Three Moments of an Explosion Stories

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 literature's most original voices.

"Horror, noir, fantasy, politics, and poetry swirl into combinations as satisfying intellectually as they are emotionally....Bradbury meets Borges, with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of hearing." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Miéville moves effortlessly among realism, fantasy, and surrealism in this dark, sometimes horrific short story collection....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." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

China Miéville is the author of numerous books, including Three Moments of an Explosion, The City & The City, Embassytown, Railsea, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (three times). He lives and works in London.