China Miéville is the Boss

It struck me, watching China Miéville come out on stage at the Purcell Room yesterday, that in a fight with any current modern author, he’d win. To begin with it was the muscle, the tattoos and the piercings. Then, when he started to talk, I realized it’s because he is seriously Intelligent (the capitalization isn’t a typo). He writes New Weird, but is in no way weird himself.

He was there to give an archaeological literary examination of London as a source of speculative fiction, visionary edge and a growing, niche genre of urban fantasy.

Within two minutes he’d used half a dozen terms, perfectly understandable in context, which I should have written down. One I had to ask him to put in my signed copy of The City and the City.

The word of the day = Perichoresis

It was the combination of Boss-ness regarding words as well as inks that led me to refer to “The Big Bang Theory” in the Q&A. Suddenly I wasn’t sure I knew sweet eff ay about the use of language.

I’m going to need to get hold of a transcript before I can do “Visions of London” justice.

For the moment, I’m just really worried I’ve written China Miéville into Skinny Inkers as Ink-tup.