Much contemporary fantasy is quite violent, perhaps in an attempt to win the respect of people who assume fantasy is all fairies and fluff; but I doubt if that’s why so much of China Miéville’s work is so in-your-face gruesome. More likely he is meeting the expectations of a readership used to the infinite kill count of sensational films and electronic games, and is bloody-minded enough to enjoy doing so. But, knowing him as a writer avowedly committed to Marxist principles of social justice, with an intense sensitivity to contemporary moral and emotional complexities and a thoughtful mind that finds expression in lucid, cogent talks and essays, I wonder if he uses the horrific as a brilliant barrage of blanks concealing a subtler, deeper engagement with the dark side.

You can’t talk about Miéville without using the word “brilliant”, whether referring to his displays of intellectual brilliance, as in the essay “The Limits of Utopia”, which opens up new ways to think about our future, or to the dazzle of his prose, as displayed in this new collection of stories. Stylistic brilliance often implies coldness, a spectator pose. The reader is not expected to identify and suffer with the characters, but to watch the fireworks go off, and gasp, and say “Wow!”. Indeed, some of these stories are pure fireworks. A whizbang, a starburst, a bright configuration of unpredictable, momentary elegance – gone. Many writers, and many readers, ask no more.

Short story: Covehithe by China Miéville Read more

Fortunately for plodders like me, it’s not all pyrotechnics. The writing, never less than excellent, takes many tones throughout the 28 stories, some showy, some not. Pastiche, when present, is so skilful that it can go unnoticed. Subjects of real weight are handled with unobtrusive ease but never glibly nor diminished by facetiousness. There are even a few characters one can, surreptitiously, suffer with. None, however, to rejoice with. Happiness is not currently on the Miéville menu.

But his wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing – even in a trendy gross-out piece such as “After the Festival” (zombies, rotting meat-masks), more so in tales that develop creepy concepts such as feigned symptoms of illness becoming genuinely contagious (“The Bastard Prompt”), or a school of psychiatry that routinely uses murder as a cure (“The Dreaded Outcome”). These are essentially horror stories, self-circumscribed by the curious objectives of the genre. Readers who don’t find being scared or disgusted satisfying as an end in itself will prefer the more ambitious stories, such as “Covehithe”, which, with marvellously unnerving poetic justice, describes wrecked and sunken oil rigs clambering back up on to land to suck more oil from the earth and returning to the ocean to spawn. Such a playful yet deeply disturbing reference to the ill times we have brought on the world arouse not a pleasurable make-believe shudder, but the real fear we’d rather pretend we don’t feel, a fear that is not simply irrational.

Brilliance often lies in concision. As I read “The Rope Is the World”, I kept imagining the 500-page science-fiction novel that it could so easily have been: crammed full of detailed scientific and technological arcana, with a complex plot involving the machinations of the powerful and the fate of cosmic enterprises or empires, all routinely punctuated by descriptions of sexual activities. But Miéville didn’t take the easy route. He wrote it all in five pages.

The offhand density is superb:

Initial outlays were clearly gigavast, but lifting one ton of cargo out beyond everyday gravity to orbit by elevator was this or that many times cheaper – some absurd margin – than doing so by rocket, by shuttle, by alien indulgence. Now that the space elevators, the skyhooks, the geostationary tethered-dock haulage columns, were shockingly feasible, research projects were all human-spirit this and because-it’s-there that. As if, faced with them, the mere savings were as vulgar as they in fact were.

This is science fiction to the nth degree. To unpack all that would take hours.

This story is followed by “The Buzzard’s Egg”, told in the quiet, rambling voice of an ignorant old slave who serves in a temple/prison for idols taken in war, like captured gods. He, their priest and jailer, is himself a prisoner. Alone, he talks to his latest god-prisoner. This one-sided conversation or confession or meditation is the whole story. I found it fascinating, full of suggestion and implication, and beautiful.

The last, long piece, “The Design”, has a characteristically inventive and unsettling subject, contrasting with the plain, clear, unhurried Stevensonian prose that it’s told in and the repressed emotion of the teller that finds voice only once. But my favourite of all these tales is “The Rules”, two and a half pages long. Read it. You won’t regret it, or forget it.

• Ursula Le Guin’s selected stories, The Unreal and the Real, are published by Gollancz. To order Three Moments of an Explosion for £15.19 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.