Perdido Street Station

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Summary: Perdido Street Station
Review: Humans, non-humans and robotic constructs, drug dealers, artists and interdimensional beings, must deal with the descent of deadly slake-moths upon the dark metropolis of New Crobuzon.

Mieville writes well on the sentence level, with a dark and lush tone, though sometimes slipping into "telling". His characters are original and vivid, and he seems to have the quality of caring about casualties; one doesn't get the feeling that there are expendable people in his world, which I like. The plot here is basically Foolish Science Unleashes Terrible Monsters, but it's complex and interesting. It gets a little too long at times, and there's one huge deus (or maybe "mantis-guy") ex machina, but overall it works very well and the multiple threads all resolve intelligently. The monsters, the moths, are terrifying, but at the same time I felt a lot of sympathy for them; really, they're just creatures trying to survive.

As in The Scar, Mieville's world of Bas-Lag is the star here, and there are times when the sheer exuberance of his worldbuilding seemed to me to get away from him a bit. I think some readers are going to get lost in the layers of detail, and some people's powers of disbelief-suspension will be overtaxed (I had trouble with the khepri). Strangely for an author who was a doctoral candidate in economics and probably has his degree by now, he doesn't give much indication of how New Crobuzon really works on a practical level. But these are quibbles: it's an outstanding book and I highly recommend it.

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Summary: I'm obviously not the intended audience
Review: Yet another urban grunge fantasy. Been there, done that. Yet more wierd aliens and hybrid people, ALL of which think and behave EXACTLY like ordinary humans, so what is the point? The highest technology is steam engines, yet we are expected to believe they have powered flight and the medical ability to graft absolutely anything onto the body. Sorry, I couldn't buy into it. Maybe I am just burned out on fantasy science fiction, although I had no trouble recently re-reading Lord of the Rings and loving it.

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Summary: Wonderfully strange, beautifully crafted
Review: I just finished reading this book about an hour ago. It was quite an experience. Miéville has masterfully created the believable, compelling city of New Crobuzon out of improbable and bizarre components. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the book was simply relishing the feeling of being some place so very strange.

But it's not all just window dressing. The characters and their interactions are up to the challenge that the setting presents. The plot is beautifully paced, rushing along like a freight train during the more adrenaline-filled passages, then "lounging aggressively" (in Miéville-speak) when it's time to look around and enjoy the sights of the city.

Here are a few examples of Miéville's extraordinary wordcraft:

"They avoided catching the eyes of the men and women who lounged aggressively on street corners."

"One of the speaking tubes on the mayor's desk thumped. He raised his eyebrows as he unplugged it.
'Davinia?' he answered. His voice was a masterpiece of insinuation. In one word he told his secretary that he was surprised to have her interrupt him against his instructions, but that his trust in her was great, and he was quite sure she had and excellent reasons for disobeying, which she had better tell him immediately."

"The night air was thick with noise. The challenges, the shouts, the invitations and temptations and dares sounded around the laughing party like bursting balloons. Gasjets, mixed with select chymicals, burnt red, green, blue and canary yellow. ... Gonophs and cutpurses slipped predatory through the crowds like fish through weeds. Indignant roars and violent cries sounded in their wake."

Make no mistake: New Crobuzon is a raucous, bawdy, sometimes seedy place -- but it is absolutely lush with a diversity of ideas which are a pleasure to absorb.

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Summary: One of the best books I've read in several years . . .
Review: Not just best steam punk. Not just best fantasy. Just a fantastic novel. I was gripped from the beginning and Mieville didn't let go. The craftsmanship, the grasp of language, the complexity, the vision, the insight into characters was unexpected and breathtaking. I will certainly be giving lots of copies to people for Christmas . . .

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Summary: When caterpillars go bad...
Review: This book took a while to grab my attention. At first it seemed interesting enough but seemed to be too quirky for its own good, a little too much "look how crazy this city is!". But once the nasty caterpillar showed up and the cleaning robot began to act suspiciously, I was hooked. Excellent ambience and atmosphere, a weirdly consistent world, and some good humor mixed with scenes horrific but occasionally beautiful.

Very good characters both high and low, though none of them were puritans. In this sense reminded me of Trainspotting, where the writer makes you care about characters who are essentially low lifes. Must be a Brit writer thing.

