Three Moments of an Explosion
By China Miéville
China Miéville’s stories resist classification, ranging from speculative fiction to fragmentary experiments in narrative form. At times they also resist clear meaning, remaining enigmatic parables of something that can only be vaguely sensed.
If these stories are parables, or trailers for a film we’ll never see, how do we interpret them? What are we supposed to make of icebergs floating over the streets of London, ruined oil rigs that walk on shore to give birth, a phantom-disease syndrome born of the performance of its symptoms, and J-horror-style ghosts rising from a German lake?
You can find political or environmental meanings in Miéville’s fantasies, but perhaps the best way to interpret them is as parables of interpretation. This is fiction written for a new world and a new century: concerned with how to read its signs and understand our place in a suddenly alien culture.
Alex on SF 