The first time I read China Miéville was when a friend with good taste handed me a copy of Perdido Street Station. Published when Miéville was not yet thirty, this was his second novel, and one of the most marvellous things I’d read in years. I’ve often seen it described by fans as the fantasy “that has everything” – it is the first in a trilogy that contains the gritty secondary-world of Bas-Lag, is centered around a city-state called New Crobuzon, and is populated by humans and several fantastic human-like races.
The scope of the novel is so wide and its ambition so spectacular that it is impossible to summarise it in a few lines, but I will mention that this is a world where magic and steampunk technology co-exist. The novel is not without its flaws, but I couldn’t put it down.
A lot of the stories in Miéville’s new collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, inspire the same breathless intensity in the reader, through the intricacies in theme and storytelling that especially characterise the longer stories. But it wasn’t that first encounter with Perdido Street Station or Miéville’s other fiction that I was thinking of while I read the 400-page collection. What came to mind most often was The Limits of Utopia, a speech given last year by Miéville at an Earth Day conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an edited version of which can be read here.
Fierce politics
Miéville is fiercely political, and although he balks at the notion that he’s consciously inflecting his fiction with progressive ideology, his political concerns are brilliantly articulated in very beautiful storytelling. In The Limits of Utopia, he presents, among other things, a critique of corporate capitalism and simplistic responses to the wanton destruction of the environment that can be racist and murderous at worst.
In his speech, Miéville invokes Raytheon, the company awarded a National Climate Leadership Award in 2013 by the US Environment Protection Agency, while “they rain death on Afghan villages.” In the title story, Three Moments of an Explosion, companies like Raytheon engage in a new kind of advertising phenomenon, called “explosion marketing”, their logos emblazoned in the sky above cities they help to raze to the ground.
A new kind of adventure sports is born out of this, involving the taking of tachyon-laced MDMA and jumping into buildings being exploded, letting the adventurers experience a chronology-slip head-rush.
The terse story, told in three parts, takes the sensationalism characterising our public life to its logical conclusion, with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and a city mayor letting a delighted child-beneficiary be the one to use the plunger that will destroy the building.
In Polynia, the ghosts of obliterated icebergs and coral reefs come back to haunt the cities of London and Brussels, stubbornly returning despite all attempts to eliminate them. The icebergs are ultimately co-opted for use by the state. And In Covehithe, the sea vomits out old oil rigs.
Biting wit
This is not to say that Miéville is all seriousness; he is capable of being deeply humorous. With a PhD and a teaching career, Miéville is intimately acquainted with the world of academia, and mercilessly lampoons it several times throughout the collection.
Of these stories, Syllabus is my favourite, and elicited belly laughs. It combines the prim, prescriptive voice of a course reading list with historical and science fiction, leading to comedy gold. In this story’s world, insect ships have arrived to London in 1848, giving rise to “a brief interplanetary war” followed by co-existence, and the proposed course will play close attention to the period following “...the inauguration of the first insect bishop in the Church of England (Bishop Insect of Manchester, in 1853), upto and including the present day, and the rapid spread of insects into their current leading positions in humanitarian and ethical organisations.”
In The Conditions of New Death, death has been “upgraded” so that the feet of corpses point directly at the observer at all times, even in the case of multiple observers. An academic paper about New Death by one PJ Mukhopadhyay at a conference in Mumbai is said to be a game-changer, although “no one is yet clear on why Mukhopadhyay’s observation is important. That it is important – that it changes everything – no doubt remains.”
In the Slopes features the eerie yet frequently tender story of two warring factions of archaeologists come to dig at a fictional island, a kind of Pompeii, but with aliens. It is told from the point of view of a lonely shopkeeper, who observes the escalating tension between the two leading archaeologists with some interest. “Academics. Hate each other more than lawyers,” his lawyer friend tells him.
Horror and heart
Miéville’s facility with horror is top-notch, too, not least because of his ability to show characters’ emotional relationships and inner worlds with great nuance. The escalating dread in Sacken, The Rabbet, and The Bastard Prompt works because of this. Sacken is the best of the lot, and concerns an obscure type of execution last practiced in 18th century Germany. The tight, short lines that introduce the horror into the at-first banal events are what make this story great. There is a triptych of screenplay-style pieces, studded with visceral imagery, which also invoke horror.
The most striking thing about this remarkably diverse collection is the expanse of Miéville’s frenetic imagination.
A lot of the shorter pieces in the collection are less story, more thought experiment, and the best of them is Four Final Orpheuses, in which Miéville speculates about Orpheus’s real intentions in turning around to look at Eurydice, thus irrevocably losing her.
The one story that did forcefully bring me back to my first reading of Miéville is the delightful The Dowager of Bees, a breakneck mystery and thriller about hidden cards in otherwise perfectly ordinary decks of cards.
