I interviewed China Miéville, the author of Un Lun Dun, The Scar, and Perdido Street Station, earlier today. If you haven't read his books, he writes Dickensian urban fantasy that's about as far away from Tolkien as you can get. his newest book is called The City and the City*, and it's about as far away from Miéville's earlier work as you can get: It's like a Philip K. Dick novel, only instead of the main character having a fractured identity, the setting is what's completely schizophrenic. It's a police procedural novel set in a city that has a psychological border with another city: Like if East and West Berlin decided to politely ignore each other instead of putting up a wall.

I'll put up the full text of the interview next week, but I have to say that Miéville is a hugely entertaining conversationalist. In twenty minutes we went from e-books—"If I was starting now I'd be very pro e-dissemination. I think it's one of those things where it is both inevitable and desirable"—to his influences in writing the most different novel of his career—"If you're a fan of [Philip K. Dick's] you never see outside him," but the major influences for The City and the City include Kafka and Bruno Schulz— to "The growing but still tiny number of Poles with African heritage."

He wrote The City and the City because "my mum was very ill and she's always been a crime reader. I wanted to write something that was completely related to her preferred protocols." Very little of the book relates to his previous works, but it was written at the same time as another book, "a big fat urban fantasy much more flavored like Perdido."

And we concluded our discussion by talking about the idea that they're remaking the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie (Miéville is a huge Buffy fan.) "My alarm bells are ringing. Never underestimate the sheer crassness of these people. How about we don't go and see it." I pointed out that geek culture resists the idea of not seeing movies that look bad. "But still," he said, "How about we don't go and see it. How about we don't go and see Transformers: Revenge of What the Fuck Ever. Of course Michael Bay's film is awful. He's Michael Bay! It was the Star Wars prequel that did it for me. I saw the first, but I'm never going to go see the others. There's quite enough really really great entertainment." He proposed the idea of an anti-Ain't It Cool News website called "Let's Not Go.com. You could publish reviews by people who saw it so you don't have it."

Miéville's reading at Third Place Books on June 5th, and you really ought to consider going. The interview will be up on our books page next week.

* The City & the City cover on this post is the British edition. As always, it is a superior cover to the American edition.