China Miéville is one of those fiction writers whose multivalent imagination — with its monsters, cityscapes of the future, and battles between good and evil — is capable of making readers’ heads explode. In The New York Times, Sarah Lyall once wrote that his novels “skitter among genres, magpie-ing elements from science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, traditional fairy tales, steampunk, horror.” So perhaps the weirdest thing Miéville could do at this point is write about the real world, which is what he does in “October,” his new nonfiction book about the Russian Revolution in 1917. Below, he tells us about his interest in the subject, why he chose to write about it a century after the events he describes, and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

It was in discussion with a friend who is also the editor of the book, Sebastian Budgen. Although there’s a huge literature on the Russian Revolution, it’s actually quite difficult to find a nonintimidating text for the interested lay reader. Sebastian was talking about the potential for writing it in a novelistic way. Basically the idea was to tell the revolution as a story, because it was an extraordinary one, without blurring the politics, or pretending the politics aren’t there, or dumbing them down.

Sebastian knew that I’ve been active on the left for a long time. Socialist politics and culture is something that’s been important to me. So he knew I had a political relationship with the revolution as well. It’s not just an astonishing story on an abstract level; it’s a very relevant story as well.

There are certain rules I followed. There’s no event, no person, no reported speech that isn’t in the literature somewhere. There’s no invention like that. It’s a book with a relatively new reader in mind, but I want the specialists to realize I’ve taken the subject very seriously.