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Jan 05, 2012

Brad rated it:

WARNING: This review probably contains some (but not many) spoilers, so you may not want to read this if you haven’t read Perdido Street Station yet. This review also contains plenty of vulgarity. Please don't read this if you do not want to see the "f" and other words. Thanks.

Me reading my review: I decided to read this on SoundCloud, since BirdBrian has turned me into a recorded voice madman. You can listen right here if you'd like.

I fucking hate moths.
More...

50 comments like (58 people liked it)

Jun 17, 2011

Joel rated it:

Lots of people like to accuse China Miéville of writing with a thesaurus open next to his laptop. How else to explain the frequent appearance of "ossified," "salubrious," "susurrus" and "inveigled" within the 623 pages of Perdido Street Station? Ok, so you can maybe argue that if you write a 250,000 word book, probably less than six of those words should be "palimpsest," but really, I just think he's a smart guy who carefully controls his prose. More...

47 comments like (67 people liked it)

Sep 03, 2011

Keely rated it:

My friends call me Senex ('The Old Man') because of my taste in fantasy, or they would, if I had any. It's often been noted that I'll give at least four stars to any fantasy from the Italian Renaissance, and yet rarely give more than two for anything written since the nineteen-sixties. Some have accused me of a staunch prejudice in period, but lo! it is not so.

I really love the fantasy genre, but the corollary of this is that I hate most fantasy books, because of how they mistreat th More...

14 comments like (35 people liked it)

Jul 10, 2011

mark rated it:

my dear Perdido Street Station,

perhaps it is fated not to be. or perhaps i need to grow a bit more, until i am able to understand and appreciate your unique charms. but for now, i am just not ready. please don't take this personally - i promise that i shall try you out again sometime, perhaps soon. too many people love you, and they love you too, too much for me to give up on you altogether.

i will admit that my first impression was off-putting - the way you talked and ge More...

23 comments like (24 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Ken-ichi rated it:

I feel like I've been reading this book forever. It's long, largely unstructured, and I never became particularly invested in any of the characters, so it just dragged on. The best thing I could say about it is that it's diverting. One of the quotes on the back describes it as "phantasmagoric," which seems accurate. All sorts of crazy random things, soul-devouring moth creatures, interdimensional homicidal spiders, creative reconstructive surgery as state punishment. That's all amusing More...

17 comments like (44 people liked it)

Jun 01, 2011

Ceridwen rated it:

Despite having declared Mr. Miéville my literary boyfriend some time ago, I have to come out and admit I've only read one (1) book by him. I've read his foray into YA, Un Lun Dun, which thumbs the touchstones of his writing: urban spaces, a bunch of weird ass shit, and literary genres ground through the pulper of his baroque writing. But, being YA, the profanity and sheer globbing fuckallery of his writing was dampened a bit. No so, here. And dag, yo, that's some stuff.

Man, I don't eve More...

85 comments like (51 people liked it)

Oct 23, 2009

Ryan rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

6 comments like (23 people liked it)

Jul 15, 2011

Catie rated it:

When we’ve turned this world into a dried up husk and have to resort to shutting ourselves in to life sustaining pods and “living” within some sort of virtual environment, I vote we nominate this guy to imagine and design our virtual realities. Sure, we’ll probably end up with some weird shit, like fire breathing iguana flowers and pulsating organic clouds that rain mucus and blood (he won’t be able to help himself) but we’ll get the most detailed, complete, panoramic world, and I can guarantee More...

13 comments like (10 people liked it)

Sep 25, 2007

Brendan rated it:

Simply extraordinary.

Let's get this out of the way: yes, Mieville likes to get his vocab on. But I don't think it's out of pretension or apprehension (I've seen both suggested in reviews on this site). Mieville's using the language to draw you in to a world that is like ours, but slightly different— a dark, morbid, fantastical dystopia that's something like the dirty lovechild of Edward Gorey, Jules Verne and Charles Dickens. It's a dirty, lowdown, steam-age-with-magic setting tha More...

0 comments like (30 people liked it)

Jul 11, 2011

Lee rated it:

My first Goodreads review.

