It appears so!
From a piece in the Guardian...
Is SF becoming cool? If it is, as China Miéville claims, then the award-winning author, whose new novel Embassytown hit the shelves yesterday, may have something to do with it. In our current era of austerity, with the largest-ever protest march on the nation's capital and a previously apathetic youth culture rallying to the UK Uncut banner, Miéville's homebrew of weird fiction and radical politics seems ever more relevant. Despite the current slew of mindless SF-flavoured Hollywood blockbusters, Miéville reminds us that beneath SF's skin-deep popular appeal beats a radical heart.
HG Wells's The War of the Worlds was originally published as part of the jingoistic "invasion literature" that fuelled imperial Britain's xenophobia. But Wells's description of alien heat rays vaporising the people of Woking and the home counties (still a common fantasy to this day) has since been widely read as damning metaphor for Britian's own campaigns in India and elsewhere. George Orwell, a sometime critic of Wells, nonetheless shared a passion for the radical metaphor. As a warning against totalitarianism and the oppressive structures of power, his novel 1984 is held as totemic by both left and right.
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