Three Moments of an Explosion
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Narrated by:
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Nicholas Guy Smith
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Bruce Mann
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Hillary Huber
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MacLeod Andrews
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By:
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China Miéville
About this listen
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Kirkus Reviews
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 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.
©2015 China Miéville (P)2015 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
"Miéville moves effortlessly among realism, fantasy, and surrealism in this dark, sometimes horrific short story collection.... His characters...are invariably well drawn and compelling." (
Publishers Weekly starred review)
Critic reviews
“Even when he is orbiting somewhere in a galaxy too far away for normal human comprehension, the genre-subverting English novelist China Miéville is dazzling. His latest collection of short stories, Three Moments of an Explosion, crowds virtuosity into every sentence. . . . There are things to admire in every story, even the ones you can’t quite grasp. The book left me feeling unsettled, uneasy, nervous, and I think that is Mr. Miéville’s point. He wants to draw attention to the scratching under the floorboards, the panic in our heads, the rebellion of nature and inanimate objects. As he says, ‘These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city’.”—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
“You can’t talk about Miéville without using the word ‘brilliant.’ . . . His wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing. . . . My favourite of all these tales is ‘The Rules,’ two and a half pages long. Read it. You won’t regret it, or forget it.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
“[A] gripping collection . . . Miéville expertly mixes science fiction, fantasy and surrealism. . . . Amid the longer stories are more cerebral, poetic flash pieces that will haunt the reader beyond the pages of this exceptional book.”—The Washington Post
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Lester Ferris needs a rest. He's spent his life being shot at, and Afghanistan was the last stop on his road to exhaustion. Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to relax. A former British colony, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution. But Lester Ferris makes a friend: a street kid with a comicbook fixation who will need a home - who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. But in a place like Mancreu, just what sort of hero will the boy need?
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Slow start - but very touching
- By Cath on 08-25-14
By: Nick Harkaway
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The Silent History
- By: Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, LJ Ganser
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
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A Thought-Provoking Premise
- By Doug - Audible on 03-31-15
By: Eli Horowitz, and others
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The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination
- Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius
- By: John Joseph Adams - editor
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Mary Robinette Kowal, Justine Eyre
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Mad scientists have never had it so tough. In super-hero comics, graphic novels, films, TV series, video games, and even works of what may be fiction, they are besieged by those who stand against them, devoid of sympathy for their irrational, megalomaniacal impulses to rule, destroy, or otherwise dominate the world as we know it. It’s just not fair. So those of us who are so twisted and sick that we love mad scientists have created this guide.
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HAND DANCING
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-30-15
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Meddling Kids
- A Novel
- By: Edgar Cantero
- Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon's Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster - another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.
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should have been a YA novel
- By Bearded Barista on 08-20-17
By: Edgar Cantero
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Stations of the Tide
- By: Michael Swanwick
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The Jubilee Tides will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes a masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.
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Hard to categorize, hard to put down
- By Robert L. on 03-25-12
By: Michael Swanwick
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The Silence
- By: Tim Lebbon
- Narrated by: Marisa Calin, Ralph Lister
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the darkness of a vast cave system, cut off from the world for millennia, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed. Swarming from their prison, they multiply and thrive. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death. Deaf for many years, Ally knows how to live in silence. Now, it is her family's only chance of survival. They must leave their home, shun others, and find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?
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I really am starting to question other reviewers
- By leelee8888 on 09-11-20
By: Tim Lebbon
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This Census-Taker
- By: China Miéville
- Narrated by: Matthew Frow
- Length: 4 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?
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Only Feeding the Darkness
- By Darwin8u on 01-14-16
By: China Miéville
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Harrison Squared
- By: Daryl Gregory
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Harrison Harrison - H2 to his mom - is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison, along with his mother, has just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him.
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The premise sounded so interesting...
- By shirley on 03-26-15
By: Daryl Gregory
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The Flicker Men
- A Novel
- By: Ted Kosmatka
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A quantum physicist shocks the world with a startling experiment, igniting a struggle between science and theology, free will and fate, and antagonizing forces not known to exist. Eric Argus is a washout. His prodigious early work clouded his reputation and strained his sanity. But an old friend gives him another chance, an opportunity to step back into the light.
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Started out good but fell flat
- By Ed A on 08-04-15
By: Ted Kosmatka
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Angelmaker
- By: Nick Harkaway
- Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Joe Spork repairs clocks, a far cry from his late father, a flashy London gangster. But when Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. Joe's client, Edie Banister, is more than just a kindly old lady - she's a former superspy. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis.
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A cure for the modern cynic
- By Maine Colonial 🌲 on 08-28-12
By: Nick Harkaway
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The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5
- By: Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, John P Murphy, and others
- Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.
