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. ( )

I bought this some months ago and left it alone because I was waiting for the right moment to dive into its imposing 710 pages. And then I was reading another book and I kept thinking about this one. I was ready for something bizarre. So I jumped in. From the first ten pages I was pulled in by the deliciously rich strangeness of this novel. The protagonist is a renegade scientist named Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin who lives in the heart of New Crobuzon, a gritty, grimy, sprawling city in the world of Bas-Lag. New Crobuzon is home to several strange alien races and many Remade people. Isaac carries on a secret affair with Lin, a khepri artist. A khepri is a creature with the body of a woman and the head of a scarab. And from there the story only gets more weird and grotesque. But it's absolutely fascinating. Isaac is hired by a de-winged birdman to restore his power of flight. In the meantime, he feeds some strange caterpillar of unknown provenance hallucinogenic drugs — the only thing it will feed on — and the caterpillar grows massively. The creature that emerges unleashes a horror upon the city of New Crobuzon and halfway into this completely enthralling story it kicks into high gear. The story contains many aliens with strange practices and cults, a brutal militia, a corrupt government, a monstrous crime-lord, fearsome creatures, magic, [b:artificial intelligence|27543|Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach (2nd Edition)|Stuart J. Russell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167881696s/27543.jpg|1362], mysterious demons... and it's all set within a stinking, sprawling city with Perdido Street Station as its nexus. The theme of transformation runs throughout this exciting story and I absolutely loved this much-praised book. I'm looking forward to reading Miéville's follow-up, The Scar, which, while not a sequel, is also set in the world of Bas-Lag. ( )

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. ( )

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 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. ( )

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/200...

Kim Stanley Robinson said recently that ‘the best British literature of our time’ is science fiction. He has a point. Certainly I feel more nourished by Perdido Street Station, a full-on chaotic, phantasmogorical, dystopian, steampunk boy’s-own-adventure-with-interspecies-sex-and-reanimated-cadavers than by any number of sensitive and self-important explorations of guilt, memory and adultery.

It’s very long, and there was a bit towards the end where I wished he would just get on with it, but it sustained me through a very long plane trip and subsequent jet lag. Whenever I read a genre work like this I feel like I’m something of an outsider, and I can’t tell what’s original to it and what is a common trope. (I recognise echoes of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman here, for instance, but have no idea whether they are actual references or simply drawing on the same meme pool.) But when it’s done as well as this, that becomes an academic question.

The book lingers in the mind, and my post-reading ruminations kept turning up treasures. For example, there's a character whose quest seems at first to be a trigger for the plot and not much more, but on reflection his story arc looks more and more like the thematic centre of the book. ( )

China Mieville weaved an amazing, original world of technology, magic, and metaphysical science that not only immersed me but subtly changed the way I look at reality. ( )

Have to go back and check this out to see why I wasn't wowed with it the way many readers are. ( )

The first of Mieville's Excellent Series: The first in the series, an excellent pseudo horror novel. Full of monsters and a wonderfully well imagined steampunk kinda world. Mieville is an honest to god socialist, and that comes through in this book and the way it imagines the social relations between people in a city gone horribly corrupt. Even the monsters, which feed off people's dreams, can be seen as a n allegory for much else that is going wrong in the city.

But, political as this book is on one level, it isn't at all heavy handed, and there is no reason those (like me) who don't share Mieville's world view won't absolutely love this book. This one is really worth getting if you're into this sort of thing. A by "thing" I mean excellent sorta steampunky horror fantasy things.

It took me a long time to work through this book. And that's a good thing as there is a lot going on throughout this novel.

The story takes place in the city of New Crobuzon on a world called Bas-Lag filled by humans and other sentient creatures. This is a world powered by steam, mixing highly advanced technology into a society that resembles large European cities in the early industrial age. Isaac, our protagonist, is a radical scientist, barred from teaching at the university due to his unconventional ideas. Because he in known to work on the fringes, he is approached by someone from outside New Crobuzon who has a lot of money and a special request.

The plot is dark and violent and compelling, but even more interesting to me is the portrayal of the city itself. I did not feel a deep connection to any of the characters, but I did feel drawn to New Crobuzon. The individual neighborhoods become characters themselves, the affluent neighborhoods fighting against the places where the poor, the criminal, and the immigrants congregate. The races have their own magical and spiritual powers, and each new group in the city brings its own culture and biases to add to the mix. This is not a melting pot, but a series of individual cultures, both integrated into the city and wholly separate.

