Perdido Street Station

, #1

623 pages

English language

Published Nov. 9, 2003 by Del Rey/Ballantine Books.

ISBN:
978-0-345-45940-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
52815141
Goodreads:
68494

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4 stars (148 reviews)

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 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 …

3 editions

Bas-lag and New Crobuzon

No rating

This is my first fiction read since late 2017. Reading is just but a recent journey of mine, and I'm glad this was my first book. The number of pages certainly intimidated me, and later on the scientific vocabulary did its work on me too, but it was worth the time it took.

Bas-lag, or at least the part of it I know of, New Crobuzon, is a beautiful world to imagine. The complexity and characters flaw-full make it all the more fun to read. On to the next read based in Bas-Lag!

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A fun weird horror romp. Not what I expected and it took a while to get started but the second half was great. I found it jarring that the storylines were all over the place in terms of detail, but rather had a roving eye that gazed upon characters randomly, some in great detail, others in apparent insufficient detail. I would have liked to have heard more about the constructs before they became central to the story. We heard much more about the remades and they were only side colour. One of the few novels where I would want a few dozen more chapters of world and character development.

Update 9/2022: This book has really stuck with me and might warrant re-reading in a couple of years. At some point it just clicked for me and I was and remain enthralled. I sometimes think of the garuda and how incompletely …

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

When stripped of its many embellishments this novel is essentially about a beast let loose and an unlikely group of characters that help each other conquer the beast and save the day. In terms of genres this is much more a fantasy than science fiction and only barely steam punk, so steampunk/sci-fi fans might be disappointed by the setting.

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

China Miéville is a fantastic writer (literally, as well as figuratively) and I loved The City And The City in particular. This book however felt as if it was trying to do too much at once, and the result is a bit confusing. Miéville also clearly does not believe in happy endings; almost all the books I've read include a character (or more than one) coming to a sad ending that could, if the author have wanted, been written much more happily. This book's no exception and the end of some of the characters is fairly depressing. So... torn between four stars, for the amazing writing and imaginative setting, and three stars because it was just not an enjoyable or happy book in many ways.

New Crobuzon is a strange, mixed, alien city with many things left unexplained. A mix of "normal" humans and other races all live here together …

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Often strange for the sake of being strange. Description was heavy--I liked the "lived-in" nature of the city and the fantastic races were interesting for the first 150 pages. I skipped a large section of the book because I was tired of the of the setting by page 350 and just wanted to see how the plot was resolved.

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I only read the excerpt. I enjoyed the language especially in the prologue ... but it's not the kind of story I am currently looking for. Aliens with human bodies and bugs as heads, just a little too strange for an easy read. Interestingly, the city felt a lot like Bangkok in The Windup Girl - and I had a hard time finishing that.

(Also I have The City and The City and a recommendation from Writing Excuses still in the queue and that premise sounds so much more interesting. So maybe another time.)

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Originally posted at Full of Words.

After reading Perdido Street Station, I can't decide what China Miéville loves more: feverish world-building or the sheer impenetrability of his prose, and I say that as someone who (occasionally) enjoyed the book. It took me a good six months to make it through that dense little tome, mostly because I only managed to read it in 30-50 page chunks about once or twice a month, and I have to admit that in the end I only finished out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

This was actually my second attempt at Perdido Street Station. I first bought it in 2003 and only made it about 50 pages in before putting it down for more than a decade. This time around, I gave it a bit more persistence, but it was never an easy book to pick up. Each of those 30-page sessions was hard-fought over …

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Perdido Street Station is bustling with life. Imagine a book as a sandwich filled with all sorts of juicy and shiny insects. These insects are intriguing, they look good, they revolt and arouse your curiosity at the same time. I am reminded of the first and only time I ate an insect, it was a beetle, an Asiatic rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros). I don't know why I mentioned that. The point is like my tasting of the beetle, it is nice to subject one's self to new and somewhat harmless experiences every now and then. It is a good thing to appreciate and to try to understand alien things.

The book is gothic, it is brutal, it is very very weird. I slogged through this book about seventy-percent in, because it somehow got boring for me. Lots of geography to take in. Descriptions of streets, roofs, rivers, buildings, architecture. Lots …

Review of 'Perdido Street Station' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Takes a little while to really good going, as Mieville starts out by introducing you to the world he is creating; a world of steam and clockwork-powered machinery, and biological hybrids. After introducing the world and the initial problem (how to restore flight to a wingless birdman), the story staggers to a crawl, as Mieville details the research and experimentation of the protagonist. I've often seen Mieville compared to Neal Stephenson, but this research-laden stretch of the novel really highlights the difference between the authors. Mieville is a really good author, but his attachment to formal prose and detailed descriptions makes the exposition and information-gathering sections of his work much less enjoyable than the similar portions of Stephenson's work. I've never been bored reading Stephenson write about the calculus, philosophy, or MMORPGs, but I found myself losing interest in reading about crisis theory in this novel.

Fortunately, Mieville does move …

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Subjects

  • Strangers
  • Dystopias
  • Dissenters
  • City and town life
  • Fiction
  • New Weird
  • Fantasy
  • Science-Fiction
  • Horror
  • Urban Fantasy