There is an almost universal human desire to dislike those who accomplish great things. Take China Miéville, for instance. He wrote a novel, Perdido Street Station, that single-handedly changed the rules of the fantasy genre, and he did it before he turned thirty. What’s more, he did it while being tall, devilishly handsome, and cut like an action-figure. What fantasy writer looks like that? It wouldn’t be so unbearable if he had the good taste to be short, fat, or at the very least old. But he is none of those things.

It doesn’t help that Perdido Street Station is a tremendously good book. His world of Bas Lag is the most richly, obsessively imaged realm since J.R.R. Tolkien’s. But unlike that grandfather of the field and his sea of imitators, Perdido Street Station and its follow-ups, The Scar and Iron Council, are socially relevant, politically current, and anything but derivative. Think Middle Earth meets Dickensian London on really good acid.

So, this brilliant young radical quickly amasses a huge reputation, and as with anyone who accomplishes too much too soon and bends the rules effortlessly, we want to despise him. Then you meet him, and find out he is one of the warmest, kindest, and most infuriatingly humble-where-his-colossal-talent-is-concerned individuals in the field. It really is too much. You don’t have any choice but to love the guy.

I caught up with Miéville in his London flat, across a transatlantic phone call that ran well past dinnertime in Alabama and into the wee hours of the morning in merry old England. With a kettle on at both ends, he filled me in on what happens when creatures out of arcane mythologies stand up and say they want a revolution.

—Lou Anders

I. “NO ONE EVER GOT INTO SCIENCE FICTION
FOR THE SEX OR PRESTIGE.”

THE BELIEVER: Are you a geek?

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Yeah, I am completely a geek. I find it very interesting entering my thirties, because the early thirties basically seems to be the era of the revenge of the geek, when those of us who didn’t have particularly exciting teenage years because we were too busy obsessively collecting comics and playing Dungeons & Dragons suddenly start running the world. But geeks are able to use their powers for good and evil, and when I look at people like Rumsfeld I definitely think I’m seeing a fellow geek, just a geek on the dark side. But yes, I feel fantastically geeky. I’m not one of those people who’s enormously proud of being a geek, but nor am I particularly ashamed...