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Amazon.com: Embassytown is, in part, about language and its uses or mis-uses. Have any interpretations of the novel thus far been in your opinion wrong but still interesting to you? China Miéville: I wouldn't say “wrong”, but there are interpretations which seem to want to come down to a single conclusion, an approach that has never convinced me--the whole “Book X means Y” paradigm. So their interpretations I may agree with, but would hesitate to seeing as the end of the matter. Conversely, a couple of times people have pointed things out that had not occurred to me at all. Someone pointed out the repeated use of the wing-f---ed Icarus trope in several books of mine: had not clocked it at all, and quite true. Amazon.com: Was Doris Lessing’s fiction any influence on the novel? China Miéville: Not consciously, no. But the unconscious is a large country. Amazon.com: Is there anything semi-autobiographical (albeit transformed) in Embassytown? China Miéville: Nothing intentional or conscious, beyond the feeling of close-upness to bigness that I recall--spuriously or not--as defining childhood. |