Perdido Street Station

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.