Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

The fiction of multiple awardwinning 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 but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpses 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.