China Miéville was the star turn at the Edinburgh Book festival

China Miéville was the star turn at the Edinburgh Book festival

The impact of technology was the subject of Miéville's address on the future of the novel. It's a discussion that, within the publishing industry at least, tends to be distorted by that deeply conservative question: "How do we all keep making a living from this thing?" Miéville presented the counter-argument: how does anyone make a living from anything in our neo-liberal economy? The very same neo-liberal economic model that advocates of DRM and anti-piracy legislation are so keen to protect. As Miéville so aptly concludes, if we're going to arrive at a new economic model that rewards human creativity and ingenuity, we're going to have to think deeply and radically about how we reshape our entire society. If any literary tradition is adapted to lead that discussion, it is science fiction.