Tom’s Reviews > Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories > Status Update

Another highlight: “Säcken,” the creepiest short story I’ve read in a while.

"In The Slopes," set in Elam, Great Britain's version of Pompeii, is a mystifying tale of speculative archaeology. McCullough is a likable local with a checkered past who is drawn into the intrigue wrought when competing teams of digging scholars arrive to excavate a long-ago cataclysm. The key here is negative space: unearthing not the artifacts but the gaps they've left behind. Don't miss it.

The Condition of New Death. A short piece, not a manifesto but “an exhortation for an exhortation” for the world to truly come to terms with this physics- and biology- defying new phenomenon. The narrator recounts how this new epoch of thanatological orientation began and how society adapted to it with relative ease, and wonders what it might mean for the future of humanity.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “Three Moments of an Explosion” / “Polynia”

One side character, a “Stepney newsagent,” points to a science magazine and claims, “Look, they melt! First they melt and now, look, they come back.”This story is less about the swift justice and repercussions of the ghostly return of vanished nature than the matter-of-fact strangeness of urban life under industrially-ushered climate transformation.

Here Miéville imagines a climate change instant karma without the moral typically assumed by environmental sci-fi. All of London is chilled by the presence of massive unidentified flying objects, quickly identified as actual icebergs and obsessed over by a regular 11 year old and his adventurous group of friends.

Sometimes it feels like a long time between Miéville novels. I’ll be taking my time with these compelling tales so I never have to be without some of that weirdness when it’s needed. The 1 1/2 page opening blast of the title story builds a disturbingly commercial future world and then blows itself up, clearing space for the icy behemoth wonder that is “Polynia.”