Three Moments of an Explosion

China Miéville (Embassytown, Railsea) relishes the written word; there's no other explanation for how he's seamlessly able to evoke a word's greatest depth and make it seem like you've never read a sentence before picking up his books. The short stories collected in Three Moments of an Explosion defy genre classification, but touch on science fiction, horror, fantasy and speculative fiction. In most of the stories, Miéville takes us one step beyond the world we know and watches the ripples flow over humanity, using the weird and unfamiliar to shine revealing light on the everyday. Ranging from the quixotic to the quick, the stories may leave you baffled—Miéville is efficient in vaguely introducing the twist without dwelling on it—or present a thrilling adventure, but each one is unique within the collection. Notable selections—too many to name—revolve around an infection that surrounds the victim in a bottomless moat if they stop moving, a space elevator, and mysterious carvings on a cadaver's bones.