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Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis show more Theory. Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger. While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . . A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination. From the Trade Paperback edition. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
mclewe For Miéville's ability to create a complete world, incomprehensible, fascinating, intelligent.
90
souloftherose Although The Windup Girl is more science fiction than steampunk/fantasy, I felt there were similarities in the exoticness of the world-building and readers who enjoyed Perdido Street Station may also enjoy The Windup Girl.
96
RagnarOlafson Same universe, a lot of the same creatures. Brilliantly done as well
30
MyriadBooks For the world building, for the heft of the plot.
aaronius Another dystopian dream-city to get lost in with weird sex and fantastic writing.
33
electronicmemory Two excellent examples of twisted, dark and brutal stories with unexpected sci-fi/fantasy elements and engrossing worlds.
11
Jarandel Similar dark, steampunk-ish urban environments that sometime veer into the horrific and fantastical.
22
majkia no idea why exactly, but the two seem similar to me.
Viriconium: "The Pastel City", "A Storm of Wings", "In Viriconium", "Viriconium Nights" by M. John Harrison
g33kgrrl "Weird cities" staples.
Member Reviews
This book hit a little harder during this second time around. I think the first time I was dazzled by the weirdness of it and relished those aspects. This time around I am in awe of the deep characters and the layers in the story. Some parts fly by, other parts drag a little bit, but the world is so alive - it seems in spite of its surroundings and circumstances - that I was always interested in what was on the page. I feel like this book is just brimming full of ideas that China thought were cool. Yeah, why not throw the mantis-clawed guy in at the end. How about AI? How about a race of beetle-headed creatures who are refugees? Oh, and what if there are whole groups of people who receive horrible body-modifications as a form of show more punishment? Yeah, throw that in there. But what if people chose to alter themselves in weird ways? Sure why not. Also, Hell is real. And there's a giant inter-dimensional spider. Hmm, what else? How about cherubs, but instead of angelic, they are quasi-human and shit everywhere? Yeah, I guess so. And that's not even getting into the main plots of this book, most of those things are incidental. So many ideas and concepts in here. I feel like nowadays, this book would be edited way down, and it would lose a large part of the magic of it. I love these sprawling books because they feel alive; its not just whittled down to the necessary components for a fast moving plot. And that's not to say that the plot doesn't move fast, because after a certain point it just flies by. I did not want to stop reading it, and that, to me, is a sign of a great book. show less
A magnum opus of grimdark fantasy, steampunk squalor—a hero’s journey through Hell. New Crobuzon is exquisitely, meticulously detailed in its every ghetto, slum, fetid sewer, decrepit building, midden, and rotting garbage heap; in its every drug addict, whore, thief, petty bureaucrat, torturer, and craven tyrant. Its main characters are complex, flawed, and believable, even as they work thaumaturgy or create sculptures with glands from the back of their insect-like heads. The heroes’ “quest,” if you will, is to rid the city of a (literally) nightmarish menace, but the plot is as complex and convoluted as the grimy back alleys of New Crobuzon. As dark and dismal, and long, as this story was, I couldn’t stop reading and was show more sorry to part ways with it. I’ll be reading more of Miéville, particularly the Bas-Lag novels. show less
Siamo di fronte a una piccola rivoluzione copernicana del genere fantastico. Senza entrare nel merito delle classificazioni (che ascriverebbero il romanzo al misconosciuto “new weird”) quello che sicuramente è palese nell’opera di Miéville è la capacità di mescolare molteplici correnti di stile per creare un’alchimia spesso precaria ma di grande effetto.
Siamo a New Crobuzon, città di sette milioni di abitanti, in una terra dalla geografia caotica e non delineata. Una città disordinata, un vero incubo urbanistico, dove tra decadenti torri, giù nei vicoli si trascinano nella sozzura umani, razze arcane e mutanti. Il primo centinaio di pagine è per entrare in contatto con questo delirante mondo di tecnologia e magia, che show more deve qualcosa sia al fantasy che allo steampunk. I protagonisti sono presentati poco a poco senza però riuscire intedere subito la direzione dell’intreccio. Il mio consiglio per chi affronta Perdido Street Station è di superare lo scoglio della “parte prima” e di insistere. Non è facile entrare nell’inferno urbano di Miéville, nel suo stile ricco e ricercato, nelle sue descrizioni dettagliate ma deliranti. New Crobuzon sembra uscita dai sogni o dagli incubi.
