Last week, in the keynote speech at the 2012 Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, China Miéville spoke about the novel’s many possible futures in cultural, political and digital terms – and concluded with a demand for state-supported salaries for writers:
“So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed?”
