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From Mr Miéville's own Gooodreads profile, the answer:
Is it still your plan to write a book in each genre and when will you return to Bas Lag?
Check out his list of fifty. Just google "Mieville 50" and there's a list that includes a paragraph of commentary on every book in the list.
I’m going to duck the question of how they inspire me a bit: I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to be evasive, it’s just that it’s a very complicated question, and much of the time I simply don’t know. Some people inspire and influence you because you think their writing style is amazing, others because their writing style is something you could never do, others because you love their ideas, others because you read them so young you’ve forgotten them and they’re part of your mental furniture, some because you hate their work so much it gets under your skin and you can’t leave it alone. You can be inspired and influenced by things you’ve never read, that have entered your head at some diffuse remove, and by things that you misremember, so when you finally find the original it’s less interesting than your own wrong memory, and so on. So how they inspire me, I don’t know. That they do is unquestioned.
The question of names is one I get asked not infrequently, and while I don’t mind at all answering it I have to admit I’m always a bit surprised. In part because if anything my concern is that I’ve gone on about my personal pantheon so much everyone must be bored of hearing about them (the fact that you’re asking me this suggests I’m wrong, which I’m pleased about); and in part because I feel like many of the names on my list must be very obvious. I can’t imagine anyone’s surprised to hear that I’m a huge admirer of:
Philip K Dick; Ursula le Guin; M John Harrison; Joan Aiken; Octavia Butler; Samuel Delany; Mervyn Peake; HP Lovecraft; CL Moore; Michael Moorcock; HG Wells; Mary Gentle; Angela Carter; James Blish; Mary Shelley; Gene Wolfe; James Tiptree Jr; Robert Silverberg; Wlliam Hope Hodgson; Kelly Link; and all the others you can probably name.
I suspect that there’s not a person on that list that comes as much a surprise. Basically, the usual pantheons of post-golden-age SF/F/H combined with early 20th Century Weird Fiction are very good starting points: if they’re shelved there, chance is very good I’m a fan.
Who do I love who I think are maybe a little less unsurprising or less known? Charlotte Bronte; Dambudzo Marechera; Harold Pinter; Jane Gaskell; Ivor Cutler; JH Prynne; Jane Gardam; Christopher Smart; Margaret Cavendish; Claude Calhun; Jonathan Swift; Lindsay Gutteridge.
Recent additions? Barbara Comyns; Marion Fox; Michael Cisco; Helen Oyeyemi.
Give me some time I could easily come up with more, but those are at the top of my head right now. And I’ve only been talking about fiction, not non-fiction. Which would maybe not double, but certainly one-and-a-half-times the list.
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H James
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Jun 08, 2011 12:24PM
From Mr Miéville's own Gooodreads profile, the answer:
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Is it still your plan to write a book in each genre and when will you return to Bas Lag?
Check out his list of fifty. Just google "Mieville 50" and there's a list that includes a paragraph of commentary on every book in the list.
I’m going to duck the question of how they inspire me a bit: I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to be evasive, it’s just that it’s a very complicated question, and much of the time I simply don’t know. Some people inspire and influence you because you think their writing style is amazing, others because their writing style is something you could never do, others because you love their ideas, others because you read them so young you’ve forgotten them and they’re part of your mental furniture, some because you hate their work so much it gets under your skin and you can’t leave it alone. You can be inspired and influenced by things you’ve never read, that have entered your head at some diffuse remove, and by things that you misremember, so when you finally find the original it’s less interesting than your own wrong memory, and so on. So how they inspire me, I don’t know. That they do is unquestioned. The question of names is one I get asked not infrequently, and while I don’t mind at all answering it I have to admit I’m always a bit surprised. In part because if anything my concern is that I’ve gone on about my personal pantheon so much everyone must be bored of hearing about them (the fact that you’re asking me this suggests I’m wrong, which I’m pleased about); and in part because I feel like many of the names on my list must be very obvious. I can’t imagine anyone’s surprised to hear that I’m a huge admirer of:
Philip K Dick; Ursula le Guin; M John Harrison; Joan Aiken; Octavia Butler; Samuel Delany; Mervyn Peake; HP Lovecraft; CL Moore; Michael Moorcock; HG Wells; Mary Gentle; Angela Carter; James Blish; Mary Shelley; Gene Wolfe; James Tiptree Jr; Robert Silverberg; Wlliam Hope Hodgson; Kelly Link; and all the others you can probably name.
I suspect that there’s not a person on that list that comes as much a surprise. Basically, the usual pantheons of post-golden-age SF/F/H combined with early 20th Century Weird Fiction are very good starting points: if they’re shelved there, chance is very good I’m a fan.
Who do I love who I think are maybe a little less unsurprising or less known? Charlotte Bronte; Dambudzo Marechera; Harold Pinter; Jane Gaskell; Ivor Cutler; JH Prynne; Jane Gardam; Christopher Smart; Margaret Cavendish; Claude Calhun; Jonathan Swift; Lindsay Gutteridge.
Recent additions? Barbara Comyns; Marion Fox; Michael Cisco; Helen Oyeyemi.
Give me some time I could easily come up with more, but those are at the top of my head right now. And I’ve only been talking about fiction, not non-fiction. Which would maybe not double, but certainly one-and-a-half-times the list.
