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 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 the socio-enconomic impact of industrialization on a magic based multi-cultral city state, but this is why you are reading,right. 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 winds down to 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'll 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. ( )

Perdido Street Station is a masterpiece. It is a manifestation of the wonderful imagination of a great mind. It dares to break standards and pushes and challenges its peers to reach for new heights in a genre that supposedly has very few limitations. It has a wonderful story and characters, even the non-humanoid types, feel down-to-earth-real that readers can sympathize with them. And most of all, it makes one think about ourselves as human beings. (more) ( )

Perdido Street Station is thoroughly enjoyable fantasy. The plot itself is a little pedestrian, however the setting really steals the show. New Crobuzon and the Bas-Lag bestiary are refreshingly innovative, which really sets the author apart from his contemporaries.

Mr. Mieville's discussions of the garuda criminal code and socialist ethos is a bit tiring and reads like a college freshman term paper, but thankfully he cuts the bland political discussion short. I am definitely looking forward to reading The Scar and diving back into Bas-Lag. ( )

Perdido Street Station is the main hub of New Crobuzon, the place where all the transportation and communication lines of the city converge. It serves as an appropriate metaphor for New Crobuzon and the novel itself, in which converge the various threads of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. New Crobuzon is a city filled with monsters. To the xenophobic, the various races which occupy it--scarab-headed Khepri, amphibuous Vodyanoi, plant-like Catacae, winged Garuda--are just the most obvious example. But there are true horrors, some of which the city hides and others which it displays openly. A corrupt government punishes offenders through monstrous mutilations of the flesh of the convicted, while a secretive and deformed drug lord packages and sells the stuff of nightmares in order to control the city's underworld.

The protagonists are themselves somewhat marginal figures--artists, thieves, convicts, rogue scientists, rabble rousers--as can be expected in a city of such extremes. When events come together to release a terrible threat upon the city, they have to come together to defeat monster of almost unfathomable danger.

If not for Mieville's imaginative and narrative powers, that would sound like a rather conventional plot. But the craft with which the city and its various inhabitants are described and the imaginative turns the story takes make for an engaging reading experience, and I sometimes thought of how in my younger days, I could become immersed in works of science fiction and fantasy that I would nowadays find clunky and cliche-riddled. Some of the inhabitants we meet, from the noble mournful Yagharek to the seemingly insane Weaver, wer really fascinating.

If there is one flaw, it is that of a large proportion of science fiction/fantasy: exposition. The exposition in Perdido Street Station wasn't bad, just what was necessary to understand the action, but there were moments where the exposition broke the flow of the story a little bit. The best works in SFF manage to make the exposition almost invisible, which doesn't quite happen in this novel.

But as I said above, it is still an incredibly enthralling experience. Conventional enough that it's quite easy to get into, while the innovative setting, story and characterization take it to a whole new level. ( )

120 pages in and I was blown away by the originality of Mieville's ideas, but the density of the writing and the slowness of the plot made me call it a day. I feel ashamed of myself. ( )