China Tom Miéville is an English fantasy fiction author, comic writer, political activist and academic. He often describes his work as weird fiction and specifically to the loosely associated movement of writers sometimes called New Weird. Born in Norwich, Miéville was brought up in Willesden, northwest London, and has lived in the city since early childhood. He grew up with his sister Jemima and mother Claudia, a translator, writer and teacher. By virtue of his mother's birth in New York City, Miéville holds dual American and British citizenship.
He studied for a BA degree in social anthropology at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 1994, and gained both a master's degree and PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics in 2001. He has also held a Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard University. After becoming dissatisfied with the ability of post-modern theories to explain history and political events, he became a Marxist at university. He debuted in 1998 with the novel King Rat, an urban fantasy set in London during the late 1990s.
Although Miéville's works all describe worlds or scenarios that are fantastical or supernatural, his work has been categorised as science fiction, fantasy and as "urban surrealism". Anyway, his left-wing politics are evident in his writing, as well as his theoretical ideas about literature. He declared that works to move fantasy away from J. R. R. Tolkien's influence, which for him is stultifying and reactionary. He once described Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature."
"Miéville tends to set his novels in fanciful places, from the vaguely steampunk realm of Bas-Lag, in Perdido Street Station and its two sequels, to the far-future planet of Arieka, in Embassytown (2011). For the hard-boiled crime novel The City & the City (2009), he invented two European city-states, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which somehow exist in the same physical space. When he has ventured into the real world, he has mostly stuck with his native London, where he still lives, as in Kraken, the urban fantasy King Rat (1998), and the mind-bending young-adult book Un Lun Dun (2007), in which two London twelve-year-olds discover a hidden, alternate version of their city." (The New Yorker)
He won all the major awards by genre, being one of the most decorated authors of contemporary fantasy and science fiction, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015. His most awarded novel is The City & The City, an existential thriller published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. Embassytown was a first and widely praised foray into science fiction. In 2016 he published the novel The Last Days of New Paris.
The postcard was issued in October 2005, upon the publication in Romanian of the novel Perdido Street Station, to the Tritonic publishing house.
References
China Miéville - Wikipedia
China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism - The New Yorker
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