When Miéville slips up, it is with an academic’s rigour. For example, the narrator of the hauntingly poetic Watching God, which is in my opinion one of the finest stories in the collection, suffers from the overemphasis of things that have already been said. But these are small quibbles – even in places where Miéville is over-explaining or under-explaining, he remains a pleasure to read, and his reputation as one of the greatest contemporary writers today is completely justified yet again, thanks to this glittering collection.
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The scope of the novel is so wide and its ambition so spectacular that it is impossible to summarise it in a few lines, but I will mention that this is a world where magic and steampunk technology co-exist. The novel is not without its flaws, but I couldn’t put it down.
A lot of the stories in Miéville’s new collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, inspire the same breathless intensity in the reader, through the intricacies in theme and storytelling that especially characterise the longer stories. But it wasn’t that first encounter with Perdido Street Station or Miéville’s other fiction that I was thinking of while I read the 400-page collection. What came to mind most often was The Limits of Utopia, a speech given last year by Miéville at an Earth Day conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an edited version of which can be read here.
Fierce politics
Miéville is fiercely political, and although he balks at the notion that he’s consciously inflecting his fiction with progressive ideology, his political concerns are brilliantly articulated in very beautiful storytelling. In The Limits of Utopia, he presents, among other things, a critique of corporate capitalism and simplistic responses to the wanton destruction of the environment that can be racist and murderous at worst.
In his speech, Miéville invokes Raytheon, the company awarded a National Climate Leadership Award in 2013 by the US Environment Protection Agency, while “they rain death on Afghan villages.” In the title story, Three Moments of an Explosion, companies like Raytheon engage in a new kind of advertising phenomenon, called “explosion marketing”, their logos emblazoned in the sky above cities they help to raze to the ground.
A new kind of adventure sports is born out of this, involving the taking of tachyon-laced MDMA and jumping into buildings being exploded, letting the adventurers experience a chronology-slip head-rush.
The terse story, told in three parts, takes the sensationalism characterising our public life to its logical conclusion, with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and a city mayor letting a delighted child-beneficiary be the one to use the plunger that will destroy the building.
In Polynia, the ghosts of obliterated icebergs and coral reefs come back to haunt the cities of London and Brussels, stubbornly returning despite all attempts to eliminate them. The icebergs are ultimately co-opted for use by the state. And In Covehithe, the sea vomits out old oil rigs.
Biting wit
This is not to say that Miéville is all seriousness; he is capable of being deeply humorous. With a PhD and a teaching career, Miéville is intimately acquainted with the world of academia, and mercilessly lampoons it several times throughout the collection.
Of these stories, Syllabus is my favourite, and elicited belly laughs. It combines the prim, prescriptive voice of a course reading list with historical and science fiction, leading to comedy gold. In this story’s world, insect ships have arrived to London in 1848, giving rise to “a brief interplanetary war” followed by co-existence, and the proposed course will play close attention to the period following “...the inauguration of the first insect bishop in the Church of England (Bishop Insect of Manchester, in 1853), upto and including the present day, and the rapid spread of insects into their current leading positions in humanitarian and ethical organisations.”
In The Conditions of New Death, death has been “upgraded” so that the feet of corpses point directly at the observer at all times, even in the case of multiple observers. An academic paper about New Death by one PJ Mukhopadhyay at a conference in Mumbai is said to be a game-changer, although “no one is yet clear on why Mukhopadhyay’s observation is important. That it is important – that it changes everything – no doubt remains.”
In the Slopes features the eerie yet frequently tender story of two warring factions of archaeologists come to dig at a fictional island, a kind of Pompeii, but with aliens. It is told from the point of view of a lonely shopkeeper, who observes the escalating tension between the two leading archaeologists with some interest. “Academics. Hate each other more than lawyers,” his lawyer friend tells him.
Horror and heart
Miéville’s facility with horror is top-notch, too, not least because of his ability to show characters’ emotional relationships and inner worlds with great nuance. The escalating dread in Sacken, The Rabbet, and The Bastard Prompt works because of this. Sacken is the best of the lot, and concerns an obscure type of execution last practiced in 18th century Germany. The tight, short lines that introduce the horror into the at-first banal events are what make this story great. There is a triptych of screenplay-style pieces, studded with visceral imagery, which also invoke horror.
The most striking thing about this remarkably diverse collection is the expanse of Miéville’s frenetic imagination.
A lot of the shorter pieces in the collection are less story, more thought experiment, and the best of them is Four Final Orpheuses, in which Miéville speculates about Orpheus’s real intentions in turning around to look at Eurydice, thus irrevocably losing her.
The one story that did forcefully bring me back to my first reading of Miéville is the delightful The Dowager of Bees, a breakneck mystery and thriller about hidden cards in otherwise perfectly ordinary decks of cards.
When Miéville slips up, it is with an academic’s rigour. For example, the narrator of the hauntingly poetic Watching God, which is in my opinion one of the finest stories in the collection, suffers from the overemphasis of things that have already been said. But these are small quibbles – even in places where Miéville is over-explaining or under-explaining, he remains a pleasure to read, and his reputation as one of the greatest contemporary writers today is completely justified yet again, thanks to this glittering collection.