Beam Me Up, China

Like a lot of people, I just can’t get enough of China Miéville, so when I heard that The Bat Segundo Show had added a podcast interview with the author, I beamed on over. It was worth the ’Net sweat. From the podcast:

When we say “world-building,” we tend to think of that D&D-esque kind, which is not a diss incidentally. It’s just a description. It’s sort of a consolidation between the geography and the history and the culture and so on before writing the story. At that’s one way of doing it. But then there are others, which are less rigid, less to do with internal coherence, in the same way. So in terms of something like Un Lun Dun or some of the short stories or even King Rat, and the book I’m working on [at] the moment as well, it’s less to do with having a coherent back-narrative and more to do with having a coherent moral and emotional feeling.

Ed Rants and The Bat Segundo Show have also just published podcast interviews with Ellen Klages, Arlene Goldbard and Ken Alder. You can catch up with all of them -- and more -- here. And if you want even more of Miéville, here’s Andi Shechter’s January Magazine review of Un Lun Dun from back in March.