Morbid Symptoms: An Interview with China Miéville

Abstract

In this wide-ranging interview, the New Weird novelist and critic China Miéville offers an account of weird fiction's liminal status as a countertradition that problematizes the critical divisions between science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In driving the rationalist positivism that generates these generic divisions toward a traumatic antihumanist nihilism, the weird generates not only a new teratology focused on the tentacle but also the possibility of an unexpected way out of the postmodern impasse of proliferating irony and self-reflexivity.