Rating: 
Summary: Words fail to describe...
Review: Forgive the emotional rantings that have been inspired by this book. I have just finished
reading this story and I am now fumbling for a respite, for succor, for breath. This novel
easily trancends description or categorization, flying high into some other-aether that will
make your head spin in its heady emotional soup. Synopisis will do this book no justice,
and it will do the potential reader no good. I loved this book. However, I also must say
that it has one of the most unsatisfying endings in the history of all literature. Without
going into any details, I found myself reading too quickly, flitting back and forth,
skipping words, fearful of the last pages as it rushed head long, desperate for the lives and
happiness of the characters within. This is not a Hollywood ending. It was not meant to
be. This is not an ending you will hope or wish for, but like life it is real, unavoidable,
unapealing, and unforseen. The book lives and breaths like nothing else that I have ever
read. The book becomes an enticing, seductive loving friend and its death is a sad one,
like the death of a loved one, which cannot ever be justified. This is a literary ending to a
monumental literary achievment that is not a book for everyone. The city of New
Crobuzon featured within, its many streets and alleys would swollow Harry Potter alive,
and you too, as it does many of the characters within. There is victory, but it is bitter
sweet. The book is the emotional equivelent to a horribly burned child which demands
your love and attention, but can never be beautiful again in the traditional sense. There is
nothing traditional about this book. The characters have not reached an end, but continue
to strive, fumbling for justice, for direction, for life. Just like you and me, they live on
after the final page is turned, they still struggle to make it. Its worth it. Take the journey
with Isaac, Lin, Derkhan, Lemeul, Motley, Slake-Moths, a Demonic Ambassodor, an
insane Spider-God of aesthetic fate, countless heroes and villains and a bird man that is
torn between its two halves. The book will fly, and soul will sore.... for a little while. The last mispelling is deliberate, as for the others, my apologies to the proofreading types.
Rating: 
Summary: This one is as good as you've heard it is
Review: I've been disappointed a few times by recent SF novels that have been touted as "the best thing since" [insert your favorite SF master here]. I'm very, very happy to say that this one lives up to its promotion. China Mieville is a powerful writer and this is a powerful book.The characters are fascinating. Isaac and Lin, for example, are not your ordinary couple (he's human and she's khepri; he's an academic maverick and she's an artist who has rebelled against her hive and moeity). And the plot gets rolling with a visit from an even more remarkable being: Yagharek, a garuda whose current full name is Too Too Abstract Individual Yagharek Not To Be Respected and who has had his wings clipped because he has forgotten that being a concrete individual requires a certain type of social matrix (take _that_, Ayn Rand!). The culture is just as fascinating, especially the interspecies stuff. You'll be horrified by the treatment of the Remades (one of Mieville's greatest strengths is his keen sense of how amazingly skillful and imaginative human beings can be at inflicting misery on one another). And if you're anything like me, you'll find yourself tempted to worship Palgolak, a god of knowledge whose sole commandment is to read voraciously for the sake of learning. But the real star of the novel isn't any of the characters. It's the city itself -- New Crobuzon, which surely ranks among the most fully realized cities in all of SF. It's certainly not any city on earth (and the city it _mainly_ isn't is London). Mieville brings it to teeming, roiling, seamy, stinking life with the sheer power of his account. The plot meanders a bit, the action is sometimes slow, but you won't care, because this city is _alive_ and you are _there_. This novel is every bit as good as you've heard it is. Along with Richard Morgan's stunning debut _Altered Carbon_, it leaped quickly to the top of my shortlist of the best new SF I've read in the last decade.
Rating:
Summary: Best Steampunk Fantasy Novel Since Gibson's and Sterling's
Review: I was a skeptic when I heard about the literary hoopla surrounding "Perdido Street Station", but this is unquestionably one novel worthy of all the praise it has garnered. Without a doubt it is the best steampunk science fiction novel (though here I regard it as steampunk fantasy) since William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's magnificient collaborative effort "The Difference Engine". China Mieville comes quite close in matching their lyrical literary style, but then he has no peer in conjuring such a fantasmagorical landscape as the blighted urban setting of New Crobuzon. Here he offers us a spellbinding epic regarding a maverick scientist's efforts in aiding a birdman regain his ability to fly. But this splendid tale is not truly the heart of Mieville's intricately woven plot. At its core "Perdido Street Station" is a dark urban fantasy with the city of New Crobuzon as its leading protagonist; a city threatened by a small group of malevolent mind-sucking creatures. Regrettably, not all of the loose ends in Mieville's tale are tied neatly, though the story ends unexpectedly, with the fates of the scientist and his closest companions not fully resolved. Still, this is a splendid literary rollercoaster ride that I strongly recommend to those who enjoy spellbinding lyrical prose created by a young writer destined to become one of the 21st Century's foremost practitioners of science fiction and fantasy.
