Status
Available
Call number
Series
Collection
Publication
Del Rey (2003), Edition: 1st Published, Mass Market Paperback, 640 pages
Description
WINNER OF THE AUGUST DERLETH AND ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARDS • A masterpiece brimming with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and fierce characters, from the author who “has reshaped modern fantasy” ( The Washington Post ) “[China Miéville’s] fantasy novels, including a trilogy set in and around the magical city-state of New Crobuzon, have the refreshing effect of making Middle-earth seem plodding and flat.”— The New York Times The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies. Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released. The city is gripped by an alien terror. The fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades. A reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of brick and wood and steel under the vaults of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape.… (more)
Media reviews
Perdido Street Station is a well written and absorbing story aimed at breaking the rules for a number of different fantasy concepts.
User reviews
LibraryThing member -Eva-
What a piece of work is...China Miéville's mind. Noble in reason, I can only assume from his writing, but definitely infinite in faculty. Reading Perdido is like wading through thick, delicious caramel - it makes for a slow read because of its intricate details and complex cabal of characters,
But, more importantly, Miéville is not a one-trick pony, flaunting a flawless grasp of language; he does have something acute to say about life. Perdido isn't about evil versus good or about any single quest, it's about modern society and its workings. It has something to say about the working man's struggle, about freedom of speech, about racial division, about a totalitarian government's rights and responsibilities, about religious following, about ecological repercussions, and whether it is possible to exist in some sort of harmony with other beings when their history and outlook on life is completely different from yours.
Fortunately, despite bringing up important issues, Miéville manages to do very little preaching. This is in essence a fantasy, inhabited by a living landscape, hideous monsters, and the flawed friends who try to make the best of what's been handed to them. There are no easy solutions offered and no perfect ending, pretty much like life itself. I am, as ever, in awe of the imagination that brought it into being.
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laid out before the reader with an unerring ear for language, and it is absolutely impossible not to be beguiled by the world presented. Sure it's verbose, even prolix, but it's so eloquently done, without approximations, that I couldn't imagine even one word missing because it would detract from the whole. But, more importantly, Miéville is not a one-trick pony, flaunting a flawless grasp of language; he does have something acute to say about life. Perdido isn't about evil versus good or about any single quest, it's about modern society and its workings. It has something to say about the working man's struggle, about freedom of speech, about racial division, about a totalitarian government's rights and responsibilities, about religious following, about ecological repercussions, and whether it is possible to exist in some sort of harmony with other beings when their history and outlook on life is completely different from yours.
Fortunately, despite bringing up important issues, Miéville manages to do very little preaching. This is in essence a fantasy, inhabited by a living landscape, hideous monsters, and the flawed friends who try to make the best of what's been handed to them. There are no easy solutions offered and no perfect ending, pretty much like life itself. I am, as ever, in awe of the imagination that brought it into being.
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LibraryThing member edgeworth
Many have commented that China Mieville's Bas-Lag series, of which Perdido Street Station is the first installment, defies easy categorisation. While I don't think it's quite the staggering anomaly that other reviewers seem to, it's certainly a creative mix of fantasy, science fiction, steampunk
This is Mieville's first and foremost talent: worldbuilding. Perdido Street Station takes place in the city of New Crobuzon, a filthy, smoggy, industrial urban wasteland where dozens of different species rub shoulders under the shadow of a fascist government. The city itself is explored through the eyes of a large cast of characters: freelance scientists, artists, convicts, journalists, thieves and adventurers, who come across (or are themselves) a variety of wildly different inhuman races, ranging from the wyrmen, small and stupid gargoyle-like creatures that infest the city's rooftops and slums, to the Weaver, a near-omnipotent gigantic spider that lives beneath the city and speaks in a constant poetic babble. And it's not just monsters - there are a lot of strange concepts jockeying for space here, like the anti-reality energy source called "Torque," the city neighbourhood dominated by an enormous, half-buried skeleton, or the primitive artificial intelligence assembling itself from discarded machines in a city dump. Thankfully Mieville manages to keep them all largely believable and consistent, soothing my fears that I was going to end up reading another clusterfuck of a book like The Court of the Air.
It's unfortunate, given the clear passion Mieville has for his creations, that he often stumbles over his own language when writing about them. Vast swathes of each page are given over to some of the most ridiculously ornate prose I've ever seen. Every sentence is saturated in adjectives, and Mieville seems to rack his brains to think of the most obscure nouns in existence:
There was a suddeon burgeoning swell of foreign exudations. The surface tension of the psychosphere ballooned with pressure, and that hideous sense of alien greed oozed through its pores. The psychic plane was thick with the glutinous effluvia of incomprehensible minds.
It's always frustrating when an otherwise talented writer believes that the best way to paint a picture with words is to cram as many complex ones he can possibly think of into a paragraph. It looks amateurish and slows down the pace of the story, and this is already a book suffering from bad pacing. Let me break down the plot for you: a birdman who has lost his wings comes to New Crobuzon to have them regrown with the help of our protagonist, a scientist named Isaac. In the course of his research Isaac enlists the city's underworld to steal a variety of winged creatures for him to study. One of these is a strange grub that eventually creates a chrysalis and emerges as an extremely dangerous moth-like monster that escapes, frees its brothers from a government lab, and proceeds to terrorise the city with them. Isaac and his cohorts must then try to hunt the moths down.
It takes Mievelle literally three hundred pages to get to the point where the moth emerges from its chrysalis. That's two other novels, right there. And those three hundred pages are not particularly enthralling; Mieville regularly spends pages and pages exploring the minds of characters who are neither relevant to the plot nor particularly interesting. Combined with the aforementioned purple prose, this makes Perdido Street Station an appallingly slow read.
Now, once the story does get going - again, you have to wade through three hundred pages of set-up first - it's actually pretty damn good. Mieville combines elements of fantasy, science fiction and horror to create a very unique story, playing off the strengths of each genre and discarding elements that don't work. His characters, for example, are extremely resourceful and intelligent, devoting themselves to learning as much as they can about the creatures they have unleashed - and Mieville does not hesistate in giving them answers when they deserve them, unlike in most horror novels, when the element of fear relies on the unknown. I was happy to overlook some of the typical problems found in speculative fiction (stilted dialogue, overly rational characters, in-depth explanation of emotions as though they're some kind of bizarre phenomenon) because Mieville was telling an entertaining monster-hunt in an original way in a brilliant fictional city.
Perdido Street Station is, overall, a good book - just not good enough to justify 867 pages and four weeks of my life. I'll certainly read The Scar, but I hope that after his first novel Mieville threw away his thesuarus and got a better editor.
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and horror, and the world of Bas-Lag is one of the most intriguing I've come across. My opinions on this book are mixed, but I still want to read the next book in the series (The Scar) simply to spend some more time in this fascinating world.This is Mieville's first and foremost talent: worldbuilding. Perdido Street Station takes place in the city of New Crobuzon, a filthy, smoggy, industrial urban wasteland where dozens of different species rub shoulders under the shadow of a fascist government. The city itself is explored through the eyes of a large cast of characters: freelance scientists, artists, convicts, journalists, thieves and adventurers, who come across (or are themselves) a variety of wildly different inhuman races, ranging from the wyrmen, small and stupid gargoyle-like creatures that infest the city's rooftops and slums, to the Weaver, a near-omnipotent gigantic spider that lives beneath the city and speaks in a constant poetic babble. And it's not just monsters - there are a lot of strange concepts jockeying for space here, like the anti-reality energy source called "Torque," the city neighbourhood dominated by an enormous, half-buried skeleton, or the primitive artificial intelligence assembling itself from discarded machines in a city dump. Thankfully Mieville manages to keep them all largely believable and consistent, soothing my fears that I was going to end up reading another clusterfuck of a book like The Court of the Air.
