Jared Shurin > Jared's Quotes

“Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.”
― China Miéville

“I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“The easiest way to do anything is properly.”
― K. J. Parker, The Proof House

“Basic fact of life: no matter how far you run, you always take yourself with you.”
― K.J. Parker, The Hammer

“War is an admission of failure”
― K.J. Parker, The Folding Knife

“If the world is a book, are you the hero, or just a walk-on part?”
― K.J. Parker, The Hammer

“A wise man once said that any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re supposed to be doing.”
― K.J. Parker, Blue and Gold

“The world is full of annoyances, none more infuriating than a fool with a valid point.”
― K.J. Parker, Devices and Desires

“It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference.”
― K.J. Parker, Blue and Gold

“It`s remarkable the truly stupid things people can do because it`s expected of them, or they think it`s expected of them.”
― K.J. Parker, Devices and Desires

“Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.”
― China Miéville

“When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?

Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge.

The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.”
― China Miéville

“Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.”
― China Mieville

“Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.”
― China Miéville

“The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.”
― China Miéville

“Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.”
― China Miéville, The Scar

“...where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?”
― China Miéville, Un Lun Dun

“Any moment called now is always full of possibles.”
― China Miéville, Kraken

“For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.”
― China Miéville, The Scar

“A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it."

-Amazon.com interview”
― China Mieville

“I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“Remember the movements that don't look like moving.”
― China Miéville

“Cooking and eating were growing to irritate her with their relentless necessity.”
― China Miéville, The Scar

“There's something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic - starting from the premise that the impossible is true, attempting to undermine expectations.”
― China Miéville

“So...I'm the funny one? I'm the funny sidekick?
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That's no way to talk about anyone! To say they're just hangers-on to someone more important.”
― China Miéville, Un Lun Dun