM: Socialist Alliance.

BG: What does it mean to be a socialist today? A lot of people would say that socialism is an archaic, unrealistic ideology.

CM: It means the same as it ever did. The crux is people before profit, a deep skepticism of whether the profit motive is the best organizing principle in the world, and that most social ills in modern society, from war through famine, are ultimately traceable to capitalism and the profit system.

In Britain nobody bats an eye if you say you're a socialist. In the States it's kind of like saying you eat babies. So I tend to kind of describe myself as progressive or whatever until I have a chance to really talk to someone.

But I think this is a really good time to be a socialist, since '99 and [the anti-World Trade Organization protests in] Seattle – even with things like the PATRIOT Act and all this. More and more people are questioning the powers that be and their agenda. I just think there's something so unbelievably fantastic and moving about the fact that World Trade Organization or G-8 or whatever can't meet anywhere in the world without putting up a fortress to keep thousands of incredibly pissed-off activists and trade unionists from throwing shit at them. That's the most fantastic thing.

BG: Still, people demonstrating against corporate globalization is nothing compared to 30 years ago when there were actual socialist states in Latin America.

CM: It's true. What we have now is considerably better than the '80s, but we're not yet the '60s. The tradition of socialism that I [subscribe to] never had any truck with the Stalinist states; many of my socialist heroes were murdered by the Stalinists. A lot of the so-called socialist states I don't consider socialist – Cuba, for example. I consider Cuba a brave experiment that was never going to succeed because it wasn't based on grassroots democracy.

BG: Going back to writing, are you a harsh self critic? When you look back on your work, do you say "I wish I could've done this scene better" or "I wish I had a created a more three-dimensional character"?

CM: I get more harsh as I get older. The first couple of books I thought, "I've got this down." Now I go back and reread Perdido, and in places I'm, like, "ooohh" [screws his face into a grimace]. Even in Iron Council I think there are bits I could've done differently. As I get better, I get harsher, which I think is a good thing. In an ideal world you'd write a book and then you'd put it in a drawer and you wouldn't look at it for a year. Then you'd go back and reread it and edit it. But publishing schedules being what they are, you generally don't have the luxury of doing that.

BG: What is your writing process like? Do you do a certain number of hours a day? Do you need a quiet meditative place? Or do you drag your laptop to the café?

CM: I tend to be a café laptop person – earplugs and a laptop in the café. Because I get stir-crazy if no one's moving. Also, this is the double-edged sword of wireless access in cafés. When there was no wireless access, I couldn't do e-mails or fuck about online. Now I can always just see who's on IM. I have to rein that shit in.

It tends to take me a few days to gear up, and then I go into a kind of autistic state where I'll just loop and loop and loop, and write for chunks of time.... I'm like an aircraft carrier: it takes a very long time to get going, but when it does it's hard to stop it.