Perdido Street Station

A brilliant book of well-rounded characters and a lavish dystopian world. All at once it manages to be urban fantasy, science fiction and fantasy.

When the protagonist takes on an unusal job from an even more unusual client, he unleashes a terrible evil upon the city that can siphon dreams from sentient beings, leaving them a shallow husk. Engaging the aide of friends and associates alike, and enraging both the city government and a powerful drug lord (for whom which his girlfriend has secretly gone to work), he must race against time to save them all.

WHAT
A hard sci-fi world for people who enjoy alien forms of life, unusual characters and an imaginative city able to hold all of them in the same space. No plot or it takes too long to get interesting.

PLOT
A disgusting human scientist is challenged with finding a way to give a winged humanoid his sawed off wings back, while his insect humanoid artist lover is commissioned with sculpting the most bizarre creature that ever existed.

SUMMARY
Isaac is a brilliant, repugnant human scientist that ostracized himself from the science community because of his unusual interests. He does not care to specialize in any field, his interests lies in the bizarre, mysteries that can benefit from a combination of any of the other fields, like biology, engineering and thaumaturgy.

His lover is Lin, an artist from a insect like race, also an outcast by choice since she didn't think like everyone else in her hive community.

The city of New Crobuzon is teeming with weird forms of life, a most bizarre combination of different races and cultures living in an strange harmony. It is gritty, disgusting and steam-punkish like.

One day a garuda comes to Issac and tells him the sad story that resulted in his wings being cut-off by his own people, giving him the unusual challenge of finding a way to grow them back, not to find an artificial substitute. His girlfriend Lin is also defied with a unique task: a crime lord wants her to create a sculpture that captures his essence, which he considers to be the essence of the city itself. He is a combination of many different creatures sown down together.

ANALYSIS
Quoting the top reviewer: “if you read only for the story and plot, this book is not for you”. Well, after a few hours there was no plot or story whatsoever. I did not care for the hyper biological sci-fi scenario presented, so I stopped reading.

The book is a bit hard to read, typical of hard sci-fi. I think the prose was fine, I just could not enjoy the city and its inhabitants being described without giving me any sort of emotional or intellectual attachment to them.

Read 2:40/31:00 9%

This was a wild blending of elements: fantasy, cyber-punk, steampunk, horror, and classic mythology to name a few. So many different creatures it's impossible to remember how you're supposed to be imagining them as you come across different characters. As Douglas Adams put it in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, “the things are also people.”

I'd be better off reading this alongside a companion book, The Visual Guide to Bas-Lag (as yet non-existent). I like to think I have a visual imagination, and it's not so much the elaborate descriptions as it is the sheer number of species and locations. Bonus, everything is covered with slime and feces.

Oh yeah, I enjoyed the story as well, though I never got too cozy with any of the characters.

Full review at SFF Book Review

This was an excellent read.

I'm still stunned by the inventiveness, the abundance of ideas and the thrill of the plot. I normally post short impressions on goodreads and a full review on my blog, but I'm afraid I can't just talk about this book “a little”. Either it's all the way gushing about how awesome the monsters are and hot terrifying the threat to New Crobuzon and how surprising each plot twist, or it's just a simple: Read this! It is brilliant.

9/10

There's a lot to say about this book.

The pacing can ebb and flow at times, from glacial and obsessed with staying in the muck of world building to flying by. Bas-Lag is full of strange characters and diverse races of people, with New Crobuzan a converging point for most of them.

There's a lot of metaphor mixed into this book, from beasts used to create recreational drugs that are uncontrollable monsters that feast on your dreams and leave you braindead to create their drug (and profit for whomever can control them) to the thuggish, fascist police force and government. It's evident that this book is deeply immersed in leftist theory, with there being analogs between the different forces of the Weaver, Construct Council and even fRemade with Jack Half-a-Prayer, and different leftist schools of thought, like Anarchism, Marxist-Leninism, Maoism and pure Marxism. Extraordinary events brings these forces together, but only temporarily.

The slake-moths are... the most terrifying fictional creation I've read since the Shrike from the Hyperion books.

The world is rich and the city is disgusting. I've read a lot of complaints about this book, about the prose being “purple” and the overuse of the word “ichor,” which is really funny. There's definitely places where the story drags but when everything worked it was brilliant and the sagging middle parts are forgotten.

My first Mieville was The City & the City and I, unusually for me, often think about it. Not so much for the plot but the for the rather remarkabe atmosphere the author was able to create. I probably wanted to love Perdidido StreeT station more than i did but too many times i found myself lost in the narrative and although the writing is sumptuous I had trouble keeping my barings. That is a reflection on me, not the book.

Let's put aside a few things when considering China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. We won't worry about all the awards he's won for the book, or the fact that the book is coherently built and densely plotted enough that this could have been an entire trilogy, but he weaves it all together into one narrative. Let's even put aside the fact that “extradimensional moth that eats consciousness and shits nightmares” may be one of the most terrifying concepts I've ever encountered in a novel.

This is a man who knows how to WRITE. Even if we, as I said, put aside everything else about this book, it's worth reading just to watch Mieville stringing words together so that they flow like honey, but without feeling overly sweet. He's similar, in that regard, to someone like Anthony Burgess or Chuck Palahnuik - the message is almost secondary to how artistically they're expressing it.

I don't know how to to describe this as anything but average. Considering how thick this book is, I would have thought something would actually happen. At best though it ended up being a mess of random ideas thrown together without much care for forming an engaging narrative. The very start and very end where okay, leaving the middle feel like a massive waste of reading time.