Rating:
Summary: absolutely fascinating
Review: 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, artificial intelligence, 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.
Rating:
Summary: Unique combination
Review: This is one of the most unusual books I have ever read. It is also one of the few I will read a second time. It doesn't really fit any one genre. It's Science Fiction, Horror, some Mystery with a few grains of some others thrown in. There were many scenes that were so well written that I could not stop in the middle of them and that I reread right away because of the images they invoked.
Rating: 
Summary: Inventive, but Hard to Read
Review: On the plus side, the world of New Crobuzon is incredibly rich and detailed, and the plot was interesting. I'd give it 5-stars for creativity. On the down side, I found the main characters' actions unsympathetic and their mannered speech increasingly annoying. They were probably written that way-- not so much "heroes" as people plunked into a situation-- but the book was too long for me to not really like the characters, even if the world they lived in was very cool, and I had to force myself to finish it.
Rating:
Summary: Good story, a lot of conceit
Review: Good story.
I took away points for the following flaws: 1. Too much unnecessary description! I found myself skimming pages and pages of it, hoping I wasn't missing anything important to the story (I wasn't). Entire chunks of this book read like an exercise in creative writing -- interesting to the writer, but not to the reader. 2. Overuse of foul language, which after a certain point does nothing to advance characterization, setting or plot. I suppose the author intends to impress us with his sophisticated "badness." I find it annoying and adolescent. 3. By far this book's worst flaw is in the characterization of the protagonist. Isaac is a santimonious hypocrite. He abandons friends to their death. He commits a shoking, atrocious act in the episode involving Andrej, though the author tries to mitigate the evil here by assuring us that Andrej was dying anyway. (Choice-theft, anyone?) Then, when it suits him, Isaac is Mr. Holier-Than-Thou. He discovers that a friend is guilty of having commited a certain crime in the past, and so he refuses to help him further. Never mind that this friend paid the price for his crime, was always loyal to Isaac and put his life on the line for him, and so redeemed himself... Never mind all that. It is convenient at the end of the book for Isaac to find an excuse to skip town. Isaac's "moral outrage" is a joke! As a female reader, I can't help but wonder if this isn't just a case of a male author using a male character to express a bit of politically correct, pro-feminist moral outrage, even though it doesn't ring true. If so, this is pure conceit. However, in spite of all the annoying things (artistically, politically, morally) that came along with this book as extra baggage, the story itself held my interest to the end. And that's saying a lot, because I frequently abandon books I find boring.
Rating: 
Summary: Flapdoodle Story/Completely Overhyped BS
Review: 1000 of 99 people found the following review helpful: Apparently I am one of the few detractors of this novel, as I prefer an enrapturing story to tricksy language and weirdness(understatement). Nothing of interest happens in the novel: slake moths break loose to devour the minds of people, a crime boss coming off early as interesting is recharacterized as a complete moron later in the novel, an evil and sentient robot forms out of a junk heap, etc. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a good story, good characters, or a good plot. For those in need of a real fantasy series, try out
George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. This work of genius contains no flowery passages delving into pseudo-philosophical ideas, (Yagharek's point of view), and keeps it real.
Rating:
Summary: Tantalizing, slow, rich, and ... Too easy to put down.
Review: I adored the savory and creative juices which flow through the pages. There is a richness here, of imagination and description. Alleys felt stinky and frightening, creatures opened up in 3D in my mind. But the story just didn't move enough for me. I yearned for more suspense, more action, and a faster pace. Ultimately, I bogged down and could go no further. This novel had great appeal for me--I'm not much of a "fantasy" genre reader, but this novel has enough urban-American sensibility to feel accesible to me. It's almost "speculative" fiction, as Margaret Atwood calls it. I am deeply intrigued by this introduction to China Mieville, but I can't quite recommend this book to people outside of the traditional fantasy audience.
Rating:
Summary: Is it a story or a picture?
Review: They say a picture is worth a thousand words. China Mieville spends endless thousands of words painting pictures in this novel. Detailed and elaborate descriptive prose is weaved throughout the book, describing in great detail every aspect of New Crobuzon, the city in which the story takes place. And while I admire the great effort Mieville goes to in order to bring the city to vivid life, in the end I felt that Perdido Street Station suffered for it. Momentum built in the story is repeatedly lost when a long descriptive passage is encountered. The focus on the characters and events is often lost, and I found myself feeling as if the prose was an intermission to the story, rather than a part of it. Ultimately, the story and the prose compete with each other so much that I couldn't really gauge whether the story was very good at all. Would I recommend Perdido Street Station? Well, that depends on what kind of writing you like. If you enjoy lots of adjective-laden phrases painting verbal pictures, you'll probably like the way Mieville portrays the environs of his gritty, surreal, bizarre city. If you're looking for a good, entertaining story, you might be disappointed as I was. Perdido Street Station isn't bad - it's just not for everyone.
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