Rating: 
Summary: yes but...
Review: Its an excellent piece of work that pushes your imagination into overdrive but don't expect a happy ending.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Imagination
Review: New Crobuzon is London on LSD, with people living in the bones of a great beast and pockets of unhumanity who take on nearly every form that can be imagined. In the middle of New Crobuzon is a love story-- an eccentric human ex-professor named Isaac in the midst of a very transgressive affair with the Khepri artist Lin. Khepri women look like oddly colored humand, with the exception of their heads, which are the bodies of giant beetles. Khepri create art by chewing and spitting colored material to form sculpture. Isaac begins an experiment to put the wings back on a creature who had been punished by having its wings removed, and in the process he unintentionally releases a horror called Slake-Moths on the world. Lin and Isaac must somehow find a way to make things right before the Slake-Moths bring New Crobuzon crashing down around them. _Perdido Street Station_ is a wonderfully complex novel in its atmosphere and detail. Certainly it's one of the best efforts I've read in books that try to detail a decadent future after centuries of the kinds of changes that science can now enact on the world-- it's a book of transformations and the effort for transformed beings to live in the same space. It weaves elements of fantasy with science fiction and ends up in a genre space uniquely its own. Unfortunately, the story is not up to the world around it. While the 800+ pages support this magnificent world, the plot points often seem strangely hackneyed, with pointless action scenes that go on and on and a story that always seems halfway ready to emerge. I cared about the action far less than I cared about the world around it-- not a good thing in a novel. Still, a book of tremendous strength and I will carefully follow this author in the future.
Rating: 
Summary: Fabulous Nightmares
Review: Not since Clive Barker's Books of Blood and Dan Simmons' original Hyperion has the fantasy genre received a body blow like Perido Street Station. This is a once in a decade, keep the lamp on all night, knock your socks off tome of fabulous nightmares, vividly realized in some of the most visceral and musical prose the genre has ever seen. King Rat, Mieville's first novel, was remarkably well-written but in the end underwhelming, its slim story adding up to less than the sum of its particular settings, its hipper than thou drum & bass affectations distracting from the genuine cleverness of the conceit. Perdido Street Station is another creature entirely -- the mythical, monstrous alterna-London of New Crobuzon so alarmingly tactile and absurdly over-detailed that it seems less a fiction than a place once visited in your darkest dreams, an essential and seething pit of subconscious import. The creation of New Crobuzon and its wildly conflicted and colorful inhabitants would be achievement enough for most books, but no sooner are we introduced to them when Mieville takes off on an unprecented riot of macrabre invention. Like a magician the author reaches into his hat and out comes Mr. Motley, the Torque experiments, the Ambassador of Hell, the Weaver, crisis energy, the handlingers, the Construct Council, they just keep coming, chapter after chapter, and above all the fascinating, terrifying Slake-Moths -- the sexy, scintilating, monster-movie stars of the book. The imaginative achievement of this book is so great, the writing so scarifyingly vivid, the overall affect so wonderously dreamlike, that it seems churlish to complain that down the long 900 page length there isn't much of a story, that the initially intriguing characters vanish behind the garish invention and eventually tiresome action scenes. That the book finally doesn't seem to be about much more than stopping a bunch of monsters. Well, maybe. But what fabulous monsters. This is only Mieville's second book. I can't wait to read what he does next.
Rating:
Summary: Unique and amazing
Review: China Mieville takes you to a world that's not unlike our own except it's populated by more than humans. But that's just the way it is in this world of creatures with human bodies and insect heads, creatures who can manipulate water and bird men. It's a mean ugly world where justice is served by "remaking" criminals by grafting things to their bodies or maiming them in ways for the world to see their crimes.
The story centers around a scientist who has a commision to bring flight back to a mutalated bird man. While this is going on his half human half insect girlfriend has been kidnapped by a "remade" gangster. And all the while the world is being threatened by giant soul sucking bugs that are bred on hallucinagetic drugs.
Only a writer of China Mieville's immagination could concieve of a world like this. Only a writer of his talent could bring this world to life in such a way that you feel this strange land is just the next town over.
I read King Rat and thought it was pretty good so I got Perdido Street Station. Although quite a large book, I finished it in a week. It went where ever I was and reading it took precident over almost anything else including sleep. His new book The Scar is being released the last week of June 2002 and for the first time ever I have pre-ordered a book. I don't need to read reviews on China Mieville, he is a unique voice and his impact on modern fiction should be felt for years to come.
