Going Under: China Mieville

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CHINA MIEVILLE HAS won numerous awards for his popular science fiction novels, but when it came to his latest book, "Un Lun Dun," he was nervous.

His fear didn't center on any of the words in the book, but rather on the pen-and-ink illustrations that adorn the pages of his first young adult novel.

"This is the first time I put my illustrations out there professionally," said Mieville, who will be at Politics & Prose on Tuesday evening. "I've drawn for years. I was very shy in case it looked like it was kind of a vanity project. I would be really horrified if people looked at them and said, 'Oh, the author obviously wanted to do his own illustrations and they didn't have the heart to tell him no.'"

Mieville's artwork, which is reminiscent of the creepy work of cartoonist Edward Gorey, garnishes the pages of "Un Lun Dun," helping to tell the story of a young girl who is out to save the world from a poisonous cloud called The Smog.

Mieville went all out with the book, introducing unsettling ideas that are sure to keep kids turning the pages. Deeba, the leading lady, sets forth in Unlondon with a crew of local denizens, including a half-ghost boy, a discarded milk carton and a talking book. She encounters binja (ninja trash cans) and a humanoid-type creature with an enormous mouth whose words take physical manifestations.

"I always love creating monsters," he said. "I remember myself as a younger reader, how voraciously I loved all those very strange ideas dealt with in a kind of grotesque but matter-of-fact way. I loved that sort of phantasmagoria."

Mieville remembered back to when he was a child and was reading some of the classics of young adult literature like Lewis Carroll's Alice stories and "The Phantom Tollbooth," and the way he would fall into them with complete abandon. "Un Lun Dun" pays homage to those stories, he said, while adding in that powerful imagination that has helped Mieville turn out his other novels and then some.

"I put in more weird ideas and more strange and abstract thoughts and more weird monsters for younger readers," he said. "I was able to kind of give way to a kind of fairy tale imagination that I wouldn't know how to deal with in an adult book."

» EXPRESS: Any differences in writing for adults than writing for younger readers?
» MIEVILLE: In some ways it was quite liberating. The difficult thing I suppose was trying to slightly calm down on my prose because in my adult books my actual prose can be sort of baroque. I didn't want to make it simplistic, but I wanted to trim some of the subordinate clauses and some of the arcane words and neologisms. It started off as an experiment and I said I'll give myself a couple of weeks of writing and see if I can get the hang of this, and then it just flowed quite fast and sort of took over.

» EXPRESS: You illustrate this book, and your previous work, "Looking for Jake," included a comic story. Are comics something you'd like to pursue, maybe writing for the long-running British comic magazine "2000AD" — the home of Judge Dredd?
» MIEVILLE: Definitely. I've got lots of ideas, several ideas in particular for comics that I would very much like to pursue in terms of writing comics. I like graphic art very much, particularly quite old fashioned pen-and-ink graphic art.

» EXPRESS: Who are your artistic influences?
» MIEVILLE: There's a lot of illustrators who are very influential to me. You mentioned "2000AD" and a lot of that classic pen-and-ink work of the 1980s before they went color — I have a big love for that in my ink work. A lot of those classic children's books are illustrated, so I think about illustrators for the Alice books and that kind of thing. And above all, another name would be Mervyn Peake, who illustrated his own writing and he was an enormously influential figure.

» EXPRESS: This book is left open to a sequel. Will we see more books in this world?
» MIEVILLE: Absolutely, sure. I like the universe that is invented in this world and the idea of the abcities [flipsides of places we already know] — you could write a different book for each abcity, these sort of twisted dreamland versions of our cities and that's absolutely something I would consider doing. I wouldn't set a date on it now, but it's something I'm very actually looking into, yes. And certainly whether or not I do the sequel to this particular one, I do feel I'd like to do more young adult writing in his world or elsewhere or both.

» EXPRESS: This has all the makings of a grand fantasy film. Any movement from the movie world?
» MIEVILLE: There's often talk — most of it from me. I know a few film people have read it and made nice noises, and discussions are ongoing. And I know several people who have read it and think it would translate well into film. As with all these things, I'm very open-minded about it. I like the idea, but I'm not holding my breath. If it happens, I'd be very interested in that.

» EXPRESS: Serious themes of environmentalism and politics are pretty apparent in this book. Are these ideas you're trying to pass on to children?
» MIEVILLE: There are clearly political themes and ideas about pollution and also about government mendacity. Those are clearly present. I'm very, very insistent that I would not want to write a book to persuade young readers of anything. That's not what its purpose is. If I wanted to have a discussion with younger readers or any readers about issues — environmentalism or politics or whatever — then I'd rather just do that. So those themes are there so that if you are interested and you want to talk about those, then great, there's some texture there for you. But if you're not interested or you don't agree or whatever, then hopefully the story is — it has to be it's own story. In the case of this book, for example, people won't believe me when I say this — honestly, the first reason I came up with The Smog was not because I thought I must write a story with strong environmental subtext, but I thought, "Ooohhh, an intelligent poisonous cloud, how cool is that?" and then I went, "Hang on a minute." So for me, it always starts with the grotesque, with the fantastic. And I'm not denying there's politics there at all, but I'm saying that's not what the book is about. It would be a mistake I think to try and turn it into a sort of pamphlet.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness-UDC)

Photo courtesy Del Rey