A highly anticipated collection of short fiction listed in the Guardian's 'Essential Literary Calendar' for 2015 from one of the most exciting and original authors writing today.
China Mieville has lived all his life in London. His first novel,
King Rat, received superb reviews and was nominated for fantasy
awards, and his second, Perdido Street Station, astonished the
literary world with its imaginative power and sheer inventiveness.
It won the Arthur C Clarke award and the British Fantasy Award in
2001.
The Scar followed that book in 2002, and in 2004, China's fourth
novel, Iron Council was published. It won the Arthur C Clarke award
for 2005. His most recent work is Looking for Jake.
You can't talk about Miéville without using the word "brilliant" .
. . The writing, never less than excellent, takes many tones
throughout the 28 stories, some showy, some not. Pastiche, when
present, is so skilful that it can go unnoticed. Subjects of real
weight are handled with unobtrusive ease but never glibly nor
diminished by facetiousness . . . Fascinating, full of suggestion
and implication, and beautiful.
*Guardian*
If anyone doubted whether China Miéville had imagination to burn,
proof of his indefatigable creative restlessness is to be found in
this collection of short stories . . . This is a bumper collection
overflowing with new visions of our beautiful, terrible world.
*Metro*
Miéville . . . is gifted with an incomparable visionary
imagination. In tale after tale in Three Moments of an Explosion
you'll find a conceit so unusual, so disturbing, so arresting, that
it takes your breath away.
*Financial Times*
A volume that suggests Miéville is not merely looking for
techniques to take back to his longer-form fiction, but doing
something altogether more ambitious: exploring the unsettling
possibilities of short fiction to describe our unsettled lives,
rather as JG Ballard did in the last century.
*SFX*
Award winner Miéville (Embassytown) 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. 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
*Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)*
Horror, noir, fantasy, politics, and poetry swirl into combinations
as satisfying intellectually as they are emotionally. Miéville
(Railsea, 2012, etc.) has a habit of building his narratives by
taking a metaphor, often about a political or social issue, and
asking what would happen if it were literally true . . . In
less-capable hands, this method might result in mere gags or dead
horses endlessly beaten. (Good thing this isn't a Miéville story,
or you'd be wiping off bits of rotten horseflesh.) In Miéville's
hands it ranges from clever to profound . . . Bradbury meets
Borges, with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of
hearing
*Kirkus (Starred Review)*
The 28 stories in China Mìéville's Three Moments of on Explosion .
. . are familiarly strange, full of eloquent monstrosity. A burning
stag runs through a city, icebergs float over towns. Miéville's
vision has a fragmentary force, and this mosaic text does it
proud.
*New Scientist*
This collection fizzes with energy and experiment . . . When you
put the book down, the world seems a richer, deeper and more
frightening place.
*New Statesman*
[A] fearsomely intelligent collection.
*Daily Telegraph*
A collection of short fiction which ranks alongside his best work.
That it is an assemblage of various pieces actually plays to
Miéville's strengths: the apprehension of social fragmentation and
somatic alienation through and endlessly fertile, monstrously
inventive imagination.
*Guardian*
A gathering of dark nuggets of genius . . . Miéville is one of our
most important writers, and this collection demonstrates his
versatility and powerful imagination to stunning effect.
*Independent on Sunday*
Miéville - twice winner of the British Fantasy Award and three
times winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award - is head and shoulders
above other writers in this genre.
*The Times*
There is a baroque extravagance to China Miéville's imagination
that is uniquely suited to a collection of short fiction . . . The
rigour of his sentences, his thinking, his politics and humanity
transform these set-ups from the merely eerie to the profoundly
unsettling.
*Times Literary Supplement*
A collection of imagined pasts and futures that sparkled with
political and narrative insight.
*Daily Telegraph*
Miéville - twice winner of the British Fantasy Award and three
times winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award - is head and shoulders
above other writers in this genre.
*The Times Ireland*
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