It's unfortunate, given the clear passion Mieville has for his creations, that he often stumbles over his own language when writing about them. Vast swathes of each page are given over to some of the most ridiculously ornate prose I've ever seen. Every sentence is saturated in adjectives, and Mieville seems to rack his brains to think of the most obscure nouns in existence:
There was a suddeon burgeoning swell of foreign exudations. The surface tension of the psychosphere ballooned with pressure, and that hideous sense of alien greed oozed through its pores. The psychic plane was thick with the glutinous effluvia of incomprehensible minds.
It's always frustrating when an otherwise talented writer believes that the best way to paint a picture with words is to cram as many complex ones he can possibly think of into a paragraph. It looks amateurish and slows down the pace of the story, and this is already a book suffering from bad pacing. Let me break down the plot for you: a birdman who has lost his wings comes to New Crobuzon to have them regrown with the help of our protagonist, a scientist named Isaac. In the course of his research Isaac enlists the city's underworld to steal a variety of winged creatures for him to study. One of these is a strange grub that eventually creates a chrysalis and emerges as an extremely dangerous moth-like monster that escapes, frees its brothers from a government lab, and proceeds to terrorise the city with them. Isaac and his cohorts must then try to hunt the moths down.
It takes Mievelle literally three hundred pages to get to the point where the moth emerges from its chrysalis. That's two other novels, right there. And those three hundred pages are not particularly enthralling; Mieville regularly spends pages and pages exploring the minds of characters who are neither relevant to the plot nor particularly interesting. Combined with the aforementioned purple prose, this makes Perdido Street Station an appallingly slow read.
Now, once the story does get going - again, you have to wade through three hundred pages of set-up first - it's actually pretty damn good. Mieville combines elements of fantasy, science fiction and horror to create a very unique story, playing off the strengths of each genre and discarding elements that don't work. His characters, for example, are extremely resourceful and intelligent, devoting themselves to learning as much as they can about the creatures they have unleashed - and Mieville does not hesistate in giving them answers when they deserve them, unlike in most horror novels, when the element of fear relies on the unknown. I was happy to overlook some of the typical problems found in speculative fiction (stilted dialogue, overly rational characters, in-depth explanation of emotions as though they're some kind of bizarre phenomenon) because Mieville was telling an entertaining monster-hunt in an original way in a brilliant fictional city.
Perdido Street Station is, overall, a good book - just not good enough to justify 867 pages and four weeks of my life. I'll certainly read The Scar, but I hope that after his first novel Mieville threw away his thesuarus and got a better editor.
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LibraryThing member Aerrin99
Perdido Street Station is bizarre and baffling and a little bit wonderful.
This is a book thick with an atmosphere so vividly drawn that you can smell the slums and rivers and feel the thick dream-gloom settle over you. In some ways, this book's greatest triumph is its ability to create the story
Meiville's world-building is astounding, with cultures and races and history and geography and a hundred other tiny details weaving together into a gorgeous tapestry that is hard not to admire. His mind must be a wonderful place to be.
His monsters are top-notch and terrifying, his characters mostly engaging and complex, his city fantastic.
Peridido Street Station does have its faults.
His plot is a little weaker. It takes quite a long time to get going at all, and once we get there the pacing seems weak. I'm pleased that he's able to tie seemingly unconnected bits from the first half of the book back in, but it would have been better for the first half of the book to not seem unconnected at all. Some of the problem-solving that goes on feels a little too easy and coincidental given what we've seen his monsters to to others, and the government feels a little too incompetent given how easy some of the problem-solving is. That said, I spent the final few chapters racing to see what happened, with my heart beating in my throat.
Meiville is dense, and although I enjoyed it, his book was slow going for me. It was one of those books that I enjoyed while I was reading it - I liked being in New Crobuzon - but it had little draw when I wasn't. Save for the last few chapters, I had no need to know what happened next, and so this book only got read on lunch breaks.
He also has an obsession with the disgusting and the filthy. As I mentioned earlier, this works for me sometimes - his slums are vivid and interesting. But he's so attached to the concept that 'shit' or 'shat' become descriptors in nearly every chapter of the book, and something that was clever the first time becomes a distracting sign of 'look how revolting I can be!'
This is a book that should absolutely be read by anyone who's a fan of genre fiction - steampunk, sci fi, fantasy - simply because it /is/ so baffling and bizarre. And wonderful. It's problems are there, but Meiville does something here that few other authors do, and it's worth it to immerse yourself in his world just to experience it.
This is a book thick with an atmosphere so vividly drawn that you can smell the slums and rivers and feel the thick dream-gloom settle over you. In some ways, this book's greatest triumph is its ability to create the story
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in the reader - this is a book about nightmares and dream-fog, and it's almost impossible to read Meiville's work without feeling that fog settle thick over your brain as you get lost in his dream-world. Meiville's world-building is astounding, with cultures and races and history and geography and a hundred other tiny details weaving together into a gorgeous tapestry that is hard not to admire. His mind must be a wonderful place to be.
His monsters are top-notch and terrifying, his characters mostly engaging and complex, his city fantastic.
Peridido Street Station does have its faults.
His plot is a little weaker. It takes quite a long time to get going at all, and once we get there the pacing seems weak. I'm pleased that he's able to tie seemingly unconnected bits from the first half of the book back in, but it would have been better for the first half of the book to not seem unconnected at all. Some of the problem-solving that goes on feels a little too easy and coincidental given what we've seen his monsters to to others, and the government feels a little too incompetent given how easy some of the problem-solving is. That said, I spent the final few chapters racing to see what happened, with my heart beating in my throat.
Meiville is dense, and although I enjoyed it, his book was slow going for me. It was one of those books that I enjoyed while I was reading it - I liked being in New Crobuzon - but it had little draw when I wasn't. Save for the last few chapters, I had no need to know what happened next, and so this book only got read on lunch breaks.
He also has an obsession with the disgusting and the filthy. As I mentioned earlier, this works for me sometimes - his slums are vivid and interesting. But he's so attached to the concept that 'shit' or 'shat' become descriptors in nearly every chapter of the book, and something that was clever the first time becomes a distracting sign of 'look how revolting I can be!'
This is a book that should absolutely be read by anyone who's a fan of genre fiction - steampunk, sci fi, fantasy - simply because it /is/ so baffling and bizarre. And wonderful. It's problems are there, but Meiville does something here that few other authors do, and it's worth it to immerse yourself in his world just to experience it.
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LibraryThing member misericordia
Perdido Street Station is for anyone who reads fantasy books and thinks "I wonder what the socio-enconomic impact of industrialization on a magic based multi-cultral city state would be like?" This book is like a mashup of Lord of the Rings and Neuromancer. China Mieville has a impressive command
The plot line of this books careens through a heavily layered world. You feel like perhaps Mieville is showing off his particular dark and detailed view of example of socio-enconomic impact of industrialization on a magic based multi-cultral city state. I wondered if this is all there is to the book. Is it just a massively detailed world built to show of the talents of the author? I was happy to discover, when the book final winds down into its last few pages, a message, a moral even.