Quando poi si entra nel vivo della vicenda allora si apprezza anche la capacità dell’autore di costruire una vicenda frenetica e coinvolgente. I protagonisti del romanzo non sono eroe in senso classico ma persone coinvolte loro malgrado in fatti più grandi di loro e costrette a porvi rimedio per tirarsi fuori dai guai. Oltre a un piccolo, variopinto gruppetto dei criminali/reietti protagonisti, facciamo la conoscenza con creature impossibili e straordinarie.
La capacità di Miéville di creare qualcosa che non rientra in nessun genere conosciuto, ma che è sicuramente fantastico, e di mescolarlo con la critica sociale, la sociologia e le dinamiche umane (e “aliene” in senso lato) è straordinaria.
Grande affresco, di difficile lettura, da leggere analiticamente senza perdere il gusto per una narrazione densa e raffinata. show less
Siamo a New Crobuzon, città di sette milioni di abitanti, in una terra dalla geografia caotica e non delineata. Una città disordinata, un vero incubo urbanistico, dove tra decadenti torri, giù nei vicoli si trascinano nella sozzura umani, razze arcane e mutanti. Il primo centinaio di pagine è per entrare in contatto con questo delirante mondo di tecnologia e magia, che show more deve qualcosa sia al fantasy che allo steampunk. I protagonisti sono presentati poco a poco senza però riuscire intedere subito la direzione dell’intreccio. Il mio consiglio per chi affronta Perdido Street Station è di superare lo scoglio della “parte prima” e di insistere. Non è facile entrare nell’inferno urbano di Miéville, nel suo stile ricco e ricercato, nelle sue descrizioni dettagliate ma deliranti. New Crobuzon sembra uscita dai sogni o dagli incubi.
Quando poi si entra nel vivo della vicenda allora si apprezza anche la capacità dell’autore di costruire una vicenda frenetica e coinvolgente. I protagonisti del romanzo non sono eroe in senso classico ma persone coinvolte loro malgrado in fatti più grandi di loro e costrette a porvi rimedio per tirarsi fuori dai guai. Oltre a un piccolo, variopinto gruppetto dei criminali/reietti protagonisti, facciamo la conoscenza con creature impossibili e straordinarie.
La capacità di Miéville di creare qualcosa che non rientra in nessun genere conosciuto, ma che è sicuramente fantastico, e di mescolarlo con la critica sociale, la sociologia e le dinamiche umane (e “aliene” in senso lato) è straordinaria.
Grande affresco, di difficile lettura, da leggere analiticamente senza perdere il gusto per una narrazione densa e raffinata. show less
Like Charles Dickens on acid.
OK, this won't be for everyone, but I loved it. Yes, I toyed with the idea of quibbling, with weasel words about how I might have shaved off half a point, if the option had been available, because it can be a teeny-tiny bit over-inflated, at 700 pages. A tad self-indulgent, at times, as the plot vanished in a maelstrom of loving excursions into the crumbling neighbourhoods of New Crobuzon, and sidebars about its weird and wonderful citizens. A little gross, for the delicately-minded ...
But ... worth every page, and every difficult passage, and every time you have to flip back x-pages to remind yourself, who the heck is Jack Half-a-Prayer again? just for the privilege of spending time in the imagination of show more China Miéville.
Miéville's great talent is spinning narrative gold from the highest of high concept Big Ideas. Every single one of his novels has, at its heart, a Big Idea that make your eyes go crossed when you try to answer that question posed by loving friends and family, What's it about? Oh, please. How long do you have?
What I think I love best about Miéville is that he understands the power -- and the proper usage -- of metaphor. Once you hand yourself over to his epic imagination, trusting that you are in safe hands, his narrative wears those metaphors lightly -- it's easy to go for long pages forgetting that New Crobuzon is a twisty, turny fun-house mirror image of London (just look at the map at the beginning of the text, if you doubt me), and that the deeply disturbing and perverted politics of New Crobuzon is a pretty accurate metaphor for what's been going on for years in our millennial world. It's easy to go for long pages marvelling at the residents of New Crobuzon -- the frog-people, the eagle-people, the bug-headed people, the cactus-people -- without stumbling over the question of what they "represent." Until, like one of Miéville's slake-moths, the ideas and imagery worm their ways into your brain, and you are left turning the possibilities over ... and over ... and over ...
