Today, the Folio Society is releasing a new 25th anniversary edition of Perdido Street Station, the iconic novel by author China Miéville. First published in 2000, Perdido Street Station is the book which established Miéville as one of the key figures of the "Weird Fiction" genre. Like Miéville's expansive career itself, the novel defies easy categorization; it combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, steampunk and horror to tell a story of a scientist tasked with a seemingly impossible challenge in the city of New Crobuzon, a squalid metropolis where humans and numerous other fantastical beings eke out a leaving beneath the heel of an oppressive government.
In the 25 years since Perdido Street Station's publication, Miéville has won numerous awards including the Hugo, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction Award, and currently holds the record as the only author ever to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award three times. It should go without saying that Miéville has written many more books and pieces of short fiction in the intervening years, including The City & The City and 2024's The Book of Elsewhere with Keanu Reeves, but for many fans of his work, Perdido still occupies a special place in their hearts.
It's the perfect sort of book for the Folio Society treatment. Based in London, The Folio Society has been publishing premium collector's editions of books since 1947, and their name is pretty much synonymous with beautiful special editions. Perdido Street Station is the latest novel to join their hallowed collection. The Folio Society is printing only 500 copies of this premium edition, which will feature a limitation page signed by the author and artist, printed map endpapers, iridescent foiling, a presentation box in the rough shape of a moth, and a black ribbon marker, as well as eight black and white integrated chapter opening illustrations and 12 full-color illustrations from artist Doug Bell.
The 25th anniversary edition of Perdido Street Station is available now on the Folio Society website. To mark the occasion we sat down with China Miéville over Zoom to discuss how this beautiful new version of Perdido Street Station was created, and what it was like to revisit his iconic novel 25 years after its publication. We also previewed some of its gorgeous artwork, which you can check out below. Read on for our full conversation, edited for length and clarity.
WINTER IS COMING: Perdido Street Station is a novel that has a really special place in the history of genre fiction, and it's also the book that put you on the map as one of the people pioneering the "Weird Fiction" genre. It's been 25 years since you published that book. How are you feeling about this new Folio Society edition on the eve of it coming out?
CHINA MIÉVILLE: There's two aspects to that. One is the aspect of the time, and the other is the aspect of the specific edition. The question of the time...you know, I'm implacably opposed to time passing, I think it's outrageous. I find it completely extraordinary that it's 25 years. Joking aside, it's melancholy but quite sweet, when I think about [how] I was very young when I wrote it, and so on.
I mean, there's no way to talk about the specific edition without — I'm well aware it starts to sound kind of PR fluffy — but I mean, it really is a beautiful edition. They've done such a gorgeous job to it. I didn't have any plans for [an anniversary edition] or anything. I wasn't pitching things...it just sort of hadn't really occurred to me. And then, the fact that this is coming out a quarter of a century after and they've made this extraordinary artifact, and there's been so much care put into the design and the artwork and the physicality of it...it's very moving, even though it wasn't something I was fishing for, It's very moving to have this kind of remarkable object marking that moment. And it sent me back to the book, because I did a new afterword. Going back over the book and so on, there's something very strange and sort of melancholy, but the melancholy that has sweetness to it. I find something quite affecting about reading this young man's book when I am not a young man.
I first encountered the Folio Society when I was a fairly young teenager, and was just really struck. It was one of the first beautifully designed collectible editions I'd ever seen. Some collector's editions, they can tip over into kind of kitsch quite easily, and I think the Folio Society, for my taste, stays on the side of sumptuous without tipping into kitsch. So, again, I don't know how to say, you know, 'It's an honor' without sounding like I'm sort of doing a junky schmaltz tour, but it is. I find it very moving.
WiC: Walk me through the genesis of this edition. Did the Folio Society approach you, or you them? How was it decided that Perdido Street Station was going to get this treatment?
CM: They approached me...it would feel very weird to me to sort of approach a kind of specialist collector's edition and say, 'I think you should do an edition of one of my works.' I mean, that is some chutzpah!