If you are tired of every fantasy book being about a young boy/girl/rabbit's heroic struggle to save the world from the old and evil wizard/Demon/witch/dog, pick up this book. You never regret reading about a cranky engineer's struggle to return a bird man's ability to fly, while fighting his insect artist girl friend's demon drug pushing patron in the Bas-lag city state plagued by soul devouring butterflies. With stops along the way in cactus men's terrarium city within a city, a junkyard magic cult's artificial intelligence, the aesthetic of art, architecture and urban renewal. If there isn't something in this book for you to like, you just haven't been paying attention.
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of both the Fantasy and Punk (be it cyber or steam) genres. Combine this with a prose style of a diatic author and you get one hell of a book.The plot line of this books careens through a heavily layered world. You feel like perhaps Mieville is showing off his particular dark and detailed view of example of socio-enconomic impact of industrialization on a magic based multi-cultral city state. I wondered if this is all there is to the book. Is it just a massively detailed world built to show of the talents of the author? I was happy to discover, when the book final winds down into its last few pages, a message, a moral even.
If you are tired of every fantasy book being about a young boy/girl/rabbit's heroic struggle to save the world from the old and evil wizard/Demon/witch/dog, pick up this book. You never regret reading about a cranky engineer's struggle to return a bird man's ability to fly, while fighting his insect artist girl friend's demon drug pushing patron in the Bas-lag city state plagued by soul devouring butterflies. With stops along the way in cactus men's terrarium city within a city, a junkyard magic cult's artificial intelligence, the aesthetic of art, architecture and urban renewal. If there isn't something in this book for you to like, you just haven't been paying attention.
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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville was a highly anticipated read and has fully lived up to my expectations. Part fantasy, part sci-fi and all original. With the invention of the city of New Crobuzon, Mieville has created a sprawling, complex and completely satisfying world. He has peopled his
The story revolves around a male human, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, an eccentric scientist and his artist girlfriend, Lin, who is a bug-like creature known as a Khepri. It’s not surprising that Mieville has created this wondrous couple, but what is surprising is how fully fleshed out these characters and many others in the book are. But always remember that in Perdido Street Station the strange and repulsive, the sickening and dangerous are often lurking, just around the corner. Is this book a romance? A thriller? Or is it a highly charged, emotional tragedy.
At times Perdido Street Station was a difficult read with it’s dense and complicated prose studded with strange languages and scientific terms. But at the same time, this was also part of the lure of this book. This was my first China Mieville book, but I can assure you that it won’t be long before I pick this author up again.
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world with some of the most bizarre creatures I have ever read about. Yet these various beings go about their daily existence, eating, sleeping, working and reacting with each other in absolutely plausible ways. His city is build with inventive architecture, every nook and corner accounted for, and all areas have their own details that are fantastic to read about.The story revolves around a male human, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, an eccentric scientist and his artist girlfriend, Lin, who is a bug-like creature known as a Khepri. It’s not surprising that Mieville has created this wondrous couple, but what is surprising is how fully fleshed out these characters and many others in the book are. But always remember that in Perdido Street Station the strange and repulsive, the sickening and dangerous are often lurking, just around the corner. Is this book a romance? A thriller? Or is it a highly charged, emotional tragedy.
At times Perdido Street Station was a difficult read with it’s dense and complicated prose studded with strange languages and scientific terms. But at the same time, this was also part of the lure of this book. This was my first China Mieville book, but I can assure you that it won’t be long before I pick this author up again.
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LibraryThing member veevoxvoom
New Crobuzon is a city of the strange and weird, and things only get stranger and weirder when Isaac, a rogue scientist, receives a request from a creature known as a garuda. The request? To help the wing-torn garuda fly again. But Isaac’s quest for the scientific gratification of flight is soon
Perdido Street Station is bizarre, inventive, and fascinating. The streets of New Crobuzon twist and turn with characters from all walks of life, from humans to bug-people to sentient cacti. Old, tired fantasy archetypes have no place in this book. Mieville’s imagination is sweeping in its scope but it extends not only to the big gears of his world, but also to the small, everyday details. There is a fresh, alien quality to New Crobuzon that I haven’t seen in an imaginary world for a long time. Mieville is a smart, versatile writer. He combines a good story with dabblings in philosophy, politics, computer technology, mathematics, and aesthetics. If there’s one thing that might turn people off Perdido Street Station, it’s that the language can be very dense at parts and in the first part of the book, very little happens. But I found that personally, even while I noticed these things, I didn’t mind them much.
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threatened when he accidentally unleashes a plague of dream-eating moths on the city, putting everyone he knows in danger.Perdido Street Station is bizarre, inventive, and fascinating. The streets of New Crobuzon twist and turn with characters from all walks of life, from humans to bug-people to sentient cacti. Old, tired fantasy archetypes have no place in this book. Mieville’s imagination is sweeping in its scope but it extends not only to the big gears of his world, but also to the small, everyday details. There is a fresh, alien quality to New Crobuzon that I haven’t seen in an imaginary world for a long time. Mieville is a smart, versatile writer. He combines a good story with dabblings in philosophy, politics, computer technology, mathematics, and aesthetics. If there’s one thing that might turn people off Perdido Street Station, it’s that the language can be very dense at parts and in the first part of the book, very little happens. But I found that personally, even while I noticed these things, I didn’t mind them much.
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LibraryThing member Radaghast
Garbage, pure and simple. Mieville writes with a thesaurus next to him, and it doesn't help. Clear and unaffected writing is not his forte. Neither is good storytelling.
LibraryThing member littlegeek
Well, I finally got around to reading this book after lots of recommendations & I have to give it a mixed review. I really liked the overall tone of ubercreepiness and the monsters were cool. But I have issues with a number of things:
SPOILERS, LOTS OF THEM
1) Too much description of place in the
2) I read lots of fantasy and I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief, but I had trouble with this one. It's cheating, and not very imaginative, to create races by just mixing humans with other species. Human/bird or human/frog or human/cactus(!) The most ridiculous example is a human female body with, apparently, an entire scarab beetle for a head. Give me a break!
3) Plot had some serious problems. Would Isaac really buy that "Lin is already dead" argument? It was 50/50 at best. If he really loved her he would have gone after her.
4) They just happen to witness the moth laying eggs.
5) Any idiot would have killed the big scary monster and THEN dealt with its cache of eggs. Please.
6) You spend weeks working beside someone who personally saved the life of your girlfriend and you don't even bother to TALK to them when you find out something you have spent months avoiding knowing?
7) The handlingers can fly. Huh?
8) The crisis engine is supposed to accomplish "anything." Why don't you use it to fix your girlfriend?
9) My favorite: they lay miles & miles of scrounged up cable in about 45 minutes and the system boots up and works perfectly the very first time!!! hahahahahaha That's the most fantastic thing in the whole book!
10) Deux ex machina spider wasn't enough, he had to come up with another one for the final scene. Je.Sus.
While this looks like a lot of issues, I did actually enjoy reading this book a lot. The prose is nice most of the time and there's lots of fascinating ideas. Some of them just don't pan out. I think there was so much fantastic detail that many people have just overlooked the stupid plot, and that's fine if it works for you. It wasn't quite enough for me.
SPOILERS, LOTS OF THEM
1) Too much description of place in the
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early chapters. 2) I read lots of fantasy and I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief, but I had trouble with this one. It's cheating, and not very imaginative, to create races by just mixing humans with other species. Human/bird or human/frog or human/cactus(!) The most ridiculous example is a human female body with, apparently, an entire scarab beetle for a head. Give me a break!