Miéville says it himself, putting the words in the mouth of his most interesting (and tragic) creation, Lin, the bug-headed Khepri:
I see clearly as you, clearer. For you it is undifferentiated. In one corner a slum collapsing, in another a new train with pistons shining, in another a gaudy painted lady below a drab and ancient airship ... You must process as one picture. What chaos! Tells you nothing, contradicts itself, changes its story. For me, each tiny part has integrity, each fractionally different from the next, until all variation is accounted for, incrementally, rationally. show less
OK, this won't be for everyone, but I loved it. Yes, I toyed with the idea of quibbling, with weasel words about how I might have shaved off half a point, if the option had been available, because it can be a teeny-tiny bit over-inflated, at 700 pages. A tad self-indulgent, at times, as the plot vanished in a maelstrom of loving excursions into the crumbling neighbourhoods of New Crobuzon, and sidebars about its weird and wonderful citizens. A little gross, for the delicately-minded ...
But ... worth every page, and every difficult passage, and every time you have to flip back x-pages to remind yourself, who the heck is Jack Half-a-Prayer again? just for the privilege of spending time in the imagination of show more China Miéville.
Miéville's great talent is spinning narrative gold from the highest of high concept Big Ideas. Every single one of his novels has, at its heart, a Big Idea that make your eyes go crossed when you try to answer that question posed by loving friends and family, What's it about? Oh, please. How long do you have?
What I think I love best about Miéville is that he understands the power -- and the proper usage -- of metaphor. Once you hand yourself over to his epic imagination, trusting that you are in safe hands, his narrative wears those metaphors lightly -- it's easy to go for long pages forgetting that New Crobuzon is a twisty, turny fun-house mirror image of London (just look at the map at the beginning of the text, if you doubt me), and that the deeply disturbing and perverted politics of New Crobuzon is a pretty accurate metaphor for what's been going on for years in our millennial world. It's easy to go for long pages marvelling at the residents of New Crobuzon -- the frog-people, the eagle-people, the bug-headed people, the cactus-people -- without stumbling over the question of what they "represent." Until, like one of Miéville's slake-moths, the ideas and imagery worm their ways into your brain, and you are left turning the possibilities over ... and over ... and over ...
Miéville says it himself, putting the words in the mouth of his most interesting (and tragic) creation, Lin, the bug-headed Khepri:
I see clearly as you, clearer. For you it is undifferentiated. In one corner a slum collapsing, in another a new train with pistons shining, in another a gaudy painted lady below a drab and ancient airship ... You must process as one picture. What chaos! Tells you nothing, contradicts itself, changes its story. For me, each tiny part has integrity, each fractionally different from the next, until all variation is accounted for, incrementally, rationally. show less
This is really an amazing piece of work. The world that China Mieville creates is enormously intricate and very detailed. It may not be pretty, but it is described in such a way that the city of New Crobuzon comes alive around you and you can admire it in all its grotesque grandness. I am not the kind of reader who usually cares about the language, as long as it doesn't distract me from the story. In this case though, it is almost impossible not to notice the poetry of some of the descriptions, and it is one of the few times that this didn't bother me. The different races that Mieville creates, along with their extensive backstory are wondrous. The two main characters, Isaac and Lin (human and khepri) hold the attention, even though in show more the beginning there is not a lot of action. Still, the scientific research of the one and the art of the other kept me occupied and fascinated.
One of the beautiful things about Perdido street station is that the characters are not heroes, and they are in classical fantasy. They are normal human beings (or non-human beings) who respond quite realistically. They have a huge problem to solve, and in the end, they do not emerge unscathed. Several of the characters are morally ambiguous. The book is very realistic in showing that just because someone does something good, it doesn't mean they always have or always will. In the end, life continues, with new scars, despite adventures and mad dashing through cities. I absolutely love this book, and during the first half, it was heading towards a five-star rating. However, despite all of its beauty, there were also quite a few pieces that threw me out of the story. Little bits and pieces of descriptions and side streets that distracted me from the main thoroughfare. The book is not a fast read to begin with and this didn't help. I revised my rating to four stars, but with the ending so beautifully done (I cannot help but love the Weaver. And that is a feat, making me love a huge spiderlike creature), I'll up it to 4.5. show less
One of the beautiful things about Perdido street station is that the characters are not heroes, and they are in classical fantasy. They are normal human beings (or non-human beings) who respond quite realistically. They have a huge problem to solve, and in the end, they do not emerge unscathed. Several of the characters are morally ambiguous. The book is very realistic in showing that just because someone does something good, it doesn't mean they always have or always will. In the end, life continues, with new scars, despite adventures and mad dashing through cities. I absolutely love this book, and during the first half, it was heading towards a five-star rating. However, despite all of its beauty, there were also quite a few pieces that threw me out of the story. Little bits and pieces of descriptions and side streets that distracted me from the main thoroughfare. The book is not a fast read to begin with and this didn't help. I revised my rating to four stars, but with the ending so beautifully done (I cannot help but love the Weaver. And that is a feat, making me love a huge spiderlike creature), I'll up it to 4.5. show less
New Crobuzon is a city that is almost a state in its own right. The upper echelons are governed by a dictatorship, and the underclass are subject to the whims of the criminal elite. Miéville has created a city that you can almost smell when reading it. It has a feel of somewhere in the middle of the Victorian age and is dark, damp and imposing.