We see the corruption of the government, especially in the power they hold to discipline and punish. Punishment is a theme that flows throughout the book, and occasionally punishment includes justice. More often we see power used by the powerful against the powerless, and this plays out up and down the strata of society.

I don't think this book can be read quickly. It's better absorbed slowly and contemplated often. Highly recommended. ( )

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 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 have never seemed 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 do 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. Its 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 crazy and wonderful book. Fantastic writing that stays with you for years (just reading the names Isaac and Yagharek brought back memories of the book and its writing) and insane amounts of (often grotesque) creativity. The writing renders the whole imaginary world vividly, which is made more impressive by how outlandish the world is.I don't generally like the genre of horror/fantasy sci-fi (which is where you would put this book if you tried to pigeon hole it) and I forget who referred this book to me, but it was well worth the read in 2004 or so when I read it. Even if you don't like horror, give the book a chance...you might like it. The only reason the book doesn't get five stars is because the last quarter or so of the book doesn't live up to the standards of the first portion of the book. Its amusing to read the polarized reviews of the book, I guarantee you will either love it or hate it, but aren't likely to be in between. ( )

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. ( )

Probably my favourite book of all time. ( )

I must admit, this book can be very... wordy, at times. However it serves to describe the unique city that Mieville has created, a fantasy/scifi steampunk monstrosity populated by all manner of bug-people, flying men, humans and robots. The story mostly deals with the attempt to end the plague of mind-eating monsters loosed upon the city and it is a fun ride. ( )

Magnifique, à lire absolument. ( )

Horrifying in parts, my heart actually raced and I frantically followed the motley crew of ruffians trying to save the dirty old city from certain death and expecting no thanks for it. A vivid fascinating adventure with all types of alien creatures, I loved this book and cannot wait to read more of China Mieville's work in this world.

Mutant cross-species sex, who'd a thought it? ( )

I can't give this one an objective rating, due to my personal reaction to the book. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Mr. Mieville's writing, and I think this book is just as beautiful (prose-wise) as anything else of his I've read. Perhaps it is a tribute to his skill that I was unable to finish the book because of the revulsion I felt at some of the scenes.
Does this make sense? Most of Mr. Mieville's work is dark, with a decided bent toward the horrific, but this one just hit a nerve for me in a way that his other books haven't.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, although I can see the merit in the work itself, this one is just not for me.

Perdido Street Station is a dense book, crowded and alive like the city of New Crobuzon where it's set. Not necessarily in plotting - while Mieville sets up a large number of plot threads, once that is done they coalesce rapidly, leaving a large part of the book with a straightforward narrative. But the writing and imagery bring you into the city itself, the lives of the inhabitants and creatures; it's a remarkable bit of writing, though perhaps not the easiest book to read.

New Crobuzon is perhaps the most important part of the book, a putrid, jumbled city built around a river. Mievelle has been placed as part of the "New Weird" movement in science fiction, and the city is an amalgam of races and species, in ghettos and mixed districts, most of the city wretchedly poor. The species are separate from both standard fantasy and logic, wrapped up in and often living on the odd magic of the world. There's massive inventiveness here, but nothing out of place.

The main thrust of the book follows Isaac Grimnebulin, a talented but unreliable outcast scientist, and his researches sparked by a request from the the half-man, half-bird Yagharek. The broader cast gets quite large, but never weighs down the novel unnecessarily, although a few later minor characters never fully mesh. Once the plot lands on the straight narrative later on, there are a few asides and passages that could - and perhaps should - have been cut from this long book. But the slow pacing and dense prose fit to a broad extent the book's world itself, a bustling, grimy, fascinating city - and book. ( )

This book was a gift, and it's one of the best gift books I've ever received, I think. I started reading it, was really enjoying it, and then at some point further in it got *even better* and I actually sighed in delight and snuggled further down into the couch in joy. ( )

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 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 ( )

I've finished this book almost two weeks ago and I still haven't gotten around to writing the review. Partly because I didn't have the time but mostly because I didn't have a clue how to approach this book. It does a marvellous job of not fitting in any category of speculative fiction I can think of for one thing. Mieville himself calls it weird fiction, which is perhaps the most fitting label one could think of. It took me a long time to make any sort of sense of the story, which, in hindsight, was not that complicated. The book is highly praised for it innovative approach to speculative fiction and awesome world building. While I don't dispute these judgements, upon reflection, I do think the book is slightly overrated.