3) Plot had some serious problems. Would Isaac really buy that "Lin is already dead" argument? It was 50/50 at best. If he really loved her he would have gone after her.
4) They just happen to witness the moth laying eggs.
5) Any idiot would have killed the big scary monster and THEN dealt with its cache of eggs. Please.
6) You spend weeks working beside someone who personally saved the life of your girlfriend and you don't even bother to TALK to them when you find out something you have spent months avoiding knowing?
7) The handlingers can fly. Huh?
8) The crisis engine is supposed to accomplish "anything." Why don't you use it to fix your girlfriend?
9) My favorite: they lay miles & miles of scrounged up cable in about 45 minutes and the system boots up and works perfectly the very first time!!! hahahahahaha That's the most fantastic thing in the whole book!
10) Deux ex machina spider wasn't enough, he had to come up with another one for the final scene. Je.Sus.
While this looks like a lot of issues, I did actually enjoy reading this book a lot. The prose is nice most of the time and there's lots of fascinating ideas. Some of them just don't pan out. I think there was so much fantastic detail that many people have just overlooked the stupid plot, and that's fine if it works for you. It wasn't quite enough for me.
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LibraryThing member plappen
New Crobuzon is a sprawling city, that is also very polluted and dirty. It is a place where all sorts of races, including humans and Re-mades (those who have been physically altered for various reasons, not always with their consent) live in fear of Parliament’s brutal Militia.
Isaac is an
Slake-moths are flying, nocturnal creatures, whose wings show an ever-changing color pattern, hypnotizing anyone instantly. This gives the slake-moth the chance to feed on a person’s thoughts, feelings and fears, leaving them in a permanent vegetative state. The Ambassador from Hell is asked to help in stopping the moths (there are now 5 of them terrorizing the city) and declines. The Weaver, a giant spider that can easily move between dimensions and has a liking for scissors, joins the hunt. How does one stop, or even slow down, creatures who can hypnotize anyone instantly?
This is a great steampunk novel. Put Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka and Neal Stephenson together in a blender, add a dash of Neal Gaiman and H.P. Lovecraft, and this is the result. It’s a long novel, about 700 pages, and the body count gets rather high by the end, but this novel is very much recommended.
Isaac is an
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eccentric scientist studying Chaos Theory. One day, he is approached by Yagharek, a member of a race called the Garuda (half-man, half-bird). Yagharek’s wings had been chopped off his back as punishment for a major crime, so he commissions Isaac to make him a new set of wings. As part of his research, Isaac acquires hundreds of species of flying things, from the smallest bug to the largest bird. He also studies the process by which caterpillars turn into butterflies. Deciding that his research is going in the wrong direction, Isaac gets rid of the rest of his "collection," and keeps a strange, multi-colored caterpillar that thrives on a very powerful and addictive drug. One night, it emerges from its cocoon as a slake-moth.Slake-moths are flying, nocturnal creatures, whose wings show an ever-changing color pattern, hypnotizing anyone instantly. This gives the slake-moth the chance to feed on a person’s thoughts, feelings and fears, leaving them in a permanent vegetative state. The Ambassador from Hell is asked to help in stopping the moths (there are now 5 of them terrorizing the city) and declines. The Weaver, a giant spider that can easily move between dimensions and has a liking for scissors, joins the hunt. How does one stop, or even slow down, creatures who can hypnotize anyone instantly?
This is a great steampunk novel. Put Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka and Neal Stephenson together in a blender, add a dash of Neal Gaiman and H.P. Lovecraft, and this is the result. It’s a long novel, about 700 pages, and the body count gets rather high by the end, but this novel is very much recommended.
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LibraryThing member BayardUS
Compared to most fantasy books (and I guess I'll define that genre as "books where magic is a thing that people are aware of") Perdido Street Station is a step up, maybe two. It deals with characters that aren't just archetypes, and those characters express emotions that are more nuanced than the
There are several things that keep me from finding Perdido impressive without comparison to the genre at large, however. The setting is likely the highpoint to the book for many people, and it certainly is impressive, giving us a city with a plethora of differing neighborhoods, most of which with a distinctive and memorable flavor, populated by a menagerie of creatures. Unfortunately it never felt like a cohesive location to me because of Mieville's tendency to throw in new aspects of the world without any warning, even late into the story. The book starts by setting out the various "common" types of inhabitants of the city, but as the story goes on Mieville drops in demons, then weavers, then sentient robots, handlingers, undine, and more. The handlingers are the most extreme and problematic example of this- while the book tells us there have been rumors about their existence, it only tells us that after they've already been introduced. Thus instead of foreshadowing their eventual appearance they come out of the blue. Then they appear for a few chapters before being dispatched and not mentioned again for the rest of the story. It's a strange episode that doesn't feel integrated with the rest of the book, or even purposeful besides giving us one more action sequence and emphasizing the danger of an enemy we already knew was dangerous from a dozen previous examples. I'd guess that this was a symptom of Perdido being one of Mieville's first books, with him still getting comfortable with a longer medium instead of a short story.
Another problem I had with the book is the dialogue. As I already mentioned, Mieville is able to get at emotions better than most fantasy authors, but that's more thanks to his ability to put characters into realistic relationships and naturally tense situations and less to do with him being able to capture a realistic conversation. The main character Isaac, for instance, is presented as a brilliant scientist and proves himself to be one, but when he's talking to other characters he always sounds like more of a con-man than someone who actually knows what he's talking about. Having read later Mieville like Kraken, I can unfortunately say that the weak dialogue wasn't just due to Perdido being one of his first longer works of fiction.
Originally I also had a problem with how so much of the story relied on coincidence, as that's usually a sign of weak storytelling in my book, butthe ending made me think that it might have been intentional on Mieville's part. Considering the end focusing on choice and its moral repercussions, and the judgment that such choices deserve, it put the action up to that point in an entirely different light. Because Yagharek committed rape (and thereby denying another person choice) Isaac refused to help him regain his flight, even with all that Yagharek had done throughout the course of the story in Isaac's fight against the Slake moths, because Isaac couldn't justify implicitly condoning Yagharek's previous actions. Though much less severe and with a more tenuous causal connection, however, Isaac caused even more harm than Yagharek. He was the one that got people to steal flying things for him, one of which he raised on a diet of drugs until it escaped and freed others of its kind, killing hundreds in the end. His lover accepted the money of a crime lord even though she knew at least vaguely what she might be getting into. Do those choices mean that they somehow deserve what they had to go through? And if not then to what degree are they different from Yagharek's actions? The obvious answer is foreseeability, but as the coincidence based plot of Perdido shows, the consequences of any act in New Crobuzon, from repairing a cleaning robot to publishing a news story you think is fake, can be entirely unforeseeable. Anyway, it made me think, which isn't something many fantasy books accomplish. Even if it wasn't intentional, the coincidence based nature of the story fits into some interesting ideas that Mieville introduces at the eleventh hour.
My other complaints are minor. The book was longer than it had to be, mostly due to the unnecessary episodes I've already mentioned, and so it could have been tighter. One of the main antagonists disappears from the story for maybe two hundred pages, to the point where you wonder if he's even important anymore. Crisis energy is a deus ex machina and far too much time is spent on Isaac talking about fake science. The title isn't very good. These complaints aren't that important. Nevertheless, they contribute to the reason why at the end of the day I only consider the book pretty good, and not any better than that. Again, if you like the genre, then definitely check it out.