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Summary: Very effective writing indeed
Review: Mr. Mieville is a very fine writer. This book is strong and a very good read -- until one gets to the end. God bless him, Mr. Mieville must have been going crazy to finish the book and his degree at the same time! The only rough spot is at the end. Other than that, it is still a pretty good read.

I only hope that Mr. Mieville improves the means by which his writing takes shape; some things take time and endings are just as important as anything else. Anything less than this effort is not going to be received well by many people.

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Summary: Yes, it really is as good as you've heard.
Review: China Mieville, Perdido Street Station (Del Rey, 2000)

Mieville has created a monster with this novel, a beautifully dystopian science fiction setting quite unlike any other I've ever encountered. The world of New Crobuzon is populated by many strange and exotic races (humans among them, of course), and it radiates outwards from the train station of the title, constantly expanding, sprawling out into the countryside from beneath the ribs of some giant, long-extinct creature.

To go into the plot at all would require a number of spoilers, as it twists and turns its way through this gargantuan masterpiece and spawns new threads on a fairly constant basis. But the novel begins and ends with two characters: Isaac, a brilliant, somewhat mad, scientist who keeps himself in equipment by contracting to (and stealing from) the university he left a decade before, and Yagharek, a garuda (woughly, a bird-man) from the Cymek desert, thousands of miles away. Yagharek comes to Isaac in disgrace, having had his wings stripped from him for crimes committed in his own country, and asks Isaac to find some method of getting him to fly again. Now if that were the whole novel, it would probably be somewhat boring (though Mieville can write like a big dog, and could probably have pulled it off). But there is much more to it, pulling in multiple levels of drawing-room drama, automatons that think for themselves, some very nasty beasts, New Crobuzonian history, and much more.

Mieville handles the whole thing with the most deft of hands, and never allows the book to get away from him. His attention to detail is stunning, especially in a twentysomething writer who's onto just his second novel. No threads are left untied, and in some situations where he has a choice of knots, he never takes the emotionally or intellectually easy way out, giving the book a sense of moral and ethical rightness that's lacking in most modern fiction.

A wonderful book that will easily make my ten best reads this year. *****

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Summary: Very impressive
Review: Reading this book stunned me. On the most visceral level, Perdido took me to another world, where magic has been quantified, theorized and objectived to an almost scientific level; where wondrous creatures walk the streets unnoticed, as there is almost no line between the bizarre and the mundane; and where a wingless bird-man attempts to regain his flight. Mieville's writing is such that I could nearly smell the odors of the city, and feel the writhing of its people.

The protagonist is most likely Grimnebulin, but on a different level, could be thought to be the setting, the massive city-state of New Crobuzon. Grimnebulin attempts to give the bird-man back his flight, and in studying the flights of various creatures, unwittingly unleashes a horde of terrifying moth-creatuers on the city. The attempts of both the city militia and Grimnebulin himself to stop these creatures provide most of the meat of the plot. But, it is in the small details in the cracks of the plot that prove the most satisfying.

Perdido crosses just about every genre there is. Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, Mystery, Steampunk, etc., but works best as a Fantasy novel. I read this immediately after Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series and enjoyed it immensely.

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Summary: Rubbish
Review: But I blame myself. Expect plenty of surrealist nonsense sprinkled within the mediocre prose. The first pages are indicative of this. Wholly unimpressive.

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Summary: Take me to Perdido Street!
Review: Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Seeing the name made me think of Herman Melville and I was curious. Seeing that he (China) was not indeed a "Melville" and all the awards this book won, made me take a closer look. The other reviews were interesting also, either some loved it or hated it. I was not disappointed and neither will you. The story takes place on a future Earth anaolg called Bas-Lag in the city of New Crobuzon, (which is an amalgam of London, Manilla, Bombay, New York and any ther cosmopolitan center.) Where our hero, (Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin) let's loose a pandora's box of problems provides an excellent allegory to today's human condition. Though long at times you are rewarded with a thought provoking work that spans broad spectrums of sentiency and introduces new paradigms in the genre of Science Fiction. The characters are well drawn and memorable. The story just gets stranger and more "out there" as you go on to find out what happens in the end. One of my favorite characters is Jack Half a Prayer. I'll never look at winged creatures the same again. A must purchase.