Rating: 
Summary: Breath of Fresh Air
Review: Unique setting, intriguing characters, compelling plot. The whole novel vibrates with tiny details that make the world bubble over with reality--however fictional--without distracting from the plot. I could not put it down.The descriptions and plot were slightly clunky at times, but the richness of the world (breezingly hinted at) only added to its complexity and subtle originality. This is not the usual fantasy and had the flavor of "steampunk" but with a terrific twist. I look forward to reading more by this author and have recommended it to almost everyone I know.
Rating: 
Summary: Colorized SF
Review: I had gotten away from SF/Fantasy because of the cliches and banality of the genre, but this one sounded like it wanted to go in new direction, so I gave it a shot. I was impressed with Mieville's prodigious imagination and command of the language, but ultimately this book fell short of its mark. It's still basically genre fiction, ultra-vivid but without anything new to add to that section of the bookstore. Whatever you want to call it - slipstream, goth, etc. - it still creates charicatures rather than characters and plots rather than lives. It's a fun trip - like going to Las Vegas - but leaves you short of a real pilgrimage.
Rating: 
Summary: Extraordinary!!
Review: This book was absolutely facinating from cover to back! The best book I have read in some time!
Rating:
Summary: Different kind of fantasy
Review: As a avid sci-fi/fantasy reader I was unprepared for the imagery evoked by the city the story takes place in. The author certainly can write, images are vivid and lingering, and the characters are believable and well developed. The setting is far from the usual sword and sorcery genre. The denizens of the city have no clear cut lines between good and evil. The city is awash in misery and the characters are all interesting in an unsavaroy and disreputable way. There are times when the story bogs down, but because of the authors writing skill the numerous side trips become a treat. The overall plot is rather simple (basically a hunt for a group of dangerous bats). But because it is narrated with such imaginative eloquence, it was a worthwhile read!
Rating: 
Summary: Perdido Street Station
Review: One of the worst books I have ever read. The combination of a sloppy plot which goes everywhere and Mr Mieville's tendency to ramble on about nothing made reading this book a perverse act of self torture. It takes almost half the book for anything to really start to happen and when it does it is so uninteresting and uninspired you loose interest. It's almost as if he ran out of steam half way through writing it and just slapped anything together to make a deadline. A real disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: A Marvelous Failure
Review: 'Perdido Street Station,' is a troubling book. I'm torn between praise and the knowledge that something went wrong. First the praise: China Mieville is a monstrously inventive writer. His story's locale, New Crobuzon, a city built under the bones of some huge animal, is an urban nightmare. If I could place it in reality it would be some huge and corrupt 3d world metropolis where anarchy rules, and the city functions by a somewhat malign grace. New Crobuzon is place where beauty is hard-won, and where most relationships are built on self-interest rather than affection. Mr. Mieville does a wonderful job of opening the city to his readers, and the tour is lengthy, and interesting in all its sordidness. His characters would be as at home on Desolation Row as anywhere. They are broken, corrupt, wounded, disfigured, and damaged as much in love as in selfishness. They are drawn from mythology ' pop, and ancient. The most human of the characters are the least interesting ' and they form the pop mythology as well as the first signs of trouble in execution. We are given the brilliant but disaffected scientist, the struggling artist, the revolutionary journalist, and the criminal with a code none of whom live up to the grandeur of the ancients or the villians. The Weaver, a spider who weaves and mends the web of reality is a wondrous creation, the Ambassador from Hell who is a frightening as the place he represents, and the vampire moths who are central to the action and rate with the worst vampires of literature are much more memorable than the heroes of this story. Except for Garuda (a fallen angel of sorts) the bad guys get the best of it. The good guys are clever, artistic, and brave, but they're really no match for the evil they face, and I suspect they succeed only because the author wants them to ' not because they deserve the victory. More trouble is that Mr. Mieville tends to invention for its own sake. His story rips along and then gets bogged in its own flights. It is a huge leap for an author to claim the discovery of a unified theory, and it's a huge failure to loose clarity in an explanation that stops the plot and ultimately explains little. The final bit that stops me from moving this book to 4 stars is the transformation of Garuda ' a noble and broken character who the author has pulling up his socks and moving into the future in a most unconvincing way. Given all this, 'Perdido Street Station' is a marvelous failure and a fascinating read. I was going to give my copy away but decided to hang onto it for a possible re-reading
Rating:
Summary: A Dazzling Milieu
Review: If you are looking for the unusual, the bizarre, for unforgettable images, this is the book to get. Mieville's city of New Crobuzon is a phantasmagorical tapestry of weirdly modified humans, from cactus to bird to frog to ant-men, a technology that is an equally crazy quilt of steam power, magic, electric-powered clockwork for heightened psi-powers, a political structure that could come straight from Stalin's Russia complete with deals with an all-too-real Satan and a world-thread artist spider known simply as the Weaver, a trash-heap conscious computer, and intimations of a history and wider world that is even more fantastic. Beyond the incredible scenery is an almost Victorian moralistic plot, where the protagonist is forced to deal with the consequences of his innocent-seeming research into methods of restoring flight to a criminal garuda bird-man. His fight against the slake-moths that were inadvertently freed as a result of one of his investigations forms the main story line, and slowly builds to an (almost) exciting story line. However... Mieville's style is very densely descriptive. In the beginning of the book, this is excellent, as it paints a very dark, depressive, intimate picture of the city and its inhabitants. As the plot unfolds and becomes more pressing, though, this same style and repeated images become an obstacle to getting the story told. At the very moments when tension has been raised to high levels, we step out for two to three pages at a time for more descriptions, effectively destroying the pacing of the story. I think this book could have been considerably improved by some heavy cutting of this material in the latter stages of the book. There are places where the plot could have been tightened. At multiple points, the Weaver saves our hero from impossible situations, an effective deus-ex-machina device as the Weaver can apparently do almost anything (except defeat the slake-moths single-handed). Although this is consistent with Victorian-era plotting, it really doesn't belong in a modern novel. Thematically the book also falls somewhat flat, with overly simplistic value/action/consequence matings, almost reminiscent of something out of Dickens. A brilliant, off-beat, dazzling setting; an exciting adventure tale; but marred by too many words and too little depth.
Rating:
Summary: Dickens???
Review: Ultra-hip pretentious trash. trendy. postmodern. Touted by sloppy sci-fi fan boys trying to prove their real writers & English intellectual tabloids trying to prove their chick and with it. Bret Easton Ellis morphed into Tony Kushner into Star Trek the Next Generation. Body Piercing. Tattoos. Dope. Transgressing the Boundaries. Glitzy Garbage. Tinsel. For illiterates with sexual hang-up's. More substance in a copy of Details magazine. Reads like Salon.com's readers profiles. Ewwwwwwww.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome fantasy!
Review: What I really liked about this book is the sheer imagination that the author generously shares with the reader. Lots of interesting ideas about the future, too. A "must read" for anyone looking for something a little wild.
Rating:
Summary: Beauty. Horror. Innocence. Perfection.
Review: There is only so much that can be said about a book of this scope, with this kind of magnificent and enthralling sweep. The breadth of imagination here is absolutely boundless, from the finer points of Chymistry to the dreamfrothbabbling of The Weaver. The characters are beautiful and tortured creatures, walkers at the edges of a vast city of infinite malice and compassion, and the narrative itself is a thread deeply woven and rewoven that, once it has entangled you the reader, will not release you until you have reached the barbed little hook at its end. A steampunk masterpiece, the bulkhead of an emerging genre, scion of a new age of fiction, and a damn good read.
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