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usual melodramatic fare. The plot is likewise not your typical chosen one/epic war story, though still heavy with action and set pieces, and it goes in a couple unexpected directions toward the end. I'll applaud any fantasy story that both does something unexpected and is solidly written. If I were grading it on a fantasy book curve it'd be at least 4 stars, perhaps better, and if you're a fan of the genre definitely check it out.There are several things that keep me from finding Perdido impressive without comparison to the genre at large, however. The setting is likely the highpoint to the book for many people, and it certainly is impressive, giving us a city with a plethora of differing neighborhoods, most of which with a distinctive and memorable flavor, populated by a menagerie of creatures. Unfortunately it never felt like a cohesive location to me because of Mieville's tendency to throw in new aspects of the world without any warning, even late into the story. The book starts by setting out the various "common" types of inhabitants of the city, but as the story goes on Mieville drops in demons, then weavers, then sentient robots, handlingers, undine, and more. The handlingers are the most extreme and problematic example of this- while the book tells us there have been rumors about their existence, it only tells us that after they've already been introduced. Thus instead of foreshadowing their eventual appearance they come out of the blue. Then they appear for a few chapters before being dispatched and not mentioned again for the rest of the story. It's a strange episode that doesn't feel integrated with the rest of the book, or even purposeful besides giving us one more action sequence and emphasizing the danger of an enemy we already knew was dangerous from a dozen previous examples. I'd guess that this was a symptom of Perdido being one of Mieville's first books, with him still getting comfortable with a longer medium instead of a short story.
Another problem I had with the book is the dialogue. As I already mentioned, Mieville is able to get at emotions better than most fantasy authors, but that's more thanks to his ability to put characters into realistic relationships and naturally tense situations and less to do with him being able to capture a realistic conversation. The main character Isaac, for instance, is presented as a brilliant scientist and proves himself to be one, but when he's talking to other characters he always sounds like more of a con-man than someone who actually knows what he's talking about. Having read later Mieville like Kraken, I can unfortunately say that the weak dialogue wasn't just due to Perdido being one of his first longer works of fiction.
Originally I also had a problem with how so much of the story relied on coincidence, as that's usually a sign of weak storytelling in my book, but
My other complaints are minor. The book was longer than it had to be, mostly due to the unnecessary episodes I've already mentioned, and so it could have been tighter. One of the main antagonists disappears from the story for maybe two hundred pages, to the point where you wonder if he's even important anymore. Crisis energy is a deus ex machina and far too much time is spent on Isaac talking about fake science. The title isn't very good. These complaints aren't that important. Nevertheless, they contribute to the reason why at the end of the day I only consider the book pretty good, and not any better than that. Again, if you like the genre, then definitely check it out.
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LibraryThing member ChrisRiesbeck
The author acknowledges Gormenghast as an inspiration for this long novel that spends as much or more time describing the claustrophobically dense city in which all the action takes place as it does on the characters and plot. This would have worked better for me if the drumbeat wasn't constantly
For all that it's over the top, and has few too many balls for Mieville to keep in the air, it's still a worthwhile read. Characters have to make very hard decisions, and live with the consequences. Something new is always happening. The locale is not quite like any you've seen before, unless you've read the The Scar.
Recommended, as long as horror is OK by you.
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how filthy New Crobuzon is. Paragraph after paragraph of synonyms for fetid. The other dominant element is horror, a la Simmons and King. When death comes, it's usually with a big splat. For all that it's over the top, and has few too many balls for Mieville to keep in the air, it's still a worthwhile read. Characters have to make very hard decisions, and live with the consequences. Something new is always happening. The locale is not quite like any you've seen before, unless you've read the The Scar.
Recommended, as long as horror is OK by you.
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LibraryThing member PhoenixTerran
I find this book to be rather difficult to describe or to explain very well to people who haven't read the book, especially without revealing too much of the plot. And of course, those who have read it don't really need me to tell them too much about it, although I find it makes a great
One of the things that's so wonderful about this book is that it defies attempts to declare it as belonging to a particular genre; it has elements of science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, crime fiction, dystopia, and horror. And that's just to name a few.
Miéville's prose is another element that I find absolutely superb about this novel. The phrasing, and particularly his choice of word, is extraordinarily well done and particularly evocative. Some readers might find his writing heavy-handed, but I happen to enjoy descriptive writing. His descriptions of New Crobuzon (the rather nasty city in which the story takes place) are so vivid that they honestly make my skin crawl. He creates a gritty, realistic atmosphere and runs with it. I know for a fact this is a place I never, want to visit. Ever.
The world he conceives is extraordinary, complex, and not at all a nice place. The novel swept me along, adding creative element upon creative element. A somewhat lengthy book with a winding plot-line, he builds up to what should be a fantastic ending, but it unfortunately falls flat and I was rather disappointed, especially after what was such a fantastic read.
Experiments in Reading
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conversation piece.One of the things that's so wonderful about this book is that it defies attempts to declare it as belonging to a particular genre; it has elements of science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, crime fiction, dystopia, and horror. And that's just to name a few.
Miéville's prose is another element that I find absolutely superb about this novel. The phrasing, and particularly his choice of word, is extraordinarily well done and particularly evocative. Some readers might find his writing heavy-handed, but I happen to enjoy descriptive writing. His descriptions of New Crobuzon (the rather nasty city in which the story takes place) are so vivid that they honestly make my skin crawl. He creates a gritty, realistic atmosphere and runs with it. I know for a fact this is a place I never, want to visit. Ever.
The world he conceives is extraordinary, complex, and not at all a nice place. The novel swept me along, adding creative element upon creative element. A somewhat lengthy book with a winding plot-line, he builds up to what should be a fantastic ending, but it unfortunately falls flat and I was rather disappointed, especially after what was such a fantastic read.
Experiments in Reading
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LibraryThing member jolerie
What is community but a means to...for all we individuals to have...our choices. Page 607
Isaac Grimnebulin is not your typical scientist, dealing with unorthodox, sometimes illegal experiments that others would claim was borderline science. His newest commission becomes an obsession of
How do you definite a book that refuses to adhere to any labels? Perdido Street Station is a fascinating mixture of both fantasy and science fiction. Like a surreal dream, the world building is impressive to say the least, filled with creatures and species of various kinds, making New Crobuzon a melting pot of life and death, existing side by side. The characters, both main and supporting are completely strange and foreign and yet familiar at the same time, demonstrating the roles and structures of a society filled with its own customs and traditions. It takes patience to fully immerse yourself in this dark, gritty, queer, and completely off the beaten track world, but once you are in, it does not let you go. Mieville displays with a flourish his ability to take command of the written word and presents to the readers a story that is beyond definition, filled with inhuman monsters and creations, yet in the end telling a very human story. Highly recommended.
