TechCrunch (of all places) interviews China Miéville about his career and the role of science fiction in society.
Topics include the popular observation that modern techno-oligarch types seem to have taken cautionary dystopic science-fiction tales as a road map.
Miéville addresses this with seriousness – but his windup contains my favorite outtake:
…this is not me dissing “Neuromancer,” which I think is a wonderful book. But when people talk about it as this terrible warning, there’s a part of you — especially as a teenager, which to some degree or other, all science-fiction people are — you’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s a terrible warning that we’re all going to get to wear mirrorshades and be fantastically cool?”