The tech in the book is steampunk, and is straightforward and uncomplicated, with basic pistols, clockwork devices, steam powered computers that use cards to programme them, but he has raised it to another level with the addition of elyctricity from simple batteries and magic.
But it is with the characters and people that inhabit this city state that he has made this so very different. There are show more regular humans with the regular count of legs and arms, Khepri with insect heads, cactacae who are green people with spikes like cactuses, the garuda, part bird part human and the vodyanoi, amphibians with human form, and the Remade who are those who have extra limbs or machines or other parts added.
And in this richly imagined, vivid, alien and yet slightly familiar landscape the plot is draped. Isaac has agreed to help a garuda who no longer has his wings, to be able to fly again. Whilst researching methods of flight of birds and other creatures he acquires a grub with fantastic colouring. It nearly dies, but when he discovers that it likes the new narcotic on the street, it starts to grow rapidly and changes into a cocoon and one night is gone. But this is no regular insect, this is a slake moth, a huge humanoid insect that feeds on fear, and the excretions make the new narcotic. It finds its four other companions and frees them, and shear terror descends on New Crobuzon as the victim count grows. And the authorities scrabble to find these creatures, the criminal want them back for the drugs and Issac seeks to destroy them too.
Miéville has taken the genres of Steampunk, gothic horror and fantasy, popped them in a blender and turned the dial to 11 with this book. The way that he describes the city and the inhabitants is full of detail and intensity. There are parts that are chilling too. The only reason that I didn’t give this five was I though that the plot was not so strong, but it is a solid 4.5 show less
The tech in the book is steampunk, and is straightforward and uncomplicated, with basic pistols, clockwork devices, steam powered computers that use cards to programme them, but he has raised it to another level with the addition of elyctricity from simple batteries and magic.
But it is with the characters and people that inhabit this city state that he has made this so very different. There are show more regular humans with the regular count of legs and arms, Khepri with insect heads, cactacae who are green people with spikes like cactuses, the garuda, part bird part human and the vodyanoi, amphibians with human form, and the Remade who are those who have extra limbs or machines or other parts added.
And in this richly imagined, vivid, alien and yet slightly familiar landscape the plot is draped. Isaac has agreed to help a garuda who no longer has his wings, to be able to fly again. Whilst researching methods of flight of birds and other creatures he acquires a grub with fantastic colouring. It nearly dies, but when he discovers that it likes the new narcotic on the street, it starts to grow rapidly and changes into a cocoon and one night is gone. But this is no regular insect, this is a slake moth, a huge humanoid insect that feeds on fear, and the excretions make the new narcotic. It finds its four other companions and frees them, and shear terror descends on New Crobuzon as the victim count grows. And the authorities scrabble to find these creatures, the criminal want them back for the drugs and Issac seeks to destroy them too.
Miéville has taken the genres of Steampunk, gothic horror and fantasy, popped them in a blender and turned the dial to 11 with this book. The way that he describes the city and the inhabitants is full of detail and intensity. There are parts that are chilling too. The only reason that I didn’t give this five was I though that the plot was not so strong, but it is a solid 4.5 show less
I am awestruck by this book. It's ebullient, kaleidoscopic, turbulent, beguiling, maximal, obscene, and all other manner of words that fit this unique, heady work. And it's challenging. Not only in the sense of submersing you in a dense, actualized world, but also in regard to how Miéville's prose truly embodies the "punk" spirit. Tropes, myths, history, sociopolitical unrest and taboo are all under constant transmutation as Miéville continuously adds themes and threads to the tenuous flux of the novel. This juggling act grows feverish, yet nothing ever falls to the wayside.