Story: 3/5

1: Being Vague, rambling plot with no little believable storyline
5: Ripping yarn. Clever, thought provoking

The story is based in a sordid police state world. Where medical advancements have bizarrely evolved yet weaponry remains in the 1700's. It is a dark and dirty setting that reminded me of Neverwhere. Unfortunately Mieville needs you to completely picture this world in your head, to a degree that is utterly frustrating at fir More...

3 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Conrad rated it:

Others seem to have found PSS's world to have been fleshed out well; I thought it was implausible. No one knows what lies beyond certain parts of the world... and someone still found it necessary to invent trains. There's at least one huge city... but how there's enough food to go around is anyone's guess.

Mieville never writes five words when eighty will do, and his editor must have been asleep at the switch: I'd love to see an adjective count of this book. There are some genre-bend More...

0 comments like (15 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2009

Mosca rated it:

It is clear that China Miéville is an exceptionally inventive writer. The steam-punk/fantasy world of the city-state New Crobuzon is an extraordinary creation. The world is populated with many sentient species and ethnicities—each with different needs and agendas—all enduring the dominance of a corrupt and incompetent human police state that oppresses and exploits most of even the human population. The varieties of creatures, monsters, and technologies are fascinating. The plot twists and charac More...

6 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Eric rated it:

The "New Weird" subgenre of fantasy/science fiction, embodied by this author and book, wound up being too weird for me. Full points to this guy for originality. There is nothing rehashed in here and it took real creativity to come up with this world. But it's a gross world and the tone is so heavy and dark. The author was able to make me want to shower just by way of his gritty, visceral descriptions of this dirty world. Even the names he gives people and places fill up the mouth like More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Sarah rated it:

Not as good as everyone told me it would be. There were parts I really enjoyed, and I liked what he was going for tone-wise, with his decadent and overblown prose. Also, I do appreciate a little Marxist theory in my fantasy. Still, I never quite believed in the world or the characters, and by the end I just didn't care.

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Apr 01, 2010

Cindy rated it:

This book has Killer Robot Chimpanzees. (I'm not sure how I forgot to mention them the first time around.) If that's not enough for you, read on...

I have to say I really liked this book. Once I got into the story (not an easy thing to do) I really disappeared into the world of Bas-Lag every time I picked up the book. The world was complex, dank, dreary, alive, mystical and fascinating. I don't think I've ever read a book that sat comfortably balanced on that delicate precipice betwee More...

7 comments like (13 people liked it)

Oct 31, 2011

Random rated it:

Meiville has managed to create a fascinating city (I can't say world since anything outside is only vaguely referenced). His language may seem pretentious to some but I think I have to disagree. I get the impression that he is trying to continue the mood not only using what the words mean, but with the words themselves.

His characters, however, suck. I just can't seem to get myself to care about them one way or another. They seem very flat and unimaginative. Descriptions are neat More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 08, 2010

Shanon rated it:

I get it! You're inventive, creative and have developed amazingly odd worlds - but could we get on with the story!

I felt like there were so many times when China Mieville's descriptions (though wonderfully descriptive) did nothing for the story. I am about a third through the story and still do not feel connected to any character besides possibly Linda (Linda right?? The bug woman). There have been many times when I don't even know what's going on. I wonder what the word count for More...

4 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 17, 2011

Jill rated it:

I threw this book out my 4th story window at page 300. Oh calm down, I checked first to make sure there were no pedestrians. What an overstuffed pretentious closet full of crap! The author kept introducing new, wonderous, fanciful, detailed (oh LORD the details), magical mystical unearthly beings at the expense of telling a story or having any ideas. I wanted to punch this book in the face. AND, one of the characters is a critter with a fabulous woman's body and the head of an incect. OK? More...

5 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 30, 2008

Matt rated it:

While I give the book positive marks overall, I have to say that I was incredibly disappointed in the way that it squandered all the wonderful setup from the first half of the novel by turning into a monster movie. I have no problem with the slake-moths, but I really wished they'd only been a subplot in this book.

