Miéville tells a fascinating and engrossing tale set in New Crozubon, a rancid and vile metropolis. While the core plot might not be that original, the baroque storytelling and detailed world make up for it tenfold. ( )

This is the most creative book I have ever read in my life, and if I discover one more so I will be surprised.

Every other page I found myself mentally uttering "What the hell?!?!?" in fascination. ( )

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 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. ( )

This is an excellently written book. Its world is described in rich details. The author confidently wields his pen to produce very enjoyable English.

Yet, I discovered once more this genre is not to my satisfaction. The book is very entertaining, written as pulp which takes place in a phantasmagorical world, a page turner. But on intellectual level it was uninspiring.

Every science fiction writer has to decide how speculative his science will be. At certain points in the book he must explain his science, part of it footed on the state of modern technological achievements, part of it interpolating trends in the future and invented. In Perdido Street Station, a work of fantasy, we find the same attempts to describe phenomena in the terms of such pseudo science, but to what end -- these are the most contrived parts of the book. If these paragraphs were to be more brief, the book would've been more reasonable, even believable. In the present form they are a tortured attempt to imitate science fiction in a fantasy book. That is the intellectual failing of the work.

The Guardian wrote: In 2000, the nascent movement was catalysed by what is now widely acclaimed as the New Weird's seminal text, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. Miéville, who had already built a cult following with his short fiction, outspoken socialist politics and confrontational opinions on traditional genre fiction, scored both a critical and commercial success with his epic novel. Set in the violent, filthy streets of Bas Lag - a fantastic re-imagining of Victorian London, Perdido Street Station captured the gnarly essence of New Weird and combined it with a well-crafted pulp narrative accessible to a broad readership. [1]

As far as fantasy goes, this book probably crosses Rubicon -- no ghosts, elves and other overused and tiring arcana. A departure I firmly congratulate and I'd recommend this book to all people who enjoy that type of literature.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/books... ( )

Wierd Gothic horror/fantasy/steampunk sf crossover novel, with plenty of detailed world-building and inter-species sex thrown in. Some consider Miéville's style to be over-wordy, but I don't recollect stumbling over it in the way I do with some much more favoured writers. ( )