The world of Perdido Street Station (PSS) is overpowering. Living conditions are horrible and the relations between people are ever shaky. Simultaneously, New show more Crobuzon teems with verve and life. It's a vast sprawl of squalor, prejudice, passion and chicanery, layered on top of dreamlike weirdness and spearheaded by biotechnical advancements. The city heaves and slouches toward some unknown destination, heavy with the weight of industry, chemicals and greed. It's a sad state indeed, and yet the characters make do with what they have. Some accept their lot, but others rally together against the untenable conditions. There are protests for change; characters that work to topple the oppressive, many-faced titan and poor conditions, and agents of the titan that work to maintain the looming, suffocating status quo so long as the means justify the lucrative ends. The permeating reach of New Crobuzon infuses all with its many veins, nodes and layers, making for a compelling, realistic setting.
One of the ways in which Miéville achieves a heightened sense of realism within such a foreign setting is by eschewing certain storytelling conventions and black-and-white simplicity, but not in a juvenile or ham-fisted way. His world's purpose and depth offer a close reflection of our own world, where easy answers to our issues are usually nowhere to be found. In a 2005 interview conducted by Lou Anders, Miéville explains his stance in regard to morality in fiction:
Miéville also points out in the same interview that there's a fine line between rewarding the good characters in a story too much, versus "being sadistic and willfully unpleasant to your characters." He calls the gritty extreme "aesthetic sadism" and tries to avoid that pitfall, too.
As PSS demonstrates, Miéville strives for a balance; an echo of how things usually end up in life. Self-serving and rotten people tend to rise above and stay above via strong-arming and deceit, while the "good guys" often remain downtrodden and lost. Detrimental or positive things can happen to both, and there are many gray areas in-between. In another interview, Miéville speaks further on the subject of suffering: "One of the reasons I make my characters suffer quite a lot is because I am genuinely interested in this question of insoluble conundrums, situations in which one cannot take a correct position, and they are often around the results and causes of suffering...I'm interested in the contingency of suffering, and one of the things I've tried to get away from is the notion of transcendental moralism of any sort."
Quite a lot fantasy inspired by Tolkien suffers greatly from a "transcendental moralism" that aims to please the reader by emulating the philosophy and world design of LotR. It's a manner of story that is fun in its own way, but is ultimately escapist and pedestrian. Miéville's and other writers' worlds stand opposed to this, portraying great suffering not as a way to enforce a worldview without nuance, but as a matter of course due to the complexity and varied mix of characters and their viewpoints.
And as history shows, people recover and continue on in spite of suffering through great devastation, corruption and loss. Miéville captures the ugly and beautiful tangle of humanity expertly in New Crobuzon with its myriad personalities—its underdogs, its fringe folk, its wary tribesmen, its self-assured bigots, its hedonists, its deep-seated opportunists, its brilliant minds—and shows how their melting pot chaos coalesces into paradox, paroxysm and moral ambiguity. Bas-Lag is a world that is complex and perplexing but imminently engrossing and startlingly recognizable.
Beyond the socioeconomic and sociopolitical aspects of PSS, there is its "New Weird" elements; elements that are crisscrossed and mixed thoroughly so as to breach genre boundaries. To quote Miéville once again, this time on his definition of New Weird: "New Weird…is a moment, a suggestion, a tease, an intervention, an attitude, above all an argument. You cannot read off a checklist and say, ‘x is in, y is out’ and think you’ve understand (sic) what’s at stake or what’s being argued."
As a seeker of unusual, boundary-defying fantasy books, this is a definition that I can get behind, although I do think New Weird can be seen as having a core—even if it's an amorphous one—due its traditional influences. In more concrete terms, Michael Moorcock defines it this way: "The New Weird produces mostly urban fantasy with a moral point and, at its best, it combines the virtues of visionary fiction and horror fiction, political satire, literary fiction and even historical fiction."
Weird fiction itself—which laid the groundwork for New Weird writers—is often described as a mixture of fantasy, sci-fi, and (supernatural) horror. Originators of the "weird" like Hodgson and Lovecraft obscure the lines between these genres, their stories emphasizing madness and the unknown. New Weird writers follow these traditions but also elevate these ideas to new heights, and that's where their own spins on this type of fiction becomes hard to pin down.
Cthulhu is perhaps one of the most popular creatures of our modern day—an unholy fusion of legendary creatures (part demon, part dragon) and an octopus. Hodgson's short story entitled "A Tropical Horror"—which predates Lovecraft's stories—is a fast-paced horror about an amalgamate "Thing" crawling out of a windless sea and hunting the crew of a ship. Hodgson also wrote some more subtle short stories that centered around building dread. From the get-go, Hodgson and Lovecraft fancied the unknown, the theoretical, and the "pull" of primordial creatures or forces beyond comprehension. Two of my favorite New Weird works, Hellboy and Bloodborne, also follow this "weird" tradition.
