Three Moments of an Explosion

Stories

By: China Miéville

Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith, Bruce Mann, Hillary Huber, MacLeod Andrews

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)

Critic reviews

“Even when he is orbiting somewhere in a galaxy too far away for normal human comprehension, the genre-subverting English novelist China Miéville is dazzling. His latest collection of short stories, Three Moments of an Explosion, crowds virtuosity into every sentence. . . . There are things to admire in every story, even the ones you can’t quite grasp. The book left me feeling unsettled, uneasy, nervous, and I think that is Mr. Miéville’s point. He wants to draw attention to the scratching under the floorboards, the panic in our heads, the rebellion of nature and inanimate objects. As he says, ‘These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city.’”—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

“You can’t talk about Miéville without using the word ‘brilliant.’ . . . His wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing. . . . My favourite of all these tales is ‘The Rules,’ two and a half pages long. Read it. You won’t regret it, or forget it.”—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

“Horror, noir, fantasy, politics, and poetry swirl into combinations as satisfying intellectually as they are emotionally. . . . 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 in this dark, sometimes horrific short story collection. . . . His characters, whether ordinary witnesses to extraordinary events or lunatics operating out of inexplicable compulsions, are invariably well drawn and compelling. Above all, what the stories have in common is a sense that the world is not just strange, but stranger than we can ever really comprehend.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

NICHOLAS GUY SMITH

If you could sum up Three Moments of an Explosion in three words, what would they be?

Nicholas Guy Smith

Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I wish that Nicholas Guy Smith narrated this entire short story collection.

If you could rename Three Moments of an Explosion, what would you call it?

I would not rename it.

Any additional comments?

none.

bliss

read every thing by china, this shows an evolution boarding on will self but better.

Reading Miéville is both Delicious AND Disturbing

Maybe even 4.5 stars. I really liked this collection. Some of the stories I loved. Adored even. Some were too light. Some extremely dense. But none were uninteresting.

Many SF/horror/noir writers get funky by bending the plot. Miéville does it by bending his words. He alters reality by converting language, both known and familiar, into something alien and the strange. Those thin threads he weaves between the normal and the exotic are done often (not always) with a slight of hand with language; a flick of his prose tongue. He is also getting better and better at the polished, palitable otherworldiness of his worlds. There is a glaze in his stories that makes reading Miéville both delicious AND disturbing at the same time.

Part of Miéville's genius [and NO, I don't use genius lightly] is his ability to find the strange in our world and escalate it. Use it as a mental catalyst to unlock some deeper key. Space elevators? He will take that to the next level. Marxist materialism? Just wait to read what he does with the Ash Heap of History. Scrimshaw? Therapy? Card tricks? Enhanced Interrogation? He will outsmart your expectations with each one. He will extract the magic from old bones or a discarded rag. He will find the horror in the shadows that haven't been cast yet.

Anyway, here is the list of his stories:

"Three Moments of an Explosion"
"Polynia"
"The Condition of New Death"
"The Dowager of Bees"
"In the Slopes"
"The Crawl"
"Watching God"
"The 9th Technique"
"The Rope Is the World"
"The Buzzard’s Egg"
"Säcken"
"Syllabus"
"Dreaded Outcome"
"After the Festival"
"The Dusty Hat"
"Escapee"
"The B[]stard Prompt"
"Rules"
"Estate"
"Keep"
"A Second Slice Manifesto"
"Covehithe"
"The Junket"
"Four Final Orpheuses"
"The Rabbet"
"Listen the Birds"
"A Mount"
"The Design"

Some of these stories, individually, at length. Some stories just hang there defying gravity in my mind. Other stories sit hard in my stomach, neither digesting or moving, just sitting and waiting for the right moment to hatch.

Not my favourite.

I am usually a far of this author, but there is a disjointed quality to this work that prevented me from enjoying it. His style lends itself much better in my opinion to longer form works such as his magnificent Perdido Street Station and Kraken, to name just two.

Not just a Masterpiece...

A thrown gauntlet.

Mieville delivers a declaration not just of war but of pogrom against merely conventional fiction.

The cast deliver a riveting & magnetic performance of the finest anthology of supernatural fiction ever to grace Human language.