Like so many of his stories, this book has some really imaginative ideas and imagery, but lacks a solid core in which you can invest. I think fans of Lovecraft would love this book, but personally I need more resolution/structure to any mysterious events, and I don't enjoy the horror of violence without there being some narrative reason to justify it.

Perdido Street Station is a great mix of setting, plot and character. I admit that for the first few chapters, I was a little weary. The main plot hadn't kicked in yet, and I was just getting introduced to the characters, so it felt like the book was spending a lot of time describing the setting. I think it's a weakness in my reading habits that setting doesn't capture my attention as much as plot and character development, so I found myself starting to skim over some of the longer descriptive passages. However, the city of New Crobuzon is so unique that whenever my attention started to waver, some imaginative element of the world would pull me back in.

Once the plot started to get going, it really absorbed me. Almost every scene introduced an interesting new element, which made the world seem like it was constantly expanding.

If I had one problem with the book, it's that there were maybe too many ideas. The fantasy setting was established early on, and it's a world where anything goes, and anything can happen. This was cool most of the time because there was always a sense that something unexpected would happen. However, there were subplots and tangents which seemed to me like they were just put there to introduce a crazy idea. The meeting with the Ambassador from Hell comes to mind; there's great imagery in that scene, but the character of the Ambassador, and the fact that our protagonists can freely communicate with Hell, never show up again.

This is a minor criticism, though, and overall, I enjoyed Perdido Street Station very much.

Wow... what a ride.

I came to this book very, very wrongly.
Firstly, I have read UnLunDun. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I was expecting something similar. This is not it.
Secondly, I was expecting Steampunk. This is not Steampunk.
Thirdly, I wasn't expecting all the cruelty and grime and suffering and horror. I don't like that. I can understand why a lot of people have given up reading this book. There's a lot of that here. It doesn't even have a happy ending.

But, after the shock I have to say this is brilliant.

If you like Gormenghast (as China does), and postapocalyptic scifi, Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood, you might like this one.

So - this book is about a chubby scientist and engineer, who develops a fancy engine. His love is sort of an insect. There's a lot of non-human species/races in this book. He promises to help a wingless Garuda (sort of an angel with bird head) to fly again. For this purpose he collects different winged creatures, and one of them is a very beautiful grub. This grub becomes a moth - sort of - and it's very beautiful, but... problematic. It gets complicated. Very complicated.

Mieville's world building is simply intense! At the heart of the novel is New Crobuzon, a seedy overcrowded steampunk kingdom of a city, teeming with life of all sorts, creatures from various species; bird people, insect people, people recrafted into ‘remades', beings from this plane and those from beyond; criminals, artists, scientists, rebels, politicians.

It's hard at first to dig your way through the onslaught of details about this weird-fantasy victorian horror London, full of vivid, dark and grotesque elaborations, alchemy and madness. But then a villain emerges and a rag-tag-crew sets off to fight it and suddenly the plot just catapults and pulls you along.

A short, simple, and informal review from a casual reader

Wow. Amazing book, and I loved it! I have never read anything so original and refreshing. The world-building in this book is like nothing I've ever seen. I can't even begin to tell you how unique it is. There is nothing like the world of Bas-Lag. It's a mixture of original and compelling ideas, in its own category of hard fantasy, bordering on surreal. It's a dark kind of whimsical world...it gave me sort of twisted Alice in Wonderland vibes, in a way. The species, the city, the creatures, the culture...fantastic. It's a unique form of steampunk...I almost want to call it grimepunk. This book is absolutely brimming with some of the most creative concepts I've ever come across, and it's definitely my favorite part of the book.

Onto the prose, Mieville's imagery is superb. There is a kind of griminess and grittiness in New Crobuzon that feels so tangible. I swear, I could smell the rancid odor of the city and feel the dirt underneath my fingernails. It's probably one of the most vivid reading experiences I have ever known. The way Mieville writes is almost poetic in a way, maybe a bit too purple but it really feels like some sort of dream. Every single one of the five senses is touched upon in his descriptions.

I had heard that there were some horrific elements in this book, not quite a horror novel but definitely horror aspects. I can agree. Some parts of this book are very unsettling, other parts are filled with dread. I'm not usually a horror reader, but I was able to enjoy the still enjoy it. Some parts got extremely intense, but in conjunction with everything else, it was a thrilling ride.

Onto my criticisms. !!!Spoilers ahead!!!

As with all long books, some parts feel a bit meandering. There are tiny plot points in the book that I feel were nothing more than fluff. It wasn't too bad, since it did give a chance to explore more aspects of the city, which I loved. But do be warned this is a pretty long book with branching plot threads.

I thin my biggest gripe with the book overall is the ending. Endings are probably the hardest thing to get down in a book. Even the great Stephen King himself is a victim of subpar endings to great stories. Perdido Street Station is no exception to me. The ending felt very unsatisfying. Call me old-fashioned, but I like endings that have a payoff. Whether it's a sad ending or a happy ending, I want to at least feel like the journey was worth it at the end. I've read that Mieville did this on purpose to show that protagonists don't always win, or that things don't always end up wrapped up in satisfying ends. I agree with the first part, but with the second part...I'm not sure I really agree with that. My argument is that...it's a book. It's a self-contained narrative written for an audience. If I end the book with a “huh, that's it?” it makes me more frustrated than anything. Especially since, considering for the particular characters and narrative in this book, it's not like they're continued in another book in the series. It just peters out. I guess Mieville is making a statement that just doesn't jive with me.

All in all, an excellent book and one of my favorites. One of my most memorable reads and a world that I've fallen in love with. I will end this review by declaring that New Crobuzon would be a great setting for a mini comic-book series or a graphic novel!