Miéville, like the weird fiction writers before him, also takes great care when selecting his creatures and introducing moments of deep existential dread. But unlike some uninspired revisions and reinventions of Cthulhu, Mieville taps into a certain Wonderlandian vein and excavates idea after idea from the rabbit hole. What results is alarmingly bizarre—the pale comes over to our side, presenting anomalous oddities in all their mad glory.
Miéville has stated that the monsters are the main thing he cares about when writing his fiction, and he more than outdoes himself in PSS. Here's his specific statement on that from the first interview I linked:
As for the writing itself, Miéville is a maximalist. Some people resent this style, but unlike the compulsive and unfettered maximalism of, say, Robert Jordan, Miéville's writing describes what needs to be described, and he's always doing it in inventive ways. And he knows when to reign in his passion and get things moving again.
Through maximalism, Miéville is able to effectively render a pulsing, living, multi-faceted city. His slums and outskirts and sewers brim with strangeness; his exposition and world is alien and fascinating and impressive. And this book is more or less a series of compacted novels. For an author attempting both an "epic" and a "fantasy," that's pretty unusual, and very welcome. Susanna Clarke achieved this with her first fantasy novel, and now I can add Miéville to that list.
Sometimes this maximalism does work against the story's pacing, but it is overall effective and there are only a few parts where the copious descriptions go on for too long. There are plenty of parts where you can tell Miéville was having a blast while writing this book. Although I took breaks here and there while reading, I always looked forward to getting back to New Crobuzon and finding out what wild thing would happen next.
Another issue I've seen people bring up is that the novel doesn't really have a clear narrative structure, or at least not a very clear direction. I agree—and it works in PSS's favor. Miéville provides a panorama of New Crobuzon, his lens sweeping wide as his pen describes it all. The lens lingers on a few characters more often than others, but PSS is ultimately a story without a main character, and one that is intent on simply showing us in great detail this massive, surreal and chimerical city. Mieville follows characters through their surroundings and documents their strife, their mirth, their conspiracies and their dealings. He displays the depth of their psychology, showing them to be charming and intriguing, but also at times selfish and utterly cruel.
Others bring up the matter of deus ex machina and diabolus ex machina, but in view of the novel's morality and certain Pyrrhic circumstances, these would-be lazy moments are less Miéville stepping in and more of matters reaching a conclusion that adheres to the story logic. And some outcomes are appropriately bereft of sense. I've decided to be pretty lenient in this area since this book is such a marvel and is written so well that it dwarfs its own flaws and issues.
I highly recommend this highly imaginative book. I love the challenge it presents and the ways in which it draws from so many sources to create an overflowing and memorable world. Its many successful threads and varying experiments all tie together into something unendingly astonishing.
(Oh, and I now have two new favorite words: "imbroglio" and "bathetic.") show less
The world of Perdido Street Station (PSS) is overpowering. Living conditions are horrible and the relations between people are ever shaky. Simultaneously, New show more Crobuzon teems with verve and life. It's a vast sprawl of squalor, prejudice, passion and chicanery, layered on top of dreamlike weirdness and spearheaded by biotechnical advancements. The city heaves and slouches toward some unknown destination, heavy with the weight of industry, chemicals and greed. It's a sad state indeed, and yet the characters make do with what they have. Some accept their lot, but others rally together against the untenable conditions. There are protests for change; characters that work to topple the oppressive, many-faced titan and poor conditions, and agents of the titan that work to maintain the looming, suffocating status quo so long as the means justify the lucrative ends. The permeating reach of New Crobuzon infuses all with its many veins, nodes and layers, making for a compelling, realistic setting.
One of the ways in which Miéville achieves a heightened sense of realism within such a foreign setting is by eschewing certain storytelling conventions and black-and-white simplicity, but not in a juvenile or ham-fisted way. His world's purpose and depth offer a close reflection of our own world, where easy answers to our issues are usually nowhere to be found. In a 2005 interview conducted by Lou Anders, Miéville explains his stance in regard to morality in fiction:
"The whole good-versus-bad morality thing, you have to be very careful or else you end up sounding incredibly trite....I remember someone saying once that they really hated my books because they weren’t 'inspiring,' but I just can’t get with this idea that literature is a twelve-step program. If someone wants to read a book to feel better, and the way they want to feel better is to see that the good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, that’s fine, but essentially what they want then is a fairy tale. I don’t mean this in really kind of a denigrating fashion, but I don’t think that’s what fiction should necessarily be about. This is in part my reaction against a tendency that has been reasonably strong in fantasy, which is precisely the attempt to depict narratives like fairy tales. Abstract morality has had a fairly strong position in genre fantasy, and so there is still a certain necessity to react against that, and to say that things don’t all necessarily work out well, and the attempt to create a more realistic, more nuanced world is precisely manifested in a world in which you can’t take nice moral lessons for granted."
