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" I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer. "

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" 'Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa. "

" Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings. "

" Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me. "

" I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre. "

" Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books. "

" 'Kraken' is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it's more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It's London as a kind of fantasy kingdom. "

" There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings. "

" Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing. "

" I love it when people want to interpret my books. "

" My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate. "

" I don't like allegory. "

" I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. "

Science Fiction

" I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction. "

" But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books. "

" I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book. "

" I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real. "

" I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today. "

" I'm a very friendly socialist. "

" I think science fiction is very bad at prediction. "

" Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati. "

" I love monsters. "

" I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair. "

" In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences. "

" In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart. "