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Narrator sounds like Tony Danza
- By Sean on 03-05-16
By: Cory Doctorow, and others
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Superheroes
- By: Peter S. Beagle, Daryl Gregory, James Patrick Kelly, and others
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman, Joe Barrett, Christina Delaine, and others
- Length: 17 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Modern gods and goddesses, remote, revered - and like the pantheon of heroes and heroines of ancient myth - possessing great power tempered with flaws. Now, find within this anthology great tales by gifted and award-winning authors who move superheroes from the four-color panels of comic books to the fantastic pages of fiction, stories that will remind anyone who ever wanted to wear a cape or don a cowl of the extraordinary powers of the imagination!
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Pretentious tired old concepts
- By BookofJoy on 12-29-14
By: Peter S. Beagle, and others
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There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.” And he wants to be able to die. In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own.
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Graze Into It
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On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea–even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago.
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Talented Mr Cowley a mismatch for Railsea
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When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borl ú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined. Borl must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own.
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Reviews, Dishonesty and The Emperor's New Clothes
- By Robert on 01-27-13
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A Spectre, Haunting
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In 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels' apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world reduces every relationship to that of profit, and burst asunder the old forms of production and of politics. It is still a recognisable picture of our world—the vampiric energy of the system being once again highly contentious. This is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today.
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A great follow up to October
- By Amazon Customer on 01-18-23
By: China Miéville
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Un Lun Dun
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- Unabridged
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What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up...and some of its lost and broken people, too. When 12-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.
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Great read for all ages
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A Spectre, Haunting
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In 1848, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels' apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world reduces every relationship to that of profit, and burst asunder the old forms of production and of politics. It is still a recognisable picture of our world–the vampiric energy of the system being once again highly contentious.
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Brilliant analysis
- By Richard Gilbert on 06-22-23
By: China Miéville
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City of Last Chances
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
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- Unabridged
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There has always been a darkness to Ilmar, but never more so than now. The city chafes under the heavy hand of the Palleseen occupation, the choke-hold of its criminal underworld, the boot of its factory owners, the weight of its wretched poor and the burden of its ancient curse. What will be the spark that lights the conflagration? Despite the city's refugees, wanderers, murderers, madmen, fanatics and thieves, the catalyst, as always, will be the Anchorwood–that dark grove of trees, that primeval remnant, that portal, when the moon is full, to strange and distant shores.
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Occupied Paris during WW2 In Fantasy World?
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What listeners say about Three Moments of an Explosion
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- CANDACE O'NEILL
- 05-07-17
NICHOLAS GUY SMITH
If you could sum up Three Moments of an Explosion in three words, what would they be?
Nicholas Guy Smith
Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I wish that Nicholas Guy Smith narrated this entire short story collection.
If you could rename Three Moments of an Explosion, what would you call it?
I would not rename it.
Any additional comments?
none.
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- Ashton
- 11-05-15
bliss
read every thing by china, this shows an evolution boarding on will self but better.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 08-13-15
Reading Miéville is both Delicious AND Disturbing
Maybe even 4.5 stars. I really liked this collection. Some of the stories I loved. Adored even. Some were too light. Some extremely dense. But none were uninteresting.
Many SF/horror/noir writers get funky by bending the plot. Miéville does it by bending his words. He alters reality by converting language, both known and familiar, into something alien and the strange. Those thin threads he weaves between the normal and the exotic are done often (not always) with a slight of hand with language; a flick of his prose tongue. He is also getting better and better at the polished, palitable otherworldiness of his worlds. There is a glaze in his stories that makes reading Miéville both delicious AND disturbing at the same time.
Part of Miéville's genius [and NO, I don't use genius lightly] is his ability to find the strange in our world and escalate it. Use it as a mental catalyst to unlock some deeper key. Space elevators? He will take that to the next level. Marxist materialism? Just wait to read what he does with the Ash Heap of History. Scrimshaw? Therapy? Card tricks? Enhanced Interrogation? He will outsmart your expectations with each one. He will extract the magic from old bones or a discarded rag. He will find the horror in the shadows that haven't been cast yet.
Anyway, here is the list of his stories:
"Three Moments of an Explosion"
"Polynia"
"The Condition of New Death"
"The Dowager of Bees"
"In the Slopes"
"The Crawl"
"Watching God"
"The 9th Technique"
"The Rope Is the World"
"The Buzzard’s Egg"
"Säcken"
"Syllabus"
"Dreaded Outcome"
"After the Festival"
"The Dusty Hat"
"Escapee"
"The B[]stard Prompt"
"Rules"
"Estate"
"Keep"
"A Second Slice Manifesto"
"Covehithe"
"The Junket"
"Four Final Orpheuses"
"The Rabbet"
"Listen the Birds"
"A Mount"
"The Design"
Some of these stories, individually, at length. Some stories just hang there defying gravity in my mind. Other stories sit hard in my stomach, neither digesting or moving, just sitting and waiting for the right moment to hatch.
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- Ian
- 10-08-19
Not just a Masterpiece...
A thrown gauntlet.
Mieville delivers a declaration not just of war but of pogrom against merely conventional fiction.
