Meet my newest, favoritest author

Confession time: I haven't read any of China Miéville's work. None of it, although I've heard so many raves in the last couple of years I fully expect to devour King Rat, Perdido Street Station and the rest in due course. So why is Miéville my newest, most favoritest author? Because of his new interview up at RevolutionSF, where he shares this sage insight:

RevolutionSF is one of the Web sites I think is doing a great job with cutting-edge sf, so I'm very flattered you all want to chat.

Truly, this is a man who's got his head screwed on right! He's actually one of the names on my short list of authors I'd like to interview, but as my self-imposed moratorium on interviewing takes root, it's looking more and more like that won't be happening. Still, interviews such as this one by Andrew Kozma are a lot of fun in their own right. Especially since he brings out insights from Miéville I doubt I'd have gotten:

I think you've put your finger on something very important, which is the confidence to not feel you have to explain everything. You can never, possibly, depict a whole world, so you shouldn't bother trying. And the hinted-at detail, which then isn't fleshed out, can be enormously useful as a way of instilling a kind of culture shock in the reader, which is a technique I like very much. I often mention things in passing. They may get fleshed out later, but it's not to be expected. Partly that's because in some cases I don't know the answers myself. Usually though I do, but I just don't want to lay it out, because it would be banal to spell it out. I think that refusal to explain everything ironically gives you a feeling of a fuller world.

Interestingly enough, this is the same point I find myself making (far less eloquently than Miéville) in my commentary on submissions to RevSF, and also during the Armadillocon writers workshop. I face this problem myself in my own writing too often--how much do you explain, how much do you take on faith the reader will twig onto? I describe it as "trusting the reader to connect the dots." Implying a cultural trait or odd environmental reality is more effective than explaining it in many cases. That makes the reference more mysterious, more intriguing and more exotic for the reader. In speculative fiction, that implied reality takes on phenominal proportions in the reader's mind that often times the author cannot match. In all honesty, how many of you were sorely disappointed once Fred Pohl finally introduced the Heechee? Detailed explanations simply bog a story down in many cases, and has its own entry in the Turkey City Lexicon which is pretty self-explanatory: "I've suffered for my art (and now it's your turn)."

Miéville's obvious good taste in fiction aside, this interview moves him up several spaces on my radar. He says all the right things (these being defined as things I wish I'd said in such a clever fasion, had anyone taken the time or interest to ask me), and the next time I'm at the local Hasting's I'll see what they've got in stock.

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