There's a fictional quality to the closeted environment of the Edinburgh International Book festival. For two weeks, Charlotte Square is fortified with a circle of portable buildings and Spiegeltents, creating a safe space for a fantasy of literary culture to flourish without undue interference from the outside world. It's a fantasy taking place in the daydreams of a seventysomething retired English lecturer, and The Book is its key signifier. The Book as object, as specks of ink splattered on decaying vegetable matter, tenaciously clinging to the bookshop shelf as the internet gushes forth its infinite flood of blogposts, status updates and indie-published ebooks.

The science-fiction track within the EIBF programme came marked with the now standard disclaimers … it's not all rubbish, some of it actually has quite a lot of insight into that "technology" stuff of which we're all so terrified. It was rather like listening to a steam-train driver grudgingly admit that those jet-fighter pilots might be on to something. Neal Stephenson, one of the big names of SF attending this year's festival, has written with some insight about the awkward experience of being patronised at literary events, even when your books engage more readers in serious debate than most of the other attendees put together.

But it was China Miéville who took centre stage at this year's EIBF, first at a sold-out discussion of his young-adult novel Railsea with fellow writer Patrick Ness, then at a barnstorming polemic on the future of the novel. Miéville arrived at the festival at the climax of an amazing five-year period, during which he has gone from a cult writer of baroque urban fantasy to arguably one of the most influential writers in any genre in the UK. His dual identity as radical Marxist academic and fantasy novelist, his absolute love of geek culture combined with a true respect for literary traditions, his unchallenged status as the writer with "the best guns in literatur" and, of course, a run of superbly idiosyncratic SF masterpieces – including The City and the City and Embassytown – have propelled him to unusual levels of fame.

Queried by Ness on the importance of genre in his writing, Miéville replied that he prefers to think of genre as a literary tradition. It's a minority viewpoint even within SF, where commercial pressures often push writers toward strict generic criteria, a pressure Miéville has clearly succeeded in resisting. But it's the only perspective that really makes sense of SF's growing cultural significance. Through the 20th century, it evolved as a literary tradition in continuous dialogue with the most significant forces shaping that century: science and technology. Now, in the early 21st century, SF provides writers with a rich set of ideas and metaphors to explore the incredible complexity of the modern era. Miéville's fiction is in continual dialogue with the SF tradition, recycling and reshaping it as a vehicle for his own philosophy and beliefs.

The impact of technology was the subject of Miéville's address on the future of the novel. It's a discussion that, within the publishing industry at least, tends to be distorted by that deeply conservative question: "How do we all keep making a living from this thing?" Miéville presented the counter-argument: how does anyone make a living from anything in our neo-liberal economy? The very same neo-liberal economic model that advocates of DRM and anti-piracy legislation are so keen to protect. As Miéville so aptly concludes, if we're going to arrive at a new economic model that rewards human creativity and ingenuity, we're going to have to think deeply and radically about how we reshape our entire society. If any literary tradition is adapted to lead that discussion, it is science fiction.