The cast deliver a riveting & magnetic performance of the finest anthology of supernatural fiction ever to grace Human language.
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- Ryan
- 12-28-15
Surrealist/weird fantasy mindscrews
3.5 stars. China Mieville is an author that can be hit or miss with me in novel form, though I enjoy his baroque, surrealist imagination and his dedication to rethinking how fantasy is supposed to work.
The stories here are mostly more in the line of Borges or Kafka than what people usually think of when they think of fantasy, sci-fi, or horror, though there are touches of those genres (in their mainstream incarnation) here. The tone tends towards quietly unsettling, with some surreal element dropped into an otherwise recognizable world. A few go in a more obviously metaphorical or philosophical direction.
Mieville likes to create intricate realities and can be somewhat oblique, so many of the pieces took a second listen before their rewards revealed themselves to me. If you're a reader that's easily frustrated by stories that are ambiguous or not strongly plot-driven, this collection might not be for you. For the most part, it's all more in the vein of the City & The City than Perdido Street Station.
Highlights
Polynia: One day, icebergs materialize in the skies above London and float there, observed by a middle-school boy and his friends. Mysteriously unaffected by gravity or weather, the bergs remain for years, attracting explorers. They seem to be the reincarnations of melted icebergs lost to climate change. Quite haunting.
In the Slopes: On a small Mediterranean island, archeologists are digging out the remains of ancient villagers entombed in volcanic ash, a la Pompeii. But among them are the remains of otherworldly beings. Strange things happen when a local shopkeeper, the protagonist, gets involved in a petty squabble between two rival researchers. Lovecraftian without emulating Lovecraft.
Watching God: A Borges-esque piece about ships that pass by an isolated spit of land, but never visit the inhabitants, who are left to wonder if the occasional shipwrecks and reefings are meant to be some sort of a message. Heavily metaphorical.
The Buzzard's Egg: An old man imprisoned in a tower is responsible for caring for the idols that the surrounding empire has taken hostage from enemy lands. He has an amusing "conversation" with one god, but we gradually learn about this man and his history. Enjoyed the timeless feel of this one.
The Junket: A Quentin Tarantino-esque filmmaker who's a non-religious Jew makes a horror movie that plays off of anti-Jewish caricatures, but is murdered before he can explain his intentions. Critics and audiences can't agree on what to make of it.
The Design: A medical student in the 1930s discovers that intricate scrimshaw art is carved into the bones of a cadaver, but only confides in an associate who's a bit more than a friend. A very effective story about the weight of secrets and the unwanted attention they might bring you.
The less successful stories were still listen-worthy, but had slightly underwhelming Twilight Zone-like twists or were a bit too fuzzy in their magic realism for me. An obvious example is one about a therapist whose approach to separating her patients from their more toxic friends and lovers isn't quite as clever of a fictional twist as it wants to be. There are also several short "movie trailers" that are impressively imaginative, but have no apparent point besides that. Perhaps Mieville was floating some novel ideas, to gauge the response.
But, overall, it's a fairly good collection, highlighting the more literary side of this author. If you want straight-up weird fantasy, go with Perdido Street Station.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Michael R. Smith
- 05-05-16
Not my favourite.
I am usually a far of this author, but there is a disjointed quality to this work that prevented me from enjoying it. His style lends itself much better in my opinion to longer form works such as his magnificent Perdido Street Station and Kraken, to name just two.
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- toy robots
- 11-18-15
Short stories from China in audio can be tough
I'm a huge China fan and have read most of his books. I should have realized that some of his later stuff tends to be a bit more complicated (looking at you Embassytown), requiring a reread here and there; playing with syntax and structure.
I found his short stories to be truly amazing but I would recommend reading this book and not listening to it. Only the longer stories tend to work out here because you have time to settle in and think on them.
There a lot of short stories crammed here, some only paragraphs. By the time one would end, and it would take a second to realize it was over, another would begin; without the chance to comprehend the events that just unfolded.
He also has a few movie "trailers" in here, the vocalists read every time marker ("second 5-7") which breaks up the intended effect, if you were reading it you might notice the times but just read the text next to it. Because of this, the trailers are a miss.
Great book, but short stories from China doesn't make for a great audio experience (often times wishing for the book to reread or scan back pages).
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- Bryne Judy
- 03-24-16
Starkly, jarringly original.
Narrator really made the pieces work. This eclectic combination of normalcy and surrealism presents a very abstandard version of science fiction.
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- Palo Alto Resident
- 09-06-15
Disappointing
I have read and enjoyed Miéville's earlier books and short stories. A small number of the current stories were entertaining, but most were boring. Since this may be the writer's trend, I thinks I am finished with him. Too bad!
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- Corax
- 06-17-18
Disappointing
Vague, unsatisfying, and unbearably pretentious, Mieville delivers evocative but pointlessly oblique prose. Mostly mediocre narration. I'll be returning this book.
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