China Miéville, in conversation with James Bradley, at Perth Writers Festival in 2013, talks about a wide range of topics including the self-conscious playfulness he indulged in when writing Railsea.

I am much more interested in books, in any field, that play around with language, rather than pursue this, to me, unpersuasive notion of language as a clear pane of glass through which you see the story

In one intersting section he describes how his novel Embassytown, 'a grumpy kind of novel', was conceived in part to have an argument with the phrase 'the healing power of storytelling'. "If you google that phrase, the internet explodes! There are literally millions of sites on the healing power of storytelling, and my issue with it was simply this that it tends to be given that storytelling is somehow healing, and so I wanted ... to write a book that was extremely suspicious of storytelling... It's very sceptical of the liberatory potential of narrative, and the idea that narrative may just as well be a shackle as a key.