Three Moments of an Explosion
For our study of "the new weird," I read China Miéville's short stories Polynia and The Condition of New Death from his short story anthology Three Moments of an Explosion. Miéville's stories are definitely strange, and I usually really like stories that bring an uncanny, abstracted feeling to the world the way Miéville's stories do. I did definitely enjoy the atmosphere and the strangeness--I thought it was fun that the floating icebergs over London were actually just floating icebergs, and liked the note in The Condition of New Death that New Death is both subjective and objective. I did, however, feel a bit overall dissatisfied at the end of the stories. While I don't mind an open-ended ending like both of these had, I felt that both stories but Polynia especially introduced a lot of interesting characters, events, or ideas but didn't explore them to the extent that they could have. In Polynia, for example, I think the narrator's decision to inhale all of the iceberg fumes and not let Ian have any could have been explored more, or we could have found out more about the climbers who sent letters down to London. Just a more specific or significant Main Event in both stories, I think, would have made them more satisfying for me.
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