I was very charmed, because I have this history [with the Folio Society]. I'm not a collector per se. I have some nice editions, but I'm not someone who collects books, historically, Which in some ways means that when I do come across particularly beautiful additions, I'm not as accustomed to them. So there's almost more of that kind of reverential awe to it.
As with most things these days, the vast majority of the initial discussions and consultations and so on took place online and over email. And it wasn't even [video calls] like this, it was all in writing, and very efficient and great, and I was really pleased to be able to do. And afterward, I felt like if we were going to do this, the fact that it was 25 years gave me an opportunity to go back to the book and look at it with a certain kind of...I didn't just want to say, 'Oh this is great, enjoy it,' you know? I wanted to look at it with that sort of loving but critical eye, I suppose. And they were very open to that, which I was really pleased about. And also just by coincidence, it was all happening at a time when I was, as I still am, coming out of [a period of being] very, very busy with work. I was paying attention to it, but I wasn't fully focused on it.
And then when I went into the office to meet them all and see the book for the first time, it was kind of the first time I'd been able to give it all my bandwidth. It was amazing to see the book, but also to meet these people who had just been kind of, you know, names on a computer screen and so on. So it went from quite abstract to very, very concrete quite abruptly, if that makes sense.
WiC: This edition has a lot of artwork by Doug Bell. What was the collaboration like there? Did you have any input on what got illustrated, or was that all Doug?
CM: I haven't met Doug sadly. We've corresponded, and I've sent him my admiration and gratitude, but the process of reaching the artist...the Folio people sort of asked me about the kind of art that I like. I mean, I wouldn't call myself an artist...but I do do illustrations, and so I have a great love of like woodcuts and pen and ink illustration and crosshatching, and that sort of thing. When I first did the book, I did do a few illustrations for it, not for publication, but for my own sort of interest, and I wanted to kind of try and tap that aesthetic.
Doug Bell's work is very woodcutty and sort of has a lot of that classic illustrative feeling to it. It's almost like you come across like a 19th century edition of the Brothers Grimm or something, except it's obviously with a much more kind of punky modern sensibility, but [with] that kind of feeling of clear, heavy lines and so on. Once I spoke to them about the kind of work I like, they said here's a few candidates and so on, and we went from there.
But that said, I would say, quite importantly...if you're working with people, it's always a collaboration. And I feel, as a matter of, I suppose, principle, and also because otherwise you can drive yourself mad, [that] it's quite important to treat it as a collaboration. To an extent it's kind of like, I'm happy to give my input and so on, but, but this is your thing, you do your thing. So I didn't want to get too heavily involved in like, 'Here's the things I think you should illustrate,' because to me, part of the pleasure is saying, 'Here's the text, here's the kind of aesthetic I'm into. You do you.' And then I get to experience that as well.
There were certainly scenes that [seemed] to me to be kind of ripe for illustration, but I certainly didn't say, 'Here's a list of what should be in it.' So there was a real pleasure for me of learning what had kind of chimed with Doug, what had they had discussed. For example, the fact that the edition, obviously it has these very, very beautiful color illustrations where there's the line work but it's also been colored, but it also has pure black and white illustrations, it has sort of like front pieces almost of different sections and stuff. And I was very, very pleased about that because again, to me, that feels like a kind of 19th century fairy tale book or something where you get these kind of color inserts, but then you get black and white printing on the actual pages themselves. And I got to experience that because I didn't lay down a set of desiderata. I sort of said, you know, here's my broad thinking, but you guys are professionals. Doug is a professional, the designers are professionals. Let's see what you come up with, you know.
WiC: That sounds like a much more pleasant way to go through a process like that than giving a list and being a stickler about it. It gave the artist the freedom to follow what speaks to them.
