DECEMBER 2015 - AudioFile
This short story collection should cause anyone new to author Miéville or narrator Nicholas Guy Smith to seek more from both. Smith narrates nearly all the stories, while the other narrators contribute only one or two each. Smith’s delivery meshes well with Miéville’s preoccupations: Both share an ability to convey the tension between the ordinary and the strange. At times, the stories are reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin’s; at other times, of Stephen King’s. Most require the narrator to hold reality in suspension. Smith easily negotiates that requirement, using subtly rising and falling intonation and pacing that quickens, slows, and pauses to great effect. Several of the stories beg development into a novel. If that should happen, Smith would be an excellent choice to narrate. K.W. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 04/27/2015
Award winner Miéville (Embassytown) moves effortlessly among realism, fantasy, and surrealism in this dark, sometimes horrific short story collection. Highlights include “Polynia,” in which icebergs begin appearing in the sky over London, floating effortlessly despite their enormous weight; “In the Slopes,” centered on the discovery of a Pompeii-like ancient city in which humans and aliens seem to have coexisted in peace; the frightening “Sacken,” about Lovecraftian goings-on at a lakeside vacation spot; “Dreaded Outcome,” in which a therapist proves herself willing to go to any length to cure her clients; and “Covehithe,” in which all of the deep-water oil drilling platforms that have ever sunk and polluted the planet return, striding out of the water like Wellsian tripods, to inflict vengeance on humanity and pursue their own mysterious agenda. Miéville’s ornate style, which befits the fantasies he’s known for, can also become terse, even minimalist, in such experimental pieces as “The Crawl” and “Listen to the Birds.” 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. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Advance praise for Three Moments of an Explosion
“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)
Library Journal
07/01/2015
Multiaward-winning fantasy and sf writer Miéville (Perdido Street Station) offers a set of fantastical stories all wrapped in a veil of normalcy. In this collection the ordinary—vacations, psychotherapy—and the extraordinary—revolutionary internecine fighting—are given a twist away from average expectations. For instance, in the title story building demolitions are used as a new form of advertising in conjunction with a fresh type of sport. The nagging plausibility that invades these stories are found even in the most imaginative of them, such as "The Dowager of Bees," in which playing cards feature hidden suits that reconfigure the game and exact a toll on the player. Adding to the volume's normal-but-not-normal feel, the author places his readers in the middle of his tales with no backstory to explain the jargon and setup—take "Syllabus," for example, an actual outline for a class in which echo figures are forbidden and students debate the success of privatizing sickness. Finally, these stories don't feature hard science but rather a possibility, an idea, a retake on the actual to be replaced by the what if. VERDICT Miéville once again shows his mastery of the astounding, and his many fans will not be disappointed.—Laura Hiatt-Smith, Conifer, CO
DECEMBER 2015 - AudioFile
This short story collection should cause anyone new to author Miéville or narrator Nicholas Guy Smith to seek more from both. Smith narrates nearly all the stories, while the other narrators contribute only one or two each. Smith’s delivery meshes well with Miéville’s preoccupations: Both share an ability to convey the tension between the ordinary and the strange. At times, the stories are reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin’s; at other times, of Stephen King’s. Most require the narrator to hold reality in suspension. Smith easily negotiates that requirement, using subtly rising and falling intonation and pacing that quickens, slows, and pauses to great effect. Several of the stories beg development into a novel. If that should happen, Smith would be an excellent choice to narrate. K.W. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-05-21
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. His masterful 2009 novel The City and the City (Locus, Hugo, and Arthur C. Clarke awards), for example, explored two metropolises with entirely separate populations, governments, infrastructures, and even clothing styles that shared a single geographical location. 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. In "Dreaded Outcome," the narrator, a Brooklyn psychotherapist, practices "traumatic vector therapy," a style that incorporates military and martial arts techniques. (Like that therapist, Miéville often mixes styles and genres, in this case academic discourse and noir.) "Most of the time what our patients need is a compassionate, rigorous, sympathetic interlocutor. Sometimes the externalized trauma-vectors in dysfunctional interpersonal codependent psychodynamics are powerful enough that more robust therapeutic interventions are necessary. I checked my ammunition." That readers can guess what will happen after the narrator learns her own therapist is also a TVT practitioner makes the ending no less satisfying. In "Polynia," the ghosts of vanished geologic and ecologic features haunt the warmed globe, with icebergs floating in the air over London, coral forming the "Great Brussels Reef," and rain forest undergrowth shutting down factories in Japan. Other stories are more open-ended. In "The Dusty Hat," members of a political organization have split off from "the Mothership" to form "the Left Faction." The story opens with the narrator contemplating a crack in his (or her?) wall and ceiling; by the time it ends, he's discovered a vast politics of the inanimate, with its own schisms. "I poured myself a glass of water. I didn't like how it looked at me." As a mysterious, not-entirely-animate figure tells him, the "loyalist" crack in his wall has been watching him: "The split was against you in the split." Bradbury meets Borges, with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of hearing.
