Three Moments of an Explosion

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 but violent 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 our most original voices.

Praise for China Miéville

The City & The City

“Dark and thought-provoking . . . [This novel has] the gritty, grainy feel of many a murder mystery shot in black-and-white, with some of the foreboding, elusive narrowness-of-frame that a Cold War spy flick possesses.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

Embassytown

“Richly conceived . . . Embassytown has the feel of a word-puzzle, and much of the pleasure of figuring out the logic of the world and the story comes from gradually catching the full resonance of its invented and imported words.”—The New York Times Book Review

Railsea

“Other names besides Melville's will surely come to mind as you read this thrilling tale: Dune's Frank Herbert, for example, & even Robert Louis Stevenson. But in this, as in all of his works, Miéville has that special knack for evoking other writers even while making the story wholly his own.”—Los Angeles Times

Perdido Street Station

“Compulsively readable . . . impossible to expunge from memory.”—The Washington Post Book World