The story is set in the sprawling metropolis of New Crobuzon. A Victorian London-like city state that is at the same time corrupted and falling apart but also at the edge of modern science. A centre of power that shows both it's long history and new initiative. A city full of strange creatures, held together by it's five magnificent railway lines that join at the cities heart. Perdido Street Station. One of these strange creatures is a the new arrival Yagharek. He is a member of a species capable of flight and has come to New Crobuzon with a lot of gold to buy the impossible.

The man who is to supply this miracle is Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin. Isaac is an independent scientist with an obsession for finding a practical application of his favoured theory. He is looking for means to harness crisis energy. To sustain himself and his research he works for various clients on both sides of the law and isn't above 'liberating' pieces of equipment from New Crobuzon's university, his one time employer. His private life is equally colourfully. He is currently in a passionate affair with Lin.

Lin is a member of the Khepri species (the name is a reference to an Egyptian god). The females of this species look human except for the fact that she has the body of an insect, complete with legs and rudimentary wings, where her head ought to be. Lin is an artists, sculpting great pieces of art with her spit and so-called colourberries. Her work is unusual for a Khepri and attracts the notice of one of New Crobuzon's most notorious criminals, Mr. Motley. He commissions her to create a sculpture of himself. A worthy challenge indeed as he is 'Remade'. A process of adapting the human body to all manner of biological impossibilities. Being remade is usually the result of a punishment handed out by New Crobuzon's notorious system of justice, but can also be used to create highly specialized workers.

Lin keeps her commission carefully secret but soon Isaac is to caught up in his own commission to notice her behaviour. Yagharek's wish proves to be the ultimate challenge, one that Isaac thinks can only be solved by the application of crisis energy. Before Isaac reaches that conclusion however, his investigations inadvertently release a creature that is both of great value and extremely dangerous. Soon the city is in the grip of this creature that leaves a string of victims robbed of their wits in it's wake, if it doesn't kill them outright. Various parties in the city set out to end the crisis but Isaac seems to be the one that can actually succeed.

It took me quite a while to get into this story. Miéville has two habits that distracted me in the early stages of the book. His vocabulary is impressive. It way exceeds even my passive English vocabulary which is seizable for a second language speaker. I have long ago learnt to ignore the urge to reach for the dictionary every other page but almost Miéville had me there a couple of times. Another thing that makes the first part of the book rather inaccessible too was the way Miéville looses himself in descriptions of various parts of the city. I have to admit, they are marvellous. He makes his city come alive, paints a vivid image of the fantastic environment in which the story is set in his readers' minds. But the fact remains that he does so rather a lot and that especially early on it breaks the flow of the story. Miéville seems to frequently get lost in his own city (no pun intended).

On the other hand Mieville introduces a lot of very interesting technological concepts. If I understood one of the passages set in Isaac workplace correct Mieville suggests New Crobuzon possesses computer-like technology based on steam power. The Construct Council's rise to intelligence from what is basically a scrap heap is also a very interesting, if somewhat disturbing, concept. Especially in the second half of the book, where the story gains speed, Mieville blends a lot of the technological concepts, Isaac's outlandish scientific ideas and even the local pantheon into a finale that will keep you up too late just so can finish the book. I will have to admit Isaac disappointed me in the end, when he finally faces the ethical side of accepting his commission. It felt like he chickened out on Yagharek in the end. Can't say it was entirely out of character though.

Mieville's approach to speculative fiction is certainly refreshing but Perdido Street Station remains an overwritten book. The story Mieville tells does not justify the 867 pages in my copy. That being said it was well worth the read. Should you decide to pick it up though, remember that it takes a while for the story to get going. Mieville is demanding on the reader but I am tempted to find copies of the other Bas-Lag novels The Scar and Iron Council as well. Maybe when I have managed to reduce the to read pile to more manageable proportions.

Want to comment on this review? Go here. ( )