His devotees with devour it.
Will they? I have no idea. I don’t know any devotees of China Miéville and this is the first book of his I have read.
But yay, smart science fiction. Actually, maybe this isn’t science fiction. Maybe it’s speculative fiction. I’m not really clear on the distinction (is there a difference? is it just semantics? I feel that Miéville, as a Phd Marxist would probably love to argue semantics regarding categorization of his work). But it’s smart and speculative and I like both those things and always always always struggle to find sci-fi/speculative/fantasy works that are both.
So Three Moments of an Explosion comprises of short stories of people reacting to phenomena, with no explanation of the provenance of said phenomena. Just reactions. And some very very short pieces, no more than a page, that function more like ideas for a longer story than a story in-and-of-themselves. Again, with the want of explanations as to why oil rigs have come alive and started walking onto land or why one would parade through London with a pig’s head covering one’s own or why the poena cullei won’t let them alone, the whole collection is unsatisfying. The stories are intelligent; maybe explaining more would dull them right up, but after a while, the stories all blend together because when something odd happens, people will react to it. Or people die weirdly, non-dying people react to it. Or people find something bizarre, then they react to it. Again and again, like thirty times, or however many stories there are, worth. Perhaps all these abnormal things are really manifestations from the same root, and all these stories are connected, which is why, now, they blend together in my memory. That, or they simply aren’t articulated enough to differentiate between, no matter how high of an IQ the stories might themselves have.
So, in the end, I can’t say I devoured the book. I’m not a devotee though. I’d read some of his longer works though, to see if the smarts of Miéville’s ideas can hold up to more lengthy-plot scrutiny. I have a copy of The City and The City I got at a book swap. Maybe I’ll try that next.
Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville went on sale August 4, 2015.
I received a copy free from Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.