Rating: 
Summary: Perdido Street: Terminal
Review: I'm often surprised at how often I find myself on the other side of popular opinion. If I hear enough good things about a book or a movie or a CD, I will try to experience it with positive expectation. I hope to like it. I want to like it. But too often, it seems, I am the only person who walks away feeling cheated, like the artist has simply played a colossal joke on me and used public opinion to lure me into a trap. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. Whichever it is, I have fallen prey to the lure of China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station". I even helped trap myself, having read the author's "King Rat" and loved it. But Perdido Street is an exploration without discovery, hype without a product, a whack-arsed fantasy for non-linear thinkers. Neither of the main characters' stories intrigued me in the slightest, not that of Isaac, who is tasked with returning flight to an angelic birdman whose wings have been torn from his body, not Lin's story, of an insect-headed artist pressed into sculpting the likeness of a crime-boss. As much as Mieville tries to instill the story with meaning and depth, I was still left wondering what it was all about and why I should care. And to add insult, the author has abandoned the beautiful language of "King Rat" and taken a contemporary tone. This book is too long, too much weirdness for weirdness' sake, too forced.
Rating:
Summary: Absorbing and Breathtaking. a true rollercoaster ride
Review: When I saw that the SF site had awarded this as the Read of 2001, I knew I had to go out and buy it. Perdido Street Station is a sprawling and exciting place which immediatly draws the reader in and captivates you. As the author has said, there are links to Mervyn Peake's, massive gothic setting Gormenghast, and is it quite apparent(not that it is a bad thing). There is that same organic element which featured in Peake's work. New Crobuzon, like Gormenghast is more than a simple setting, it is a living organism.
The story is a fascinating one, I absolutely adored Isaac and found him a trully delightful character to follow. His relationship with Lin was very believable, which is saying something since it is a transspecies. All of the characters however are engaging and will keep you enthralled through out the book. The idea of mind-sucking vampire moths was incrediably different, but truly amazing.
I don't think I can truly give justice to this novel, you simply have to go out and buy it for yourself. I'm positive you will enjoy it if you like fantasy, horror, science fiction or are prepared to give something new and different a go. I cannot wait until his next novel, The Scar is released, another masterpiece!
Rating:
Summary: Warning: Marathon Caffeinated Reading Session Required
Review: This book is so brutally beautiful and well-written that I have a hard time knowing where to start. First of all, if you're a fan of well-constructed fantasy cityscapes, this book is going to be your cup of tea. Every neighborhood within New Crobuzon is alive and teeming with activity; the streets breathe, the skies are alive with flying critters, the rivers are bursting with life, and a frightening surgically-altered murderer stalks the quiet alleyways by night. Colorful descriptions of the buildings, the inhabitants, and how they relate to the areas around them, are fascinating in their own rite - without even getting to any of the plot of the book. I think what I love most about this book is the total lack of sentimentality for its protagonists. Here, just as in real life, good intentions don't necessarily get the job done; random events have very real and negative repercussions on nice people. The plot is positively scintillating and the writing is absolutely among the best I've seen from any fiction writer. Set amid a backdrop of political intrigue, pseudo-science, and crackpot philosophies, a monstrous lifeform is unwittingly released upon the city. In order to stop it and save the city, the cooperation of a disparate group of concerned outlaws, citizens, and other unclassifiable entities is required. Drop everything and fire up the coffee, it's going to be a long night.
Rating:
Summary: morbidly bizarre and complex urban fantasy =excellence
Review: Aside from perdido street station having an engrossing story with incredible characters that you actually start to feel as though you know them its best aspect is itd attention to detail. China Mieville makes you see what he wants you to see with his incredibly detailed tellings of his environments and characters in this story. some people might find that too much detail makes for a boring read and in most cases i agree but in perdido street staion it works in quite the opposite manner. the telling of this story which is trully beutiful and imaginative and thrilling combined with the authors descriptions of the environment that make you feel as if you are there make for a mind blowing and compelling read. perfection.
Rating: 
Summary: Long and gruesome
Review: Te author's imagination and world building here is unique and well constructed. You'll feel like you're there. As mentioned in other reviews here, the setting descriptions are verbose and sometimes take several pages. Much of this could have been trimmed with no adverse effect. The primary conflict doesn't kick in until halfway through the book. Characters pop in and out of the story seemingly at random. The theme of this book could very well be, "Every action has consequences." Indeed, every character's action does have consequences and none of them are very pleasant, despite the character's intentions. Some of these consequences are downright gruesome. Once you make it to the halfway point, these and the well-realized, dark and dirty setting make for a very exciting, yet grim read.
Rating:
Summary: The definition of anti-climactic
Review: A powerful and creative work that will keep you up at night. The first several hundred pages are gripping, entangling the reader in a unique world where technology, magic and military might previal, where creatures blend into new breeds, or are engineered for convenience or punishment. Racism goes beyond skin color. Science is pseudo-science. The story has amazing twists, turns, victories and defeats, but the last fifty pages left me incensed at the abrupt and incomplete nature of the plot. Mieville obviously put forth quite a bit of effort into what would otherwise be genuinely top-notch sci-fi/fantasy, but you have to present a clear conclusion, good bad or indifferent, and this book didn't do it.
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