C. Anderson 2008-09-25

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I read this novel after reading another of Mieville's works - Un Lun Dun, which I enjoyed immensely for it's twisted, fantastical plot. However, Perdido Street Station came up a little short for me. The plot of this novel was again, exactly what I expect from Mieville - weird, twisted, grungy and 100% unique. Mieville takes the reader through a fantasy world like nothing you expect and nothing you'll see again. From bizarre races of creatures with woman bodies and beetle heads, to deals with demons and the complete twisting of physics, this plot does not disappoint.

This novel primarily follows the story of a couple in the grips of forbidden love, a human and a member of a beetle-woman race. However, the novel is not a love story. As the plot progresses, Lin and Isaac are each commissioned for separate projects by two very different and very bizarre clients. Isaac, a scientist, is approached by a member of an avian race who has had his wings cut off in punishment for a mysterious crime. Isaac's task is to devise a way to rehabilitate the flying capabilities of the disfigured outcast. Lin, Isaac's lover and a capable artist, is approached by a grotesquely disfigured, but powerfully influential mutant who asks her to create a secret sculpture of his unnatural form.

The plot of this novel has a new twist every step of the way, from the vivid city life of New Crobuzon to the mind-devouring monsters that Isaac inadvertantly lets loose on the city. Nothing in the story disappoints.

However, my main disappointment in this novel lies in the writing style the author used. While the actual tale is edge-of-your-seat enthralling, Mieville often draws out the mundane until I was actually falling asleep reading. I felt as though there were paragraphs, pages, even entire chapters that droned on in heavy descriptions of things that were not essential to the plot. Additionally, Mieville often uses several pages reiterating one central idea that he could have gotten across with a few sentences. No one wants to read the same sentence thirty times in a row, simply written in a slightly different fashion. Now, I won't argue that setting isn't important, but Mieville overdoes it with the lengthy, heavy descriptions. Sometimes for an entire chapter, he spends his words on basically nothing at all, a time in which the plot comes to a standstill while we read tediously about the layout of Isaac's workshop of the sounds and smells of the city. Important, yes. But in moderation.

Overall, this book was worth it to me. For the extra hundred or so pages the author uses to discuss nothing at all, the gripping plot and complete immersion in a fantasy world is worth the read. For fans of grungey science fiction and R-rated plots, this book is worth picking up.

F. W. Porras 2008-08-01

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For the past 30 years or so, the fantasy genre has, with the exception of a few great works from a few great authors, mired itself in a situation where it has become unimaginative and unoriginal where works have become practically clones of each other. In recent years though, a few inspired souls have gradually tried to take the genre out of its familiar and commercially safe elements hoping to take fantasy back to an environment when it was wide-open in terms of storyline, setting, characterizations, etc., where every other author wasn't trying to be the Second Coming of J.R.R. Tolkien. Daring and creative authors have emerged who have taken their work away from the accepted formulaic approach and looked for inspirations outside of the established works of the genre, instead of keeping on repeating its own successes. Perdido Street Station takes the reader in a totally different world from that of your typical fantasy fare.

China Mielville, who describes his work as "weird fiction" and influenced by early fantasy authors like H.P. Lovecraft and Mervyn Peake, deliberately stayed away from Tolkienesque formulas in order create his work. He incorporated fantasy, science fiction, horror, and steampunk to create this highly imaginative, complex and downright amazing masterpiece that breaks the established boundaries taking the genre to heights unexplored for a very long time.

Perdido Street Station may be a little difficult for some to read as the story takes time and requires focus. He takes the reader into a tour of New Crobuzon and explores a city in decay through some rich and descriptive passages that define the cities structures, societies, creeds, history and its various races and creatures. In doing so, he also explores a little on themes like, crime, and racial intolerance, government control, poverty, commercialism, freedom of expression, drugs, and religious societies. But as one takes the time to immerse in the writing of Mielville, one is taken to a city that is amazing at the same time dark. It is dark, vile, dirty, ragged, ill, decaying but also mesmerizing and amazing, and one which seems to impose itself on its inhabitants. No other city has come this alive with character in the pages of fiction since the establishment of Gotham City.

Such is the way the author writes. Each major character is well-rounded and fully dimensional. They have strengths and they have faults. The main character isn't a handsome and cool physical specimen. He is an overweight person, who makes love to an insect and probably caused the death of one of his friends. He will also make morally ambiguous decisions.

And through him, Mielville makes his readers think about the ethics of some issues. In the story, Isaac makes two decisions that could be subjects of a great moral debate about what is right and what is wrong. Does the end justify the means? How much is one life worth? Do our moral obligations supersede our morality?

And herein lies the reason why Perdido Street Station is a masterpiece. It is a manifestation of the wonderful imagination of a great mind. It dares to break standards and pushes and challenges its peers to reach for new heights in a genre that supposedly has very few limitations. It has a wonderful story and characters, even the non-humanoid types, feel down-to-earth-real that readers can sympathize with them. And most of all, it makes one think about ourselves as human beings.

Akachei 2008-07-26

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Perdido Street Station is a dense book, crowded and alive like the city of New Crobuzon where it's set. Not necessarily in plotting - while Mieville sets up a large number of plot threads, once that is done they coalesce rapidly, leaving a large part of the book with a straightforward narrative. But the writing and imagery bring you into the city itself, the lives of the inhabitants and creatures; it's a remarkable bit of writing, though perhaps not the easiest book to read.

New Crobuzon is perhaps the most important part of the book, a putrid, jumbled city built around a river. Mievelle has been placed as part of the "New Weird" movement in science fiction, and the city is an amalgam of races and species, in ghettos and mixed districts, most of the city wretchedly poor. The species are separate from both standard fantasy and logic, wrapped up in and often living on the odd magic of the world. There's massive inventiveness here, but nothing out of place.

