In Which The Secretary Trolls for a Date

China Miéville, my current nominee for the "Viggo-Mortensen-Double-Dipping-at-the-Well-of-Talent" Award, will be at the Booksmith on Haight Street on Tuesday, February 27th, at 7 pm. I plan to be there too. Among other things, I hope to thank him for compiling the list: Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read.

Even though he failed in his 2001 bid for a seat in Britain's House of Commons (as a member of the Socialist Alliance) he has managed a few achievements in the 35 years since he was born:

1994 B.A. Cambridge
1998 King Rat, first novel published
2001 Ph.D. London School of Economics, Perdido Street Station, published
2002 The Scar
2004 Iron Council
2007 Un Lun Dun, you know, for kids.

Oh, this makes me tired so I'll leave it at that, skipping the writing awards et cetera and just say, I've read his first three books and they rock. Iron Council now moves to the top of my reading list. Rat bastard.

A quote from wikipedia: "I’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have... I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that to, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?"

(popmonkey, if you can make it, I'll give you back your watch!)