Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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 Therapy
After 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.

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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,

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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.

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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

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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”).

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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Collection of weird and wonderful stories (as you would expect from his other writing).

I always find it wryly amusing when critics impressed at China Miéville rush to compare him to authors such as Zadie Smith or David Mitchell. As if Miéville were brilliant despite the fact that he writes fantastic fiction. Or as if the "weird fiction" tag attached to his books were somewhat

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dishonourable or demeaning. In reality, it is difficult to imagine Miéville writing anything but his particular brand of “new weird”. Not because he lacks versatility but, on the contrary, because the striking images which he conjures up fit so perfectly within the tradition of the fantastic and the surreal.

Take "Polynia", in my opinion one of the best pieces in this short story collection. We are in the near-future and icebergs suddenly materialise over London. From this simple yet haunting premise, set against the backdrop of a city at once familiar and strange, Mieville manages to fashion a little gem - a post-apocalytpic sci-fi story which also works as a realistic coming-of-age narrative, a tale which harks back to the adventure/explorer yarns of the 19th Century but which is at the same time underscored by very contemporary environmental concerns.

There are other stories which display Miéville’s knack for original plot lines. In “The Dowager of Bees”, he imagines a world where professional card players face a mysterious occupational hazard - the occasional, unexpected appearance of rogue cards with terrifying consequences. In “Keep” the world is in the thrall of an epidemic in which a moat digs itself in the earth around infected persons.

Miéville’s fantastic fiction is often politically-infused or inspired by social concerns and this collection gives us a number of examples of his “leftist weird”. Thus, “The 9th Technique” is an oblique critique of Western foreign policy and society’s complacency in the face of the use of torture techniques. “Dusty Hat" starts off as a bitter satire about the infighting within the political left, before turning into an existentially weird story. In “Covehithe”, the wrecks of ecological, marine disasters take life and roam the Earth.

Elsewhere, Miéville adopts a more traditional style and the results are none the worse for it. Try the escalating, unnerving horror of “The Mount” or the ghost/horror story “Säcken” inspired by the disturbing (and real!) execution method known in Roman Law as the poena cullei .
This anthology gives us a wide-ranging primer of the author’s work and, as one would expect, some of the stories had less of an impact than others. I didn’t particularly like the flash-fiction pieces which seemed little more than sketches compared to the longer tales – perhaps an indication that an original concept on its own is not enough. I also felt that some of the stories were too conceptual for their own good. I have in mind, in particular, “Watching God”, which I interpreted as an extended metaphor about religious belief.

So – is Miéville as good as Zadie Smith or David Mitchell? Believe me, they are as good as he is...

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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.