Miéville does such a wonderful job setting up his world and the characters who live within it that I didn't want a conventional plot to take over. For the first half, I real More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Sep 07, 2010

Rachel rated it:

Finally read; still irritated at prodigious use of synonyms for "icky", and there's a few ten-dollar words that Mieville is in love with and uses far too many times ("pugnacious", "lascivious", "bathos" and "vile" stick out). Worldbuilding...spent too much time on the seamy and the scandalous and the gross, but was otherwise thorough. Liked the interpretation of academia, the entire concept of khepri, the Remade as created-lower-caste, and the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 12, 2011

Chris rated it:

The last time I read this, I wrote: "While this book is remarkably huge, it's a swift read - well-paced, interesting, creative and clever, which are all good things to have in a book." At the time, that was true, but this time? Not so much.

I don't know what changed in the intervening years. The first time I read this book, it gripped me and wouldn't let me go. I fell into it, into the vast and horrible city of New Crobozon and all the madness that was built into it, and whe More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Feb 26, 2011

Juushika rated it:

On the streets of New Crobuzon, the strange citizens live in a cacophony of culture, pollution, and alchemy. But their greatest threat may come not from their turbulent politics or research into unstable energy—but from a deceptively harmless, exotic grub. Perdido Street Station begins in one direction, exploring the intricacies of a fantastical city and the liminal work of two lovers—one a scientist, one an artist—within it; it continues in another, with a more traditional great evil and the di More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 14, 2011

Phil rated it:

What makes for good genre fiction, good science fiction, fantasy, or horror? What makes for good literary fiction? Is it the same thing in either case? Is it a matter of a writer striving simultaneously for what's most satisfying in each and bringing them together, of trying to be all things to all people? Or is it, rather, a matter of looking at the many different approaches one can take when writing a work of fiction, and figuring out which ones to mix and match, and in what quantities, to arr More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 17, 2011

Lori rated it:

My goodness, my mind is blown away by the phenomenon that is China Melvielle. I was quite sure that this would rate a 4, because it does have problems, but as soon as I came to the computer it was clearly a 5. I don't think I'll ever forget it. New Crubuzon will flash on me at weird times. The sight of a moth will momentarily agitate and still me probably forever. Hopefully this won't extend to butterflies, but even they might be suspect for awhile. Maybe I should go to the zoo and sit in the bu More...

6 comments like (11 people liked it)

Mar 10, 2009

Arthur rated it:

A story with no ending

I have a very ambiguous feeling about PSS. I loved the book and hated the ending.

The book:
An incredible story! Mieville's imagination blows you away. There are a lot of absolutely new things introduced in the book, races, monsters, engines, contraptions, ideas ...they are so fresh, new, interesting. The story is like a fantasy thriller. When you read the book you cannot help but immerse into the new world. Just when you thought, you know everything, More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 05, 2011

Natalie rated it:

Perdido Street Station is taking me straight to the GR Books that Should be Made into Movies List!

China Miéville should should play the Tansell role and work on the screenplay and monster design with Guillermo del Toro.

Because the movie needs to have lots of action to match the book Guy Ritchie or maybe Matthew Vaughn should direct, del Toro could co-produce, and play Motley during filming, and spend tons of time on the monsters that way?

David Bowie More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 17, 2011

Chris rated it:

Well then. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that weak, unfulfilling ending. Why, the entire book was pretty weak and unfulfilling, so why did I hope for otherwise? Simple. I needed hope. Hope that there was a purpose behind all the awards and praise heaping I’ve seen given to this book. Surely there would be a payoff for enduring 600 pages of pretentious nonsense. But alas, I was wrong.

Story wasn’t the goal here, I suppose. More like trying to impress the literary establishment. More...

3 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 24, 2009

Steve rated it:

This is a very enjoyable book, however don't expect a fairy tale ending. Honestly, it left me with a slightly nauseous feeling at the end. If it weren't for that feeling, I would have given the book 5 stars. The extraordinary creativity framed by this book made it worth it for me, but others might not feel the same.

The world that China Mieville creates is unlike anything else I have encountered in scifi or fantasy. It's a blend of industrial age technology and magic. There are creatu More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 29, 2009

Amy rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 11, 2010

Beck rated it:

I FINALLY finished this one, after giving myself a stern talking-to about reading so much drivel lately.

Mieville is verbose to the point of decadence in his prose (though mostly in describing dirty, dingy, dystopic surroundings), and he uses a glut of unfamiliar words. I am rarely a fast reader. I will ordinarily re-read sentences to better envision the scene and action, to try out characters' expressions and the mouth-feel of their words. With Mieville, I had to reread to capture More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)