Isaac Grimnebulin is not your typical scientist, dealing with unorthodox, sometimes illegal experiments that others would claim was borderline science. His newest commission becomes an obsession of
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impossibilities. His client, a Garuda, a half-man, half-bird entity for reasons he is unwilling or perhaps unable to share has lost his wings and his ability to fly. His challenge for Isaac - help him reclaim the skies once again. While the Garuda is forced to be a prisoner of land, a new terror is upsetting the balance of life in New Crobuzon. Night after night, bodies are found still technically alive, but completely depleted of any form of intelligence, their souls extinguished. Isaac's research into giving the Garuda his freedom once again is intricately connected to these monsters of the air and time is running out to find solutions to both these problems, while the fate of New Crobuzon's citizens hang in the balance. How do you definite a book that refuses to adhere to any labels? Perdido Street Station is a fascinating mixture of both fantasy and science fiction. Like a surreal dream, the world building is impressive to say the least, filled with creatures and species of various kinds, making New Crobuzon a melting pot of life and death, existing side by side. The characters, both main and supporting are completely strange and foreign and yet familiar at the same time, demonstrating the roles and structures of a society filled with its own customs and traditions. It takes patience to fully immerse yourself in this dark, gritty, queer, and completely off the beaten track world, but once you are in, it does not let you go. Mieville displays with a flourish his ability to take command of the written word and presents to the readers a story that is beyond definition, filled with inhuman monsters and creations, yet in the end telling a very human story. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member reading_fox
This novel has received much acclaim as a new type of science fiction - weird sf. To me it still feels like fantasy, and I didn't much enjoy it.
The basic plot and world building is excellent Issac is a scientist in a twisted world, a distorted mirror of what ours may have been once before some
However the downside is the prose. This is written in a slow overly wordy literary style that is just dull and hard work to read. 800 pages are a struggle, this prose makes them much much harder. I ended up skimming swathes of text without losing any plot points or the overall grasp of the magnificent city. The characters are also, despite all the words, thin. Issac gets some attention, mainly paragraphs of drifting verbiage, all the others are thin constructs. This is acceptable for the robots, but the aliens require far more crafting to make them believable.
The second problem with this tome is that it is often unnecessarily dark. There are dark themes, but there is frequently gratuitous dwelling on the specific acts and descriptions which again are better skipped through.
All in all it is a fascinating work imbued with stunning imagination, but it really needs a much heavier hand on the editing.
I won't be re-reading this for some time.
The basic plot and world building is excellent Issac is a scientist in a twisted world, a distorted mirror of what ours may have been once before some
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cataclysmic event caused the Fractured Worlds. The city of New Creuzon is filled with humans and non-humans, water and air beings and those even stranger. Issac is commissioned to help a birdbeing who has 'lost' his wings fly again. In so doing he gathers together many other flying beings to study, one being a strange caterpillar, this grows and escapes and Isaac and some friends help save the city from the strange SlakeMoths. The corrupt city politics and criminal gangs interfere. The Weaver is summoned as a massive spider, and is another wonderful concept. However the downside is the prose. This is written in a slow overly wordy literary style that is just dull and hard work to read. 800 pages are a struggle, this prose makes them much much harder. I ended up skimming swathes of text without losing any plot points or the overall grasp of the magnificent city. The characters are also, despite all the words, thin. Issac gets some attention, mainly paragraphs of drifting verbiage, all the others are thin constructs. This is acceptable for the robots, but the aliens require far more crafting to make them believable.
The second problem with this tome is that it is often unnecessarily dark. There are dark themes, but there is frequently gratuitous dwelling on the specific acts and descriptions which again are better skipped through.
All in all it is a fascinating work imbued with stunning imagination, but it really needs a much heavier hand on the editing.
I won't be re-reading this for some time.
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LibraryThing member Ken-Me-Old-Mate
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville After a couple of chapters you can smell this book.
His evocation of the city is so overwhelming and powerful that you can feel that you know this place. It is seedy, run down and dangerous. It stinks, it is decrepit and corrupt and yet it is intriguing and
The story going on here is one of fiction, parable and love. It is a formidable piece of work that either you will cope with or not, it will not be the fiction that fails. It may not be for everyone either. If he used different races instead of species it would have subtly changed the essence and made it maybe too recognisable, too near to home. One species killing another may be palatable but one race killing another not so. Empathy changes when we cross that barrier. And yet, at the same time, the main female character is so sexy and desirable even though she is not human.
At one point I wondered if this was science fiction or fantasy or dystopian, or maybe all of these but by then it didn't matter one iota. By that time I could already see the characters and knew them well. The advantage of stories constructed like this is that ideas can be introduced that would flounder in other forms of fiction and the total difference from our "normal" is a more effective mirror than realistic fiction.
I loved it and devoured it steadily.
At around 640 pages it is big enough to get your teeth into, go on treat yourself.
His evocation of the city is so overwhelming and powerful that you can feel that you know this place. It is seedy, run down and dangerous. It stinks, it is decrepit and corrupt and yet it is intriguing and
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also surprisingly inviting. The characters he draws fit so well in this place that everything that flows from there just seems natural even though they are different species.The story going on here is one of fiction, parable and love. It is a formidable piece of work that either you will cope with or not, it will not be the fiction that fails. It may not be for everyone either. If he used different races instead of species it would have subtly changed the essence and made it maybe too recognisable, too near to home. One species killing another may be palatable but one race killing another not so. Empathy changes when we cross that barrier. And yet, at the same time, the main female character is so sexy and desirable even though she is not human.
At one point I wondered if this was science fiction or fantasy or dystopian, or maybe all of these but by then it didn't matter one iota. By that time I could already see the characters and knew them well. The advantage of stories constructed like this is that ideas can be introduced that would flounder in other forms of fiction and the total difference from our "normal" is a more effective mirror than realistic fiction.
I loved it and devoured it steadily.
At around 640 pages it is big enough to get your teeth into, go on treat yourself.
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LibraryThing member janly
I believe this author will get better with age. His creation of a setting that defies stereotypes is truly amazing...the combination of new technology with pre-computer technology was original and fun to imagine. For me, though, Melville focused on the setting to the detriment of character
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development. It actually made me mad that I know more about the view from the shack on the hill than I do about the female reporter staying in it. She had been intimately involved in major developements throughout the book, but I know nothing about her and she had no defining personality characteristics. Other than Lin, the bird guy and the weaver, we were not allowed to develop a relationship with any character. By using vocabulary beyond almost anybody's reach and spending way too much time describing cool settings and paraphenalia, the biggest relationship we were encouraged to develop was with China Melville's ego. Very narcissitic attempt at creating a universe that I actually wish I had been allowed to be a part of. Show Less
LibraryThing member Karlstar
This strange, edgy story is a real mixed bag. A combination of steampunk, cyberpunk, horror and fantasy; it ends up mostly a bad mix. Bizarre, strange aliens that make little sense, and have worse names, and a tendency towards the grotesque makes this hard to read. Semi-scientific babbling really
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slows it down in parts, and the action is extremely inconsistent and illogical. Show Less
LibraryThing member JanetinLondon
Despite a slow start, once the main story got going this was a great book. The plot is basically a simple, classic one – in a harsh, oppressed environment, Isaac is a rogue scientist, taking on private projects, not always legal. A client comes with an unusual, probably impossible request, and
The themes are also classic – the potential but also the risks of advancing technology, the battle of good v. evil, bravery and loyalty, but also betrayal (once or twice I thought I had strayed into a George R.R. Martin book!). Yet there were also two themes which I see as more modern (and, I think, perhaps primarily urban) – the connectivity of everything, physically and psychically, and the increasing need and ability of humans to utilize this, and the way in which different cultures share space and time, specifically crowded cities, interacting yet not really integrating, with some shared values yet very alien to each other in other ways.
