[6] He stood for Regent's Park and Kensington North for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 United Kingdom general election, gaining 1.2% of votes cast.

His mother was a translator, writer and teacher, and the daughter of Leo Claude Vaux Miéville, whose wife Youla (née Harrison) was granddaughter of Edward Littleton, 4th Baron Hatherton.

In 1982 his mother married Paul Lightfoot, a maternal descendant of George Charles Mostyn, 6th Baron Vaux of Harrowden; they divorced in 1992.

At the age of eighteen, in 1990, he taught English for a year in Egypt, where he developed an interest in Arab culture and in Middle Eastern politics.

The Player's Handbook for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons cited his novel Perdido Street Station as a source of inspiration for the game's designers.

[18] In 2010, Miéville made his first foray into writing for RPGs with a contribution to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game supplement Guide to the River Kingdoms.

[20] Miéville is also indebted to Moorcock, having cited his essay "Epic Pooh" as the source upon which he is "riffing" or even simply "cheerleading" in his critique of Tolkien-imitative fantasy.

[23] He stood unsuccessfully for the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in the 2001 general election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance, gaining 459 votes, equivalent to 1.2%,[24] in Regent's Park and Kensington North, a Labour constituency.

[26][27] In August 2013, Miéville was one of nine signatories (along with veteran film-maker and socialist Ken Loach, academic Gilbert Achcar, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Kate Hudson, fellow novelist Michael Rosen, and actor Roger Lloyd Pack) of an open letter to The Guardian announcing the foundation of a "new party of the left", to be called Left Unity.

The letter, which claimed that Labour policies on austerity and the breaking of ties with trades unions amounted to a "final betrayal of the working-class people it was founded to represent", stated that Left Unity would be launched at a "founding conference" in London on 30 November 2013 and would provide, as an "alternative" to Labour, "a party that is socialist, environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination".

[6] In 2014, together with Richard Seymour and others, Miéville quit the International Socialist Network, a Left Unity faction, over a dispute concerning the acceptability of sexual "race play"[28][29] that was prompted by discussion of a controversial art piece owned by Dasha Zhukova.

Steele considers it an ideological though nuanced retelling: "Known as a left-wing activist, [...] Miéville writes with the brio and excitement of an enthusiast who would have wanted the revolution to succeed.

[33] In a letter to Joybrato Mukherjee on 22 April 2024, Miéville rejected his nomination for a DAAD fellowship, citing Mukherjee's role in the cancelling of Jewish-American political theorist Nancy Fraser's Albertus Magnus Professorship at the University of Cologne because Fraser signed a pro-Palestine letter during the Hamas-Israel war, and his lack of "faith that the institution will stand against such a shameful program of repression and anti-Palestinian racism.