
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville is a bizarre and captivating tale set in the steampunky city of New Crobuzon. The story follows a brilliant scientist, a half man half bird seeking help, a half bug half woman artist, a renegade journalist, a self-aware robot, and a pack of monstrous moths on a quest for knowledge, justice, and survival. Filled with intricate world-building, weird creatures, and unexpected twists, the book immerses readers in a richly textured, atmospheric read that blurs the lines between fantasy, horror, and steampunk genres.
The narrative delves into the dense and corrupt city of New Crobuzon, where characters must navigate complex social relations and face hard decisions with consequences. Mieville's writing style, described as dense and heavy, paints a vivid picture of the city and its inhabitants, creating a neo-gothic, neo-victorian, and steampunk world. The book is praised for its originality, richly detailed monsters, and the author's ability to handle multiple ideas and themes with brash intelligence and confidence.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include graphic violence, body horror, themes of brutality, and instances of sexual violence.
Has Romance?
The book features a medium level of romance, primarily between Isaac and Lin, exploring their complex relationship amidst the chaos.
From The Publisher:
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none-not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger-and more consuming-by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon-and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .
A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination.
Praise for Perdido Street Station
"[A] phantasmagoric masterpiece . . . The book left me breathless with admiration."-Brian Stableford
"China Miéville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination."-Peter Hamilton
"It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's."-John Clute
Ratings (50)
Incredible (11) | |
Loved It (18) | |
Liked It (11) | |
It Was OK (5) | |
Did Not Like (4) | |
Hated It (1) |
Reader Stats (160):
Read It (52) | |
Currently Reading (2) | |
Want To Read (88) | |
Did Not Finish (5) | |
Not Interested (13) |
4 comment(s)
I'm not entirely sure what I actually have read in this book. It's weird and somewhat blizzard, I was at parts disturbed by it but at the same time so fascinating in a weird way that I had to continue. It gets 5 stars from me as it's a book I won't soon forget and as strange as the reading experience was, it really worked.
Originally posted at
Full of Words.
After reading Perdido Street Station, I can't decide what China Miéville loves more: feverish world-building or the sheer impenetrability of his prose, and I say that as someone who (occasionally) enjoyed the book. It took me a good six months to make it through that dense little tome, mostly because I only managed to read it in 30-50 page chunks about once or twice a month, and I have to admit that in the end I only finished out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
This was actually my second attempt at Perdido Street Station. I first bought it in 2003 and only made it about 50 pages in before putting it down for more than a decade. This time around, I gave it a bit more persistence, but it was never an easy book to pick up. Each of those 30-page sessions was hard-fought over the course of several hours, and I oftentimes found myself reading and re-reading passages just to make sure I'd fully comprehended their contents and meaning. I enjoyed many parts of the book, but I can't help feeling a certain amount of exhaustion and relief after struggling to finish it for so long.
In broad strokes, Perdido Street Station tells the story of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, inventor and disgraced academic, and what happens when a disfigured garuda – a sort of half-man, half-bird creature – named Yagharek comes to his laboratory in New Crobuzon and asks Isaac to help him fly again. Yagharek is flightless, his wings removed as part of a brutal judicial punishment, and he's travelled hundreds if not thousands of miles just to ask Isaac for his help. Yagharek's gold is plentiful and Isaac is in need of a patron, so he soon sets off on a quest to restore the garuda's flight. What Isaac does not know – cannot know – is that he will inadvertently set into motion a series of events that bring only nightmare, catastrophe and death to his city and everyone he knows and loves.
However, before the novel gets to the point where the plot kicks in, Miéville spends several hundred pages on setup, character development and a huge amount of world-building. If one of the characters visits a new neighborhood, Miéville includes a minimum of a few paragraphs describing how it looks, smells, sounds, pulses with life and interacts with the city around it. These passages are oftentimes beautiful, carefully drawn and incredibly dense, but over the course of the 600+ page novel, it becomes hard not to react with impatience when Miéville's attention strays yet again to the architecture of his imagined city.
The idea is, of course, that New Crobuzon is another character in the story, but the problem is that Miéville seems intent on including too much of everything; the kitchen sink, a few bathtubs and maybe a swimming pool for good measure. Every new neighborhood has enough detail to support an entire storyline, but Miéville barely takes a breath before introducing even more obscure and bizarre details. What seems magical and fascinating for maybe a hundred pages or so becomes overkill when it just keeps happening past the halfway point of the novel.
Also, it doesn't help that Miéville seems to delight in writing incredibly dense prose. I'm sure a large part of why I took so long to finish the book is that it felt like I was barely making any progress even though I would sit down and read for hours at a time. I was finally able to increase my pace a bit once the actual plot became clear, but at the same time I was a little disappointed to discover that all of Miéville's baroque wordplay leads up to a relatively straightforward man versus monster story.
Ultimately, Perdido Street Station was a difficult book that I respected and sometimes liked but can't help finding fault with as I think more about it. I'm glad I finally finished it so that I can mark it off my near-infinite list of unread books, but it will be a good long while before I pick up another one of Miéville's books. Of course, there are at least three others on my shelves, waiting for me to read them.
Perdido Street Station follows a model similar to
The Scar in that the title names a location that is pivotal to the plot. Neither place seems important in the beginning, but eventually both where it is and what it does becomes the hinge on which the plot folds.
This device is more pronounced in
PSS, since the station in question is the transportation hub of New Crobuzon. Readers who enjoy literature of the city will love
PSS; New Crobuzon is a character in Mieville's book the way Victorian London is in Dickens, Dorchester in Dennis Lehane, or New York in Ann Petry's
The Street. Mieville dumps a massive amount of information on the reader, some of which doesn't initially seem important to the plot, but it is all fascinating and it all pays off in the end. I never found the descriptions of the city self-indulgent or wandering. Although I would never want to live there (and don't quite understand why certain characters are so attached to it), New Crobuzon is a vibrant and fascinating character in this novel.
I could write endlessly about this book, from the pseudoscience to the interspecies relationships to the politics (which are so like our own, it's depressing and scary). Instead I will leave you with a moment from the book that, in all my years of reading scifi, I had never encountered before:
Giant moth orgy.
A wonderful book. I'm a bit torn on the ending. It was good, but realistic as well. I won't give it away, but it's well worth the read. I was engrossed.
About the Author:
China Miéville is the author of numerous books, including This Census-Taker, Three Moments of an Explosion, Railsea, Embassytown, Kraken, The City & The City, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and…
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