We really aren’t in the habit of linking to The Believer, but this China Mieville interview was too good to pass up: “I had a conversation with someone about this the other day, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to write the Bas Lag encyclopedia.’ And they said, ‘That’s really bad though, because you’re a socialist. You shouldn’t be writing these books that are just a kind of naked, cynical attempt to cash in on the sad obsessions of the geeks.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t understand at all! I can’t imagine anything I’d love to do more than write an encyclopedia of my imaginary world, with the possible exception of writing the bestiary.’ I’m in this fucking business for the monsters. The monsters are the main thing that I love about the fantastic. And unfortunately, you can’t really sell books of monsters to publishers. They insist on stories linking them.”