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A review by duffypratt
Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville
challenging
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
These stories are interesting, but very few of them are satisfying. They either present a strange/cool idea in an experimental way and leave it at that, or they develop on it in a narrative that is somewhat engaging but ends up being a bit perplexing. There are only a couple in the bunch that I thought were truly excellent, most notably After the Festival.
The ideas, I have to say, are very cool. Mieville seems to place himself somewhere between Kafka, Borges, and J.G Ballard, with perhaps a touch of David Lynch (of Eraserhead). We get icebergs floating in the sky over London, medical students who find their cadavers have scrimshaw on their bones, oil rigs that have come to life and are invading the land. Towers built up as cities reaching to geosynchronous satellites, but now decaying. A disease that makes it so that a trench of earth spontaneously digs itself around any of the infected who remain stationary for long enough.
The imagination is extremely fertile and, as with much of Kafka, the weirdness seems to present itself as a kind of metaphor. But it's difficult to say what the metaphors are actually pointing to. And as with Kafka, I am sometimes at a loss to understand. So all that I'm left with is whether I enjoy it or not. And here, I would say it's about 50/50. Some of these stories seem very cool moment by moment. But they tend to simply peter out; the world ends not with a bang...
Still, I'm glad to have read these, and I may come back to a couple of them (After the Festival, The Keep). But I don't think Mieville is as good in the shorter formats as he is in the Bas-Lag books, or in Embassytown. Will definitely read more by him.
The ideas, I have to say, are very cool. Mieville seems to place himself somewhere between Kafka, Borges, and J.G Ballard, with perhaps a touch of David Lynch (of Eraserhead). We get icebergs floating in the sky over London, medical students who find their cadavers have scrimshaw on their bones, oil rigs that have come to life and are invading the land. Towers built up as cities reaching to geosynchronous satellites, but now decaying. A disease that makes it so that a trench of earth spontaneously digs itself around any of the infected who remain stationary for long enough.
The imagination is extremely fertile and, as with much of Kafka, the weirdness seems to present itself as a kind of metaphor. But it's difficult to say what the metaphors are actually pointing to. And as with Kafka, I am sometimes at a loss to understand. So all that I'm left with is whether I enjoy it or not. And here, I would say it's about 50/50. Some of these stories seem very cool moment by moment. But they tend to simply peter out; the world ends not with a bang...
Still, I'm glad to have read these, and I may come back to a couple of them (After the Festival, The Keep). But I don't think Mieville is as good in the shorter formats as he is in the Bas-Lag books, or in Embassytown. Will definitely read more by him.