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China Miéville Writes a Secret Novel With the Internet’s Boyfriend (It’s Keanu Reeves)

After nearly a decade of silence, the beloved sci-fi author opens up about loss, love, and a collaboration with Keanu Reeves. A WIRED exclusive.

Whether he meant the short text by Marx and Engels, itself a commissioned project, a tie-in of sorts for the revolutions of 1848, or China Miéville’s most recent book, A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, about the same, I could not tell. I texted Miéville: “There’s a literal billboard in Times Square with your name on it.” And so there was: The Book of Elsewhere, which gave equal billing to novelist and actor, had its cover reveal three stories above the heads of morning commuters. War-torn Europe had shown him there was something else to account for—that we don’t just go for what’s good, but also for what’s bad, for “unpleasure.” Thus he conceived of the death drive at the end of World War I and during the Spanish flu, wherein his beloved daughter Sophie died suddenly.

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