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    Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
    Unavailable
    Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
    Unavailable
    Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
    Audiobook14 hours

    Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

    Written by China Miéville

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

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 4, 2015
    ISBN9781101922835
    Unavailable
    Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
    Author

    China Miéville

    China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His novel Embassytown was a first and widely praised foray into science fiction.

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    Reviews for Three Moments of an Explosion

    3.5/5

    183 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      She felt her heart speeding as she went through these motions, not expecting to understand more but desperate to do so, here in what she could feel through her skin was a locus. She was an antigen here, perhaps. She was something.

      The citation reveals it all. These exercises didn't work for me. They were not images or examples but miniatures, tiny plots -- in both senses. There were a few stories which I did admire. The story Polynia is one, the next few sentences contain SPOILERS.

      So, icebergs has appeared levitating over the streets of London. What follows is part taxonomy and scientific debate and part oral history. The effect of this arrival is eerie and fascinating. The total absence of point or purpose to this event is what captivates. Then sadly towards the end of the story similar phenomena are described as occurring elsewhere: a coral reef inexplicably on the streets of Brussels and tropical rain forest growing in Tokyo. That caused an instant deflation for this reader. That's it.

      The remaining stories bordered between the boring and the undercooked, many focused on runes or scripts as a sinister presence. I didn't find them particularly scary or even interesting. I was hoping for Bas-lag and instead found moral wreckage from the War On Terror. That doesn't constitute failure in itself. I hesitate to compare Miéville to, say, Julian Barnes. Well, maybe I am. CM was offering his sketchbook and I didn't care for it. That isn't a slight only an interporetation.
    • 4/5
      As always, I find Mieville's stuff fascinating and horrifying at the same time. The stories in this collection seem sometimes to be brief explorations of a stray idea. Maybe that's what short works usually are.
    • 4/5
      Collection of weird and wonderful stories (as you would expect from his other writing).
    • 4/5
      A brief piece - but it's got a lot in its few pages: original and weird science-fictional ideas, and a beautifully conjured sense of angst at the zeitgeist.

      It reminded me of an incident when I was a child: my father took me to see the controlled demolition of a building. The charges were set wrong, and instead of the whole building falling to dust, it only pancaked in one floor. The crowd milled around with a sense of dissatisfaction and worry...
      Although the building here collapses fully, and the scenario is quite different, the emotions surrounding it seem familiar.
    • 5/5
      Unlike most people, I find China Miéville's short stories more satisfying than his longer fiction. He's too inventive and experimental a writer to be hemmed into a single setting. This collection is pushing the boundaries of what we're used to seeing in weird fiction, including short screenplays for imaginary movie trailers. Each one has a single mind-bending premise explored just as much as we need to, usually expertly paced and with a slow teasing reveal. If there's any fault it's that a few fail to end satisfactorily, just trailing off after the main idea is worked out. But it's a remarkable wildly imaginative collection.
    • 3/5
      I have read and admired several of Mieville's novels over the years. He has a distinct flair for imaginative settings, which he populates with quirky characters who undertake important tasks and encounter weird things. This worked particularly well for me in books like The Scar, Perdido Street Station, Embassytown and The City & the City. But not particularly well for me in Kraken and Iron Council, books about which I would say I admired the ambition, but in the end the concept couldn’t really carry the story.Unfortunately, that latter sentiment came to me more often than not as I waded through this generous collection of short fiction. Many of these often very short works (more vignettes than stories) felt like gimmicks that never really went anywhere and never really sold me. While I can admire the ambitious concept behind some of these, I didn’t find much satisfaction in the reading of them.Which is not to say that I didn’t find stories to admire in this book. “Säcken,” “After the Festival,” and “Covehithe” were my favorites. I also appreciated a group of stories that felt vaguely Ballardian (“Watching God,” “In the Slopes,” and “Polynia”) and one that felt surprisingly like an homage to Robert Sheckley (“Dreaded Outcome”).
    • 3/5
      I generally like China Miéville's work, although I have not read much since I left London, but I am not generally a fan of short-stories, and I am not at all convinced that the short story shows off his talents. Miéville's best books, for me "Perdito Street Station" and especially "The City and the City," grow in complexity and atmosphere with the telling. There is no space in the short form.Read this book if you are sure you want to read all of Miéville's work. Read it if you are a short story fan and want to see how he fares. But the general reader, especially one who is not familiar with China Meiville, might want to try something else of his first.I received a review copy of "Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories" by China Miéville (Random House – Del Rey Spectra) through NetGalley.com.
    • 4/5
      A collection of 28 stories of various genres, lengths, and quality. I'm normally a huge advocate of anything Miévillian and I wholeheartedly recommend most of these stories, but some of them are just not up to par. Miéville's strength is imagining an impossible situation (icebergs appearing above London, sentient oil-rigs, elevators to space) and then build a world around it that makes it not only believable, but probable, almost normal. When it works, it's nothing short of genius, but when it falls short it's really frustrating; some of the stories in this collection don't really go anywhere - they just end - and because others are so fantastic, the disappointment is even greater. It's not a collection I'd recommend for someone who hasn't tried Miéville before (if someone wants short stories, Looking for Jake is a much more coherent collection), but for any Miévillian, it's a must read because the great stories are truly great, even if some slogging through mediocre stories is needed to get to the gems.
    • 5/5
      For years, China Mieville has been an author who’s lived in concepts, not prose. His work can be clunky at times, pinned down by his PhD words and occasionally by Marxist tendencies. This is sometimes the case in Three Moments of an Explosion, but the concepts more than override the piece. Here is a selection:Polynia: Icebergs begin to grow above London. Recall the adage that 90% of the depths are below the surface. What happens when you drink this water, breathe this air for too long?The Condition of New Death: Death, as a subjective and objective phenomenon, overtaking the planet. Confront bodies as they lie, and witness them.The Dowager of Bees: There are suites that Hoyle’s never told you about, and rules that you’ve never managed to play by.The Crawl: A movie trailer. Humans, Zombies, and something more. Why should the dead be content to merely replicate the living? This is the most effective short story I’ve read in several years.The Buzzard’s Egg: Gods as prisoners of war, and the man who tends them.Dreaded Outcome: Combat TherapyAfter the Festival: After wearing a mask in revelry, Tova’s friend can’t seem to stop thinking about it. Did I mention that the mask was a pig? An actual pig freshly slaughtered. The Bastard Prompt: What happens when a standardized patient starts giving you impossible symptoms? What happens when someone else arrives with that disease?Keep: A virus makes holes around us.Covehithe: Oil derricks get restless, and walk off.The Design: Filigree found on still-living bone. At least one of those simple things caught your eye, your attention, your mind. This is Three Moments of an Explosion, concepts which catch and stick and hold. It is a collection mildly obsessed with small apocalypses, the ending of very particular worlds. Mieville wants us to feel the planet beneath us, the uncertainty around us, unease and horror. His words, his ideas, are merely a canvas for endings, for fear in the modern era, knowing that we ourselves are responsible for some of the death that he presents. And yet, the collection is moving, uplifting, inspiring, for showing us that things will continue, that small ends are not The End, and that our humanity is always worth pursuing. I cannot recommend this enough.