Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories - Hardcover

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. (Ursula Le Guin 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. (Claire Allfree 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. (James Lovegrove 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. (Tim Martin 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. (Adam Roberts Guardian)

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.