Miéville also points out in the same interview that there's a fine line between rewarding the good characters in a story too much, versus "being sadistic and willfully unpleasant to your characters." He calls the gritty extreme "aesthetic sadism" and tries to avoid that pitfall, too.
As PSS demonstrates, Miéville strives for a balance; an echo of how things usually end up in life. Self-serving and rotten people tend to rise above and stay above via strong-arming and deceit, while the "good guys" often remain downtrodden and lost. Detrimental or positive things can happen to both, and there are many gray areas in-between. In another interview, Miéville speaks further on the subject of suffering: "One of the reasons I make my characters suffer quite a lot is because I am genuinely interested in this question of insoluble conundrums, situations in which one cannot take a correct position, and they are often around the results and causes of suffering...I'm interested in the contingency of suffering, and one of the things I've tried to get away from is the notion of transcendental moralism of any sort."
Quite a lot fantasy inspired by Tolkien suffers greatly from a "transcendental moralism" that aims to please the reader by emulating the philosophy and world design of LotR. It's a manner of story that is fun in its own way, but is ultimately escapist and pedestrian. Miéville's and other writers' worlds stand opposed to this, portraying great suffering not as a way to enforce a worldview without nuance, but as a matter of course due to the complexity and varied mix of characters and their viewpoints.
And as history shows, people recover and continue on in spite of suffering through great devastation, corruption and loss. Miéville captures the ugly and beautiful tangle of humanity expertly in New Crobuzon with its myriad personalities—its underdogs, its fringe folk, its wary tribesmen, its self-assured bigots, its hedonists, its deep-seated opportunists, its brilliant minds—and shows how their melting pot chaos coalesces into paradox, paroxysm and moral ambiguity. Bas-Lag is a world that is complex and perplexing but imminently engrossing and startlingly recognizable.
Beyond the socioeconomic and sociopolitical aspects of PSS, there is its "New Weird" elements; elements that are crisscrossed and mixed thoroughly so as to breach genre boundaries. To quote Miéville once again, this time on his definition of New Weird: "New Weird…is a moment, a suggestion, a tease, an intervention, an attitude, above all an argument. You cannot read off a checklist and say, ‘x is in, y is out’ and think you’ve understand (sic) what’s at stake or what’s being argued."
As a seeker of unusual, boundary-defying fantasy books, this is a definition that I can get behind, although I do think New Weird can be seen as having a core—even if it's an amorphous one—due its traditional influences. In more concrete terms, Michael Moorcock defines it this way: "The New Weird produces mostly urban fantasy with a moral point and, at its best, it combines the virtues of visionary fiction and horror fiction, political satire, literary fiction and even historical fiction."
Weird fiction itself—which laid the groundwork for New Weird writers—is often described as a mixture of fantasy, sci-fi, and (supernatural) horror. Originators of the "weird" like Hodgson and Lovecraft obscure the lines between these genres, their stories emphasizing madness and the unknown. New Weird writers follow these traditions but also elevate these ideas to new heights, and that's where their own spins on this type of fiction becomes hard to pin down.
Cthulhu is perhaps one of the most popular creatures of our modern day—an unholy fusion of legendary creatures (part demon, part dragon) and an octopus. Hodgson's short story entitled "A Tropical Horror"—which predates Lovecraft's stories—is a fast-paced horror about an amalgamate "Thing" crawling out of a windless sea and hunting the crew of a ship. Hodgson also wrote some more subtle short stories that centered around building dread. From the get-go, Hodgson and Lovecraft fancied the unknown, the theoretical, and the "pull" of primordial creatures or forces beyond comprehension. Two of my favorite New Weird works, Hellboy and Bloodborne, also follow this "weird" tradition.
Miéville, like the weird fiction writers before him, also takes great care when selecting his creatures and introducing moments of deep existential dread. But unlike some uninspired revisions and reinventions of Cthulhu, Mieville taps into a certain Wonderlandian vein and excavates idea after idea from the rabbit hole. What results is alarmingly bizarre—the pale comes over to our side, presenting anomalous oddities in all their mad glory.