The characters, of course, are not classic ones. Mieville has created a range of species, some more human-like and some less, and he uses their different characteristics to support the story in some unique ways. Isaac is a great character, as is Yag, his client, and there are many other interesting characters, some of which drive the main plot and others of which are more minor. The city itself is also a key character, and the descriptions of various buildings and parts of town are some of the most enjoyable sections of the book. And I love that there is a map at the front. Occasionally, though, Mieville just gets carried away with his love for his creations, and there are various sidetracks and subplots and even quite major characters which I felt didn’t enhance the story in any way and just made me feel the book was too long.
On balance, I am giving this book 4 stars, because the story is great, there are some excellent characters, and the writing is very good most of the time, but it is too long, and some of it is too self-indulgent. Having said that, I will certainly be reading more of Mieville’s books next year.
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Isaac’s research inadvertently unleashes a terrible threat. Isaac and others try to figure out what’s happening, and how to save the city, and there are a variety of events and adventures along the way.The themes are also classic – the potential but also the risks of advancing technology, the battle of good v. evil, bravery and loyalty, but also betrayal (once or twice I thought I had strayed into a George R.R. Martin book!). Yet there were also two themes which I see as more modern (and, I think, perhaps primarily urban) – the connectivity of everything, physically and psychically, and the increasing need and ability of humans to utilize this, and the way in which different cultures share space and time, specifically crowded cities, interacting yet not really integrating, with some shared values yet very alien to each other in other ways.
The characters, of course, are not classic ones. Mieville has created a range of species, some more human-like and some less, and he uses their different characteristics to support the story in some unique ways. Isaac is a great character, as is Yag, his client, and there are many other interesting characters, some of which drive the main plot and others of which are more minor. The city itself is also a key character, and the descriptions of various buildings and parts of town are some of the most enjoyable sections of the book. And I love that there is a map at the front. Occasionally, though, Mieville just gets carried away with his love for his creations, and there are various sidetracks and subplots and even quite major characters which I felt didn’t enhance the story in any way and just made me feel the book was too long.
On balance, I am giving this book 4 stars, because the story is great, there are some excellent characters, and the writing is very good most of the time, but it is too long, and some of it is too self-indulgent. Having said that, I will certainly be reading more of Mieville’s books next year.
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LibraryThing member Raven
An odd one, this. Recommended to me by nearly everyone I know who shares tastes with me, so I was going to read it at some point. I finally got around to it and it took me a week or so over Christmas and New Year, not a traditional time of sharp intellectual engagement, but despite some inattentive
Like I said - fascinating stuff. And the worldbuilding in the novel is really worth the price of admission. But somehow... it loses momentum towards the end. Plot threads are carefully established and then quietly dropped; character arcs, similarly. The prose loses momentum, too - amateurish stuff like the use of the same adjective twice in two sentences, and there's a point where I seriously considered putting the book down if he used the word "faecal" one more time - and the end when it comes is a bit unsatisfying.
But that said, it's worth the price of admission for the worldbuilding. I may read his others and see what I think of those before passing judgement.
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reading I am a little disappointed with how it all turned out. I loved the first five hundred pages unreservedly - chaotic, imaginative, brutal but sometimes warm, all fascinating stuff. The plot, if it can be reduced to a few words, centres on a scientist named Isaac, living in a darkly fantastic otherworld city, New Crobuzon, alongside other races (cacti people, snake people, insectoid people, one of whom is Isaac's artist girlfriend, Lin) and a vast array of technological and magical marvels. It's a dystopia, of course, corrupt in a variety of interesting ways, and among all of this, Isaac gets a visitor, Yagherek, a refugee from a winged race of people who wants his help to fly again.Like I said - fascinating stuff. And the worldbuilding in the novel is really worth the price of admission. But somehow... it loses momentum towards the end. Plot threads are carefully established and then quietly dropped; character arcs, similarly. The prose loses momentum, too - amateurish stuff like the use of the same adjective twice in two sentences, and there's a point where I seriously considered putting the book down if he used the word "faecal" one more time - and the end when it comes is a bit unsatisfying.
But that said, it's worth the price of admission for the worldbuilding. I may read his others and see what I think of those before passing judgement.
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LibraryThing member funkendub
Shocking: I read The City and the City first of Mieville's novels and thought he was this specialist in terse noir. Which I love. So, while I've enjoyed these longer, shaggier novels, I do wish he'd quit being so damn prolix and get down to writing only those words that are absolutely necessary.
LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
I'm not much for genre fiction of any sort, but I'd heard good things about Mieville's work from readers I respect. When I found a new copy of "Perdido Street Station" on sale for two bucks, it seemed like a good place to get my feet wet.
I'm not quite sure what I expected, but this wasn't exactly
I'm not quite sure what I expected, but this wasn't exactly
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a world-changer for me. There's a lot floating around in this book – Mieville muses on religion, artificial intelligence, urban planning, science, and history, but these ideas are basically window-dressing on a big, pulpy film noir narrative. His world can sometimes be beguilingly exotic, but much of Mieville's source material, which likely includes superhero comics, sci-fi everything, and gangster movies, will probably seem achingly familiar to most readers. New Crobuzon can seem a lot like London with a few extra antennae thrown in, it's often too easy to draw a direct connection between the social conditions of Bas-Lag and our own contemporary social issues, and many of Mieville's characters seem like echoes of the boho post-collegiate types that the author probably once ran with. This isn't necessarily a problem, since "Perdido Street Station" is still lots of fun to read. There are some nice touches here – a gigantic set of fossilized ribs of indeterminate origin tower over the city, his characters carry flintlocks, and oddball religious cults flourish. Mieville's also done some reading in cultural studies and related fields – many of characters inhabit in-between cultural spaces, and his treatment of them is admirably sensitive. Also, his invented creatures are appropriately terrifying. The book's overlong, but Mieville works hard to keep a rather intricate plot in motion, and his writing is, by turns, entertainingly purple, gritty, and cinematic. Still, nothing connects on a thematic level. Ideas float in and out of the text and a detailed fantasy world gets built, but I'm not sure Mieville knows exactly what, if anything, he wants his book to say. It's interesting enough, though, to see the (strictly analog) cogs of his mind spin for a few hundred pages. I'll be picking up "The Scar" next. You can't go wrong for two bucks. Show Less
LibraryThing member drachenbraut23
“Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”
What a wonderful book. Mieville has demonstrated again what a great storyteller he is, his vivid and imaginative
step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god."
My fave character in this book was Yagharek the garuda. Punished for a despicable crime, by taking away his ability to fly. He comes to New Crobuzon to find someone who can help him to gain the ability of flight again. To observe his journey from a quiet and ashamed creature, obsessed only with his own predicament and then to turn into a friend and a hero - and in the end to turn into something completely new. Even so that his crime was horrible, I felt for this creature throughout the whole story. I especially liked the ending as it sort of was unexpected, but very fitting.
"I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.”
Highly recommended to anyone, who enjoys Mieville's complicated, but imaginative writing and who doesn't mind grabbing a dictionary at times for clarification of words.
What a wonderful book. Mieville has demonstrated again what a great storyteller he is, his vivid and imaginative
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descriptions of the characters and New Crobuzon made this book really enjoyable. This book was not an easy read (at least not for me) as I had to use the dictionary many times. However, that didn't distract from his brilliant storytelling. The story itself is not just about the characters, but about the city New Crobuzon itself. It's about the politics, the poverty, the criminals, the hard life, the survival but also about the beauty found in a huge city. It's about love and betrayal, about danger and corruption and so much more. Most of the characters in this story are flawed, selfish, careless and some of them are downright horrible, but that was excactly what I enjoyed so much about the story. Nothing seems to be as it is. step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god."
