Three moments of an explosion

This is an incredibly strange collection, filled with bizarre ideas and twists. What it lacked (and this is so common in collections) was consistency. I’ll be honest, I almost gave up after the first couple of pieces. I didn’t care at all for the title piece, and worried that the stories wouldn’t improve.

Happily, I was wrong. There were several that will stick with me for quite some time. I made a pact with myself that, if I wasn’t feeling a story after the first several pages, I could skip it and move ahead. In so doing, I discovered that about half of the stories didn’t catch me. The half that did, however, were worth the effort.

I would recommend reading this collection, but only when you are able to fully concentrate and take the time to unwrap the strange gifts inside at your own pace. And it’s ok to skip stories you aren’t feeling. I promise that any fan of weird fiction will find something to provoke inside.

I finally found a China Miéville book that is not an automatic 5 for me.

That being said, I loved it.

This is a book with stories of varying lengths. Here, too, as in all of his books, China Miéville showcases how good he is at conjuring up interesting and rich premises for fantasy worlds. In this book, the worlds are all based on our own with a twist. I don't want to spoil it a lot, but just to give an idea, some of the twists that are widely advertised from this book are:

- A world where broken oil rigs come alive and start roaming the world.
- A world where Earth built huge space elevators who form their own societies.
- A world where Poker players around the world are visited by magical cards that are both wondrous and strict.

Some of the stories have more obvious points, political, aesthetic or just conversational. Others are just weird (which is to say their points or ideas are more hidden and convoluted).

One thing all stories have in common, though, which gives this collection its character, is that all of them end abruptly. The book mostly lacks resolutions, and even when they exist, stories still end abruptly. This left me with a feeling of frustration, bewilderment and wonder, but thinking back, it feels like the concepts aren't made to sustain full books or really long winding plots: they're made to be briefly explored, as flights of fancy, and then abandoned at just the right moment before one flies to the next one.

The reason I ended up giving the book a four, was that I did feel unnecessarily confused at times, and I ended up not being full captivated. Since the stories were short, though, even when a story wasn't as captivating as I'd hoped, I quickly found myself being immersed in the next one.

All in all, this book is perhaps a little niche: don't read it if you expect to understand everything, or get satisfying conclusions: read it if you enjoy clever confusion, and jumping around in fantastical constructions.

Um.

I love Miéville so much that I just could not fathom not enjoying a collection of his short stories, but I just can't honestly say that I enjoyed this. At all.

I suppose his novels do have some aspects of this, but I was not prepared for, essentially, horror -- like, seriously disturbing, nightmare-fuel type stuff. Really inventive, upsetting, haunting stories.

And besides that, they all either have bad endings or leave things unresolved. A lot of them are very formulaic, and the formula is "present day, present time" + "something inexplicable and fucked up happens" (giant icebergs appear in the skies over London, people come down with a strange malady that causes trenches to form in the ground around them, etc) + "the story ends without there ever being any answers to what is happening".

They're not badly written, they just give you nightmares and depress you without really giving you anything in return.

I did enjoy the slightly Borgesian style of: The Dowager of Bees, A Second Slice Manifesto, Syllabus, The Design.

I wish I had never read Säcken and After the Festival. Just... shudders.

The challenge with critiquing a collection, for me at least, is whether to assess each story individually and then average it out, or to pretend that there's some overall cohesiveness the author(s) succeeded or failed to attain. Because the truth is that even when the stories all share a theme or tone, I can't see the forest for the trees.

I started this collection thinking I was going to write a little critique about each story, and for the first half or so, I did; I summarized each tale, noted what the main conceit was and what I thought of the execution. At some point, though, I started feeling a bit too proud of my incisive tone and just read the rest. I'm not sure if that increased my enjoyment or not, but anyhow, it's done.

I'll be glad to share my thoughts on the first dozen or so stories with anyone who wants to read them, but I'd suggest that you first read the stories themselves, because my little blurbs don't really prepare you.