Miéville has stated that the monsters are the main thing he cares about when writing his fiction, and he more than outdoes himself in PSS. Here's his specific statement on that from the first interview I linked:
"And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters."
As for the writing itself, Miéville is a maximalist. Some people resent this style, but unlike the compulsive and unfettered maximalism of, say, Robert Jordan, Miéville's writing describes what needs to be described, and he's always doing it in inventive ways. And he knows when to reign in his passion and get things moving again.
Through maximalism, Miéville is able to effectively render a pulsing, living, multi-faceted city. His slums and outskirts and sewers brim with strangeness; his exposition and world is alien and fascinating and impressive. And this book is more or less a series of compacted novels. For an author attempting both an "epic" and a "fantasy," that's pretty unusual, and very welcome. Susanna Clarke achieved this with her first fantasy novel, and now I can add Miéville to that list.
Sometimes this maximalism does work against the story's pacing, but it is overall effective and there are only a few parts where the copious descriptions go on for too long. There are plenty of parts where you can tell Miéville was having a blast while writing this book. Although I took breaks here and there while reading, I always looked forward to getting back to New Crobuzon and finding out what wild thing would happen next.
Another issue I've seen people bring up is that the novel doesn't really have a clear narrative structure, or at least not a very clear direction. I agree—and it works in PSS's favor. Miéville provides a panorama of New Crobuzon, his lens sweeping wide as his pen describes it all. The lens lingers on a few characters more often than others, but PSS is ultimately a story without a main character, and one that is intent on simply showing us in great detail this massive, surreal and chimerical city. Mieville follows characters through their surroundings and documents their strife, their mirth, their conspiracies and their dealings. He displays the depth of their psychology, showing them to be charming and intriguing, but also at times selfish and utterly cruel.
Others bring up the matter of deus ex machina and diabolus ex machina, but in view of the novel's morality and certain Pyrrhic circumstances, these would-be lazy moments are less Miéville stepping in and more of matters reaching a conclusion that adheres to the story logic. And some outcomes are appropriately bereft of sense. I've decided to be pretty lenient in this area since this book is such a marvel and is written so well that it dwarfs its own flaws and issues.
I highly recommend this highly imaginative book. I love the challenge it presents and the ways in which it draws from so many sources to create an overflowing and memorable world. Its many successful threads and varying experiments all tie together into something unendingly astonishing.
(Oh, and I now have two new favorite words: "imbroglio" and "bathetic.") show less
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Perdido Street Station is a well written and absorbing story aimed at breaking the rules for a number of different fantasy concepts.
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Author Information
112+ Works 50,858 Members
China Miéville was born in Norwich, England on September 6, 1972. He received a B.A. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1994, and a Masters' degree with distinction and Ph.D in international relations from the London School of Economics, the latter in 2001. He has also held a Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard University. show more His first novel, King Rat, was nominated for both an International Horror Guild and a Bram Stoker award. His other works include Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council, Un Lun Dun, The City and the City, Embassytown, and Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories. He has won numerous awards for his works including three Arthur C. Clarke Awards, two British Fantasy Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, and the 2008 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. He also published a book on Marxism and international law called Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Station Perdido
- Original title
- Perdido Street Station
- Original publication date
- 2000-03
- People/Characters
- Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin; Lin; Yagharek; Derkhan Blueday; Lemuel Pigeon; Benjamin Flex (show all 23); Mr. Motley; Lucky Gazid; Montague Vermishank; David Serachin; Lublamai; Teafortwo; Bentham Rudgutter; Eliza Stem-Fulcher; MontJohn Rescue; The Construct Council; The Slake-moths; Shadrach; Pengefinchess; Tansell; The Weaver; Jack Half-a-Prayer; Kar'uchai
- Important places
- New Crobuzon; Bas-Lag; Perdido Street Station; Brock Marsh; Spatters; Kinken (show all 10); The Glasshouse; The Spike; Rudewood; Pelorious Fields
- Epigraph
- 'I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.'
Philip K. Dick, We Can... (show all) Build You - Dedication
- to Emma
- First words
- Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.
- Blurbers
- Gaiman, Neil; Stableford, Brian; Hamilton, Peter; Carroll, Jonathon; Clute, John
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 823.914
- Disambiguation notice
- Do not combine with either Die Falter or Der Weber. Perdido Street Station was split into two volumes for publication in Germany.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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