My fave character in this book was Yagharek the garuda. Punished for a despicable crime, by taking away his ability to fly. He comes to New Crobuzon to find someone who can help him to gain the ability of flight again. To observe his journey from a quiet and ashamed creature, obsessed only with his own predicament and then to turn into a friend and a hero - and in the end to turn into something completely new. Even so that his crime was horrible, I felt for this creature throughout the whole story. I especially liked the ending as it sort of was unexpected, but very fitting.
"I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.”
Highly recommended to anyone, who enjoys Mieville's complicated, but imaginative writing and who doesn't mind grabbing a dictionary at times for clarification of words.
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LibraryThing member selfnoise
Big, splashy mission statement of the new weird. Highly grotesque steampunk-esque urban fantasy with some truly frightening, distinctive antagonists. The main characters are oddly irritating at times. Mieville's sequel, The Scar, is also good, but is somewhat anticlimactic and suffers from a truly
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odd choice of protagonist. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, has much better pacing and more interesting characters. All three novels are great fun but can grate at times because they try to be thrillers and social commentaries, and don't really succeed at both. Show Less
LibraryThing member cleverusername2
Perdido Street Station was certainly a wonderful read, the kind that prompts you to stay up to 2 am as to reach its conclusion. As much as I savored every chapter I can see spots where Miéville butted up against the limits of his ability to hold onto a complex narrative. The first half of the book
Halfway through though something bad happens, and it gets worse. Then it gets terrible; and then even worse. I think it is a fine and wonderful thing to put your characters through some fresh hell but slowly the narrative flow started to change. For whole chapters there was no dialogue. We were told what was going on rather then shown. I was still enjoying myself but it took me outside the book a bit. I’d love to read some of Miéville’s later works to see if he has avoided being written into a corner like this. Another fold in the soft, vulnerable underbelly of this novel is the inclusion of TWO otherworldly deus ex machina characters who are vital to concluding the finale. While this sort of thing happens in science fiction, fantasy and horror stories (Perdido Street Station is a bit of all three); all the time I suppose it is mildly acceptable yet a tad glaring.
It seems as if an important plot element from the start of the book is forgotten, but it comes back quite spectacularly in the finale. There is an epic monster-hunting standoff then only slight reprieve as the antiheroes go underground fearing for their lives wanted dead by both the police state apparatchicks and the powerful criminal underworld at-the-same-time. The story ends in a gut punch of a reveal. Very nice.
Perdido Street Station is like a photography exhibit of some alien ghetto. It is horrid and beautiful. It is lush and repellant. I don’t’ think this is a novel for everyone but certainly for fans of the macabre. It seems like a sophomore effort but with considerable potential to thrill.
You will never look at a certain night-flying insect the same way.
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is very evocative, introducing you to the snarled vistas of the Victoriana-inspired fantasy city of New Corbuzon with liberal dashes of reference to the outside world of Bas-Lag. I’ve read that Miéville is a Dungeons & Dragons fan and I can certainly see its influence on this novel. It is clear he wanted to write a fantasy story completely out of the Tolkien high fantasy mold and his fantasy races could have easily wandered off the pages of a TSR Monstrous Manual complete with creatures borrowed from real-world mythology such as the Garuda and Khepri. Perdido Street Station could be loosely called a fantasy but fits exactly into the New Weird movement; in fact it could be capstone to New Weird as Neuromancer is to cyberpunk. I enjoyed the narrative flow of the first half, where there is much banter between the ensemble of characters. There is a lot of showing instead of telling us what they are doing. No one is a saint in Bas-Lag. Everyone is a varying shade of sinner, even heroes cut from a Fritz Leiber sword & sorcery cloth for scoundrels. Good stuff. There was also a party of “adventurers” that was a fun parody of a troupe of D&D characters. Things don’t quite work out for them as they do around the kitchen table.Halfway through though something bad happens, and it gets worse. Then it gets terrible; and then even worse. I think it is a fine and wonderful thing to put your characters through some fresh hell but slowly the narrative flow started to change. For whole chapters there was no dialogue. We were told what was going on rather then shown. I was still enjoying myself but it took me outside the book a bit. I’d love to read some of Miéville’s later works to see if he has avoided being written into a corner like this. Another fold in the soft, vulnerable underbelly of this novel is the inclusion of TWO otherworldly deus ex machina characters who are vital to concluding the finale. While this sort of thing happens in science fiction, fantasy and horror stories (Perdido Street Station is a bit of all three); all the time I suppose it is mildly acceptable yet a tad glaring.
It seems as if an important plot element from the start of the book is forgotten, but it comes back quite spectacularly in the finale. There is an epic monster-hunting standoff then only slight reprieve as the antiheroes go underground fearing for their lives wanted dead by both the police state apparatchicks and the powerful criminal underworld at-the-same-time. The story ends in a gut punch of a reveal. Very nice.
Perdido Street Station is like a photography exhibit of some alien ghetto. It is horrid and beautiful. It is lush and repellant. I don’t’ think this is a novel for everyone but certainly for fans of the macabre. It seems like a sophomore effort but with considerable potential to thrill.
You will never look at a certain night-flying insect the same way.
Show Less
LibraryThing member mel-L-co0l-j
while it's not its little sister, The Scar... what is? unfortunately for Mieville, he's more gifted than most everyone in the multiverse, so we can only compare him to himself. the only reason this book loses half a star, is that the ending is quite the denoument. it felt as if China didn't quite
like most of China's work, we're given a plate steaming with elements of fantasy, Magic Realism, dystopian society, sci-fi, horror, and fascism. most deliciously, all of this is combined with rogue physics gone awry. PERFECT for us nerds who also appreciate a fine literary endeavor, that's still full of guilty pleasures like shoot-outs with government agents, psychics, running in the sewer from bad guys (c'mon... it's the best literary device in the world!), high romance with insect-people, egotistical Garudas, and clumsy electronic devices that allow you to speak with Satan.
read it.
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know where to end it. still, the brilliance of this book remains incendiary. like most of China's work, we're given a plate steaming with elements of fantasy, Magic Realism, dystopian society, sci-fi, horror, and fascism. most deliciously, all of this is combined with rogue physics gone awry. PERFECT for us nerds who also appreciate a fine literary endeavor, that's still full of guilty pleasures like shoot-outs with government agents, psychics, running in the sewer from bad guys (c'mon... it's the best literary device in the world!), high romance with insect-people, egotistical Garudas, and clumsy electronic devices that allow you to speak with Satan.
read it.
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Subjects
Awards
Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 2002)
Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 2002)
Locus Award (Nominee — Fantasy Novel — 2001)
World Fantasy Award (Nominee — Novel — 2001)
SF Site Reader's Choice (2001)
British Fantasy Award (Winner — August Derleth Fantasy Award — 2001)
SF Site Editor's Choice (#1 — 2001)
Arthur C. Clarke Award (Winner — 2001)
British Science Fiction Association Award (Shortlist — Novel — 2000)
Otherwise Award (Shortlist — 2000)
Nagroda SFinks (2004)
Ignotus Award (Winner — 2002)
Kurd Laßwitz Preis (Winner — Foreign novel 2003)
Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (Winner — 2005)
Locus Recommended Reading (2000)
Language
Original publication date
2000-03
Physical description
640 p.; 6.88 inches
ISBN
0345459407 / 9780345459404