The main thrust of the book follows Isaac Grimnebulin, a talented but unreliable outcast scientist, and his researches sparked by a request from the the half-man, half-bird Yagharek. The broader cast gets quite large, but never weighs down the novel unnecessarily, although a few later minor characters never fully mesh. Once the plot lands on the straight narrative later on, there are a few asides and passages that could - and perhaps should - have been cut from this long book. But the slow pacing and dense prose fit to a broad extent the book's world itself, a bustling, grimy, fascinating city - and book.

Frederick Taylor-Hochberg 2008-07-18

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SUMMARY: No one can fault Miéville for a lack of imagination; but a jumble of cool ideas does not save a book hampered by glacial pacing and major style problems.

The sprawling, dilapidated city of New Crobuzon is the main attraction of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, and it is a place where anything goes: there are golems made out of trash, and immensely powerful dimension-traversing giant spiders (which speak in frenzied, delirious poetry), and moths with prismatic wings that eat brains, and cactus people, which need no explanation. In this mad mishmash of a world, which draws on steampunk and the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, science and magic coexist, and the border between them is highly pliable. In one scene, for example, a repairman feeds a mere handful of punched cards into a robotic construct, and suddenly the machine is sentient.


Isaac dan der Grimnebulin is a quirky, brilliant scientist who lives in the midst of this chaotic, imaginative milieu. He studies Crisis Theory, which involves releasing immense amounts of energy from the disorder bottled up in everyday objects. He has a girlfriend named Lin, a moderately successful artist who has the body of a human and the head of a scarab. One day, a mysterious bird-man with amputated wings arrives at Isaac's lab and offers Isaac an enormous amount of money to restore his lost power of flight. At the same time, Lin gets a commission from an inhuman mobster to sculpt his (its?) likeness. These two plotlines come together when a cocoon in Isaac's lab hatches and a brain-eating moth emerges to terrorize the city. Isaac, Lin, and the bird-man Yagharek chase after it, and in the process discover a conspiracy involving the mobster and the city's corrupt government.


This intricate premise, and Miéville's vivid descriptions of New Crobuzon and its otherworldly inhabitants, captivated me for the first hundred pages. But after a while my excitement petered out. Like a relentless, sadistic tour guide, Miéville drags us through page after page of un-necessary description of New Crobuzon, each one repetitively emphasizing just how dirty and slimy and ugly and monstrous the city is (very), without really adding anything new or interesting. These eclipse the story, and the reader is left too fatigued to care about the fates of the characters. The drawn-out, clunky action scenes are a microcosm of this poor pacing; instead of making me feel a sense of urgency and desperation and speed, I imagined everyone moving through pudding. In the end I was left wondering why this book trickled on for seven hundred pages, and why Peter Lavery (the editor, whom Miéville thanks in the book's acknowledgements) didn't lop off at least two hundred of them. There's a difference between world-building and constantly re-affirming that your world is grimy and gross and oozing; Miéville seems unaware of this.


The long asides about New Crobuzon would be more readable were it not for Miéville's pretentious, wordy prose style; at first it is tolerable, but after a while it becomes grating. Miéville never fails to choose a big word when a small one will suffice. Among the worst offenders are "quintumvirate" and "agglutination." He once describes a tunnel as having a "subversive topography;" I submit that this is silly. Adverbs also abound atrociously, said the critic critically. This example, in particular, made me cringe: "Tentatively, carefully, nervously, Ben reached out with Umma Balsum's hands towards Derkhan." The dialogue is similarly manhandled: all of the characters seem to shout dramatically all the time, and swear far more than necessary.


Miéville also decides that spelling words wrong makes them more interesting: for example, the water-shaping magic of the vodyanoi (these are water spirits; they can be found in the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, or in Russian folklore) is called "watercraeft." This is a goofy and amateurish way to build a world. I should know, because I used to do it when I was writing goofy and amateurish fantasy at fifteen.

Miéville considers himself a writer of "weird fiction," which borrows elements from horror and science fiction, and attempts to distance itself from the clichés of fantasy. In interviews, he affirms this by yelling at Tolkien and the Tolkienesque tradition. He calls Tolkien the "wen on the arse of fantasy literature" and decries his "cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity." But Miéville himself isn't much better. In Perdido Street Station, the division between good and evil is stark and obvious: there's the plucky rogue scientist who's on a mission to save the city against the sinister, totalitarian government that is so evil that it (in what is admittedly a pretty fun and memorable scene) literally consorts with the denizens of Hell.


Perdido Street Station isn't a horrible book, but it's overrated and disappointing; the comparisons to Neil Stephenson and Kafka on the dust jacket are unforgivable. There are scores of compelling ideas and an interesting premise but Miéville's overblown prose and tedious pacing squander them. Those looking to read original, anti-Tolkienian fantasy should pick up Gormenghast (which heavily influenced Miéville) instead.

J. Kline 2008-06-06

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This book is interesting, at first. There is a strange new world, richly visualized and described. There are unusual characters, about whom the reader learns gradually instead of having everything spelled out. But it soon starts to feel like the author was making it up as he went along. And it could definitely have used a stronger hand in the editing process. It's clear the author never had an idea he didn't like and didn't feel obliged to cram into the story. Every new character is cooler and more outrageous than the last, and they only stay on the stage for a moment before being displaced by whatever new idea struck the writers fancy.

By the end, fatigue sets in, and it became a chore to finish the book. And I sort of wish I hadn't, as it had a terrible ending, with the big 'reveal' of one of the main characters making no sense, and the reaction of the protagonist being completely out of character.