CM: That kind of, and then you get to learn something about [the book]. Because the text...you don't own it when it goes out in the world, in the same way [that] every single reader is going to have their own images of all these things. I don't like when — and I want to be careful about this — but to a degree, I think there is a danger [that] writers can become a bit like the official keepers of their own lore and kind of the cops. And it's kind of like, 'No..you're doing so and so wrong, that's not how it is. Let me tell you.' To a degree that's inevitable if you've done a world creation and so on, but as far as possible, I like to...once it's out of my hands, you know, I don't own it. It's always a collaboration, it's a mental collaboration with readers, in the same way as writers who will sometimes tell, you know, if someone does an interpretation or a critique of their work, and they will respond by saying, 'Well, no, that's wrong, and I know because I wrote it.' I don't think that's how writing works. I don't mean to sound pompous...to me it is kind of a matter of principle that these texts don't end where I end. I'm not the cops, and so it's not just a question of saying, 'Well, it's easier for me if my hands off.' It's also really exciting to me to discover what this text becomes in someone else's hands, especially if it's an artist whose work I admire.
WiC: I have seen some of the artwork, it's gorgeous. Were there any pieces that when you saw them, and saw what spoke to Doug and his interpretation of them, either surprised you or made you see those parts of the story in a new light?
CM: I don't have the copy in front of me, but I can tell you straight off the bat, I was thinking about this as we were talking about it, I love his rendering of the cactus man, the cactus person. He has an image of a Cactacae. And it is not how I'd imagine it. As I was writing it, my version of these creatures, for people who haven't read it are kind of large, bulky, sort of sapient sentient humanoid cactuses. And in my head canon...there was a certain kind of bulky look to them. What's so interesting to me about the way he's rendered it is that it's quite distinct from my initial image, but when I look at the descriptions in the text, it's completely faithful to [them], and that's exactly what Im talking about. So I would never have envisaged it that way, but he, with complete fidelity to the descriptions, has rendered this kind of new iteration. And so that was a real pleasure, for example. That's one that comes to mind.
And also, getting into spoilers...I don't know much people care about spoilers, but with a spoiler warning let's put it that way...the antagonists, the creatures that feature largely as the kind of monsters in the book. I would never have conceived of them that way. But that was a little different in the sense that they are deliberately described quite vaguely because their nature is that they're very difficult, glancing at them is complicated and dangerous. Even for myself as [the author], with the Cactacae I had an image of the Cactacae. With the slakemoths, even when I was writing them, it was always kind of at the edge of my vision, and what that means is that no two representations of them look the same, and that's a real pleasure for me.
I was really pleased with...and I guess surprised at his representation of Isaac, who's the main character, And there was a couple of things about it that I really valued. Not that racial politics in New Crobuzon work the same way as it does in our world, but in a sort of fairly off-handed way because its a completely different set of politics, Isaac is described...he's not white. And not infrequently when I've seen people sort of try [to make fan art], people often miss that precisely because it isn't prioritized in this context. But Doug, his representation was scrupulously and precisely faithful, in ways that like really sort of physicalized Isaac, He's older than he's often represented, and he has this kind of scrunched up, studious face. So it was an interesting mixture for me of surprising accuracy and surprising deviations from my own ideas.
WiC: There's one element of the illustrating where I'm going to assume accuracy was, if not more important, more relevant to the conversation, which is that there's a map in this edition. Was that something you had to coordinate on at all?
CM: There is a map in the original edition, and I think in most which are made. I've drawn various maps of the city, and somewhere in my house is a very, very carefully hand drawn map of the city, where I printed out the place names in a particular font that I was really [fond of]. I think it was Centaur, and I cut them out and I stuck them on very carefully and if I say so myself, it's very beautiful. I have no idea where it is. It's somewhere, and I've got like photos of it somewhere.
And so, I can't remember if I was able to fish out a photo of that, but certainly, we shared with them some of the reference material and the map in the original Pan Macmillan edition, which is...there's nothing wrong with it, but it's much more functional. It's not nearly so sort of exquisite. There's never been such a beautiful version of the map. This one has been made like a kind of really exquisite sort of 18th century explorer's notebook or something.
WiC: Let's talk a little more broadly about the Folio Society. You mentioned you first encountered their books at a fairly young age. Are there any other editions from other authors you've particularly enjoyed?
