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3.5 

Three Moments of an Explosion

By China Miéville
Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Kirkus Reviews  The fiction of multiple award–winning author China Miéville is powered by intelligence and imagination. Like George Saunders, Karen Russell, and David Mitchell, he pulls from a variety of genres with equal facility, employing the fantastic not to escape from reality but instead to interrogate it in provocative, unexpected ways.
 
London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse’s bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?
 
Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves—Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of literature’s most original voices.

Praise for Three Moments of an Explosion
 
“China Miéville is dazzling. His latest collection of short stories, Three Moments of an Explosion, crowds virtuosity into every sentence.”The New York Times
 
“You can’t talk about [China] Miéville without using the word ‘brilliant.’ . . . His wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
 
“[A] gripping collection . . . Miéville expertly mixes science fiction, fantasy and surrealism. . . . Amid the longer stories are more cerebral, poetic flash pieces that will haunt the reader beyond the pages of this exceptional book.”—The Washington Post
 
“The stories shine . . . with a winking brilliance.”—The Seattle Times
 
“Mind-bending excursions into the fantastic.”—NPR
 
“Bradbury meets Borges, with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of hearing.”Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
Three Moments of an Explosion is a book filled with fabulous oddities.”Entertainment Weekly
 
“Miéville moves effortlessly among realism, fantasy, and surrealism. . . . His characters, whether ordinary witnesses to extraordinary events or lunatics operating out of inexplicable compulsions, are invariably well drawn and compelling.”Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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27 Reviews

3.5
“These stories are interesting, but very few of them are satisfying. They either present a strange/cool idea in an experimental way and leave it at that, or they develop on it in a narrative that is somewhat engaging but ends up being a bit perplexing. There are only a couple in the bunch that I thought were truly excellent, most notably After the Festival. The ideas, I have to say, are very cool. Mieville seems to place himself somewhere between Kafka, Borges, and J.G Ballard, with perhaps a touch of David Lynch (of Eraserhead). We get icebergs floating in the sky over London, medical students who find their cadavers have scrimshaw on their bones, oil rigs that have come to life and are invading the land. Towers built up as cities reaching to geosynchronous satellites, but now decaying. A disease that makes it so that a trench of earth spontaneously digs itself around any of the infected who remain stationary for long enough. The imagination is extremely fertile and, as with much of Kafka, the weirdness seems to present itself as a kind of metaphor. But it's difficult to say what the metaphors are actually pointing to. And as with Kafka, I am sometimes at a loss to understand. So all that I'm left with is whether I enjoy it or not. And here, I would say it's about 50/50. Some of these stories seem very cool moment by moment. But they tend to simply peter out; the world ends not with a bang... Still, I'm glad to have read these, and I may come back to a couple of them (After the Festival, The Keep). But I don't think Mieville is as good in the shorter formats as he is in the Bas-Lag books, or in Embassytown. Will definitely read more by him.”

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