While the squid is a more “epically resonant creature,” Mr. Miéville says that he is in fact “a partisan of the octopus.” (His earrings turn out not to be totems of aggression at all, but silver casts of baby octopus tentacles, a gift from his girlfriend, an American doctor. He also has some little octopus figurines in his bathroom.)

To call “Kraken” a squid-napping caper is about as accurate as saying that “King Lear” is about property rights. Among the many topics that bubble beneath the wild imagination at play are millennial anxiety, religious cults, the relationship between the citizen and the state and the role of fate and free will.

“The book is intended to be kind of a romp,” Mr. Miéville said. “What happens if two apocalypses are scheduled to happen at the same time? How cosmologically embarrassing!”

Read one way, the book is part of a long insiders’ dialogue between Mr. Miéville and his genre friends. “It’s a very referential book, designed to tease geek culture  my tribe,” he said. Those sorts of readers find a thicket of playful allusions to classic and contemporary science fiction and fantasy stories.

For nonfantasy readers, there are references to works like “The Crying of Lot 49,” the Saki short story “Sredni Vashtar,” and the movie “Fantasia.” And Trekkies will be tickled by the long riff on teleportation, or travel by “beaming up,” a facet of “Star Trek” that has long irritated Mr. Miéville because, in his view, it entails ripping people apart and then piecing them, inadequately, back together.

“I spent much of my youth soul-suckingly horrified by ‘Star Trek’ and not understanding why no one else could understand that it was a charnel ship manned by ghosts, because you die every time you teleport!” Mr. Miéville said. “It freaked me out.”

None of Mr. Miéville’s books is quite like the one before. For a trilogy set in a fictional universe, he invented a world so richly imagined it makes Tolkien’s Middle Earth look plodding. “Un Lun Dun,” a children’s book, is a Neil Gaimanesque tale of the mystical London beneath the surface.