CM: They have a beautiful edition of collected Old English poetry called The Wanderer and Other Poems, which is really, really exquisite. I really like their edition of the David Jones' In Parenthesis. There's a lovely edition of Toni Morrison's Beloved, and I like many of their Ursula Le Guin editions as well. Le Guin and Morrison were both quite influential on the afterword in this edition of Perdido because...both of them have done this thing that I find very moving and interesting, which is to return to books many years after publication — Toni Morrison with The Bluest Eye and Le Guin with a few books, but particularly The Left Hand of Darkness — and sort of consider and reconsider the book in the light of some of the criticisms. The brickbats as well as the bouquets.
I think as a sort of generalization...writers and creative people are often understandably very defensive of their own work, and I understand that and I share the desire. But I think as far as possible, it's good to try and not do that, and to be open to sort of good faith criticism and good faith insights, even things that you're not sort of aware of and so on. And what I found very, very inspiring about both of them, you know, Le Guin returned to The Left Hand of Darkness many times and engaged with her own critics, including critics from within feminism, and at various points started to say like, 'Yeah, you know, I was defensive on this point, but on reflection, I think that so and so was correct about this. And if I did it again, I would do it differently. Here was my thinking at the time.' Similarly, Toni Morrison's [anniversary] edition of The Bluest Eye, she's very thoughtful about what she sees as what the book doesn't achieve that she'd hoped for, and the things that don't quite work. Neither of them are distancing themselves from the work, but they're sort of approaching it with a kind of compassionate but critical, proud but sort of open-minded eye, and I found that very inspiring.
There are other authors, and I won't name names, but there are authors I know who...if a particular book receives certain kinds of criticism, they'll write very splenetic denunciations of the critics. And I want to be clear, it's perfectly fine if you disagree with a critic. Critics are not automatically correct. But I can think of a writer, for example, who changed something because of all the criticisms, but then complained about it. And that feels to me like...you know, if you decide something's wrong and you want to change it, I don't have a problem with that unlike some people. I think that's fine. But what really impresses me is saying 'No, I'm not going to change the text because this is the text as it was, it is a piece of history. It's a piece of, you know, my canon. But I also acknowledge this kind of good faith discussion. I want to come at this as a kind of sincere and interested interlocutor, and accept points where they're well made and so on.'
And in my afterword...I'm tremendously proud of the book, but there are certainly things that, on reflection, certain criticisms that I I look at now and I'm like, 'Yeah, I think that's fair, and I want to acknowledge that.' And I have the bandwidth and space and age to be able to do that. And so I already liked the Folio Editions of both Morrison and Le Guin, but then using them and name checking them as kind of inspirations for this way of thinking about one's own stuff, I then sort of re-experienced their work anew in those editions.
WiC: We're just about out of time, so I'm going to hit you with one last lighter question to end things. What are you reading right now that you're really enjoying, or that you'd like to recommend to people who like your work?
CM: Oh, wow. I just finished Brian Evenson's short story collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight, and I think Brian Evenson is one of the outstanding short story writers at work today. A kind of dark, surreal, weird fiction, and this particular collection is also very, very moving. It showcases in some aspects, a certain tenderness that I haven't seen in other of his works. So that's a book that really looms for me.
And I am just about to finish a collection of Joy Williams short stories, called Escapes. I read her book The Changeling, which is a novel and I thought it's fantastic. So I started seeking out some of her stuff, and I really, really like Escapes.
The last one I'll mention...I've been on a huge kick of a British crime writer called Celia Dale, who is being brought back into print after quite a long time out of print. I think she's phenomenal. So, although not technically a "weird" writer, but with a kind of unease and a sort of psychological nastiness, that I think is absolutely fantastic. All of her books are great, but I would particularly recommend one, I think the fantastic Valancourt Press have done an edition, it's called A Dark Corner. Absolutely extraordinary book.
A huge thank you to China Miéville for taking the time to chat about Perdido Street Station with us! The new 25th anniversary edition is available now from the Folio Society. If it's an edition you're considering adding to your collection, I would head over to their site sooner rather than later; with only 500 copies in existence, it will probably sell out fast.
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