Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Jun 11, 2011 mark monday rated it it was ok

Shelves: i-gave-up, fantasy-modern

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 gestured and sought attent 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 gestured and sought attention only created annoyance. but still, i was determined to soldier on, knowing of the wonders that many others have enjoyed in your embrace. i thought that there must be something there, some quality underneath all of the affectation and all of the almost-desperate attempts to dazzle and to provoke. i felt confident that beneath all of the ruffles and ribbons and silky trifles and shiny buttons that there would be something interesting and of value, buried down deep. but as i undressed you, instead of a warm beating heart, i found only more rococo haberdashery. there was no there there!

but you know, once i felt the same way about samuel delany, about ronald firbank - and lo & behold: i now admire them both, i respond rather quickly to their bold instigations, their often sharp tongues, their secretly dreamy temperaments. it just took time. and i'm sure yours will come as well. but not now! i simply haven't the energy or patience to get to know you. and i am certain, in the end, my affection must mean little to you, Perdido... you are too beloved by all to be wounded too deeply by this minor affront. please do forgive my rash bout of grappling and its abrupt finish, this lectio interruptus. i take full responsibility.

this i do promise: to be continued! we will once again tumble into each other's arms, hoping for some kind of delight or satisfaction. this evening was... simply not meant to be. the housekeeper will take care of the sheets and mess; please do me a kind favor and take your leave through the servants' entrance.

'til the time of our sweet reunion,
yours,

mark monday ...more

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Mar 25, 2008 Brad rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-best, weird, personal-mythology, meta-review, to-read-again, mieville50, faves, speculative, steampunk

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.

Seriously. I hate them. They freak me ou ...more

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Apr 29, 2008 Brooke rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2009, fantasy

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I don't normally include spoilers in reviews, since I want them to be useful to people who are wondering if they should read the book, but I have too many specific thoughts on this one to keep it spoiler-free.

The first thing that pops into mind about Perdido Street Station is that Miéville went overboard with the idea of, "Show, don't tell." Miéville shows everything down to the tiniest detail. This made it take a very long time to make it through all 600 pages, and I ended up spending much more I don't normally include spoilers in reviews, since I want them to be useful to people who are wondering if they should read the book, but I have too many specific thoughts on this one to keep it spoiler-free.

The first thing that pops into mind about Perdido Street Station is that Miéville went overboard with the idea of, "Show, don't tell." Miéville shows everything down to the tiniest detail. This made it take a very long time to make it through all 600 pages, and I ended up spending much more time with this book than I ever envisioned. Which was fine, it was well-written, but at the same time I rather relieved to be done.

The plot was interesting; it starts off being about scientist Isaac trying to help a de-winged creature fly again. This turns into a horror story about brain-sucking giant moths after one of the specimen Isaac is studying escapes. Thrown in with it are some bits about a humanoid bug woman who is commissioned by a mob boss to make a sculpture of him, some political drama involving the militant government, and mechanical cleaning robots who gain intelligence. For the most part, everything ties together in the end, and all the different plots are relevant to each other. Except one: Lin the insect woman.

What was her purpose? She was a main character in the beginning, we saw many scenes from her point of view and learned about her life and her motivations, and then she just disappears and is presumed dead by Isaac for most of the book. What was the purpose of building her story so much before dropping her almost completely? It made no sense to me, especially when Isaac unexpectedly finds her in the end, tortured by the mob boss but alive, only to have her permanently lose her mind to the giant moths a couple pages later. She served no true purpose to the plot, she didn't motivate Isaac to do anything that he wasn't motivated to do otherwise - except maybe one thing, which ties into my other complaint:

In the final pages of the book, Isaac discovers that the de-winged creature he had been helping, Yagharek, had his wings removed as punishment for raping someone. In some ways, the scene played out well. He's conflicted, because Yagharek has become his friend who risked his life to kill the giant moths and save the city, but at the same time Isaac is repulsed by the crime. In real life, you hear a lot of people say that a rapist couldn't possibly have committed the crime, because he had done other things that were good, and he was someone's friend. Miéville, to my relief, understood that these good deeds don't cancel out or preclude someone from committing a terrible crime. However, Isaac seems to need Lin's torture to push him over the edge - in the abstract, it was horrible that his friend raped someone, but it took Isaac imagining how Lin got some of her injuries to make him abandon Yagharek. Which means that A) Isaac isn't empathetic enough to feel the same amount of outrage for the rape of someone he didn't know even after spending the entire book trying to save the city from creatures that were violating people, and B) Lin, despite being a rather strong and interesting character in the beginning who had her own storyline, was really nothing more than a female sacrificial lamb to motivate a decision Isaac made in the final pages. Which is a tired, tired trope.

Other parts of the end of the book were odd, too - Isaac and his companion, Derkhan, were feeling disgusted by their need to sacrifice a dying man to capture the moths; however, despite the multiple paragraphs describing their horror at their actions, they managed to kill members of the city's militia with no thought whatsoever. Also, a notorious serial killer who had been mentioned very briefly hundreds of pages prior for some reason shows up and helps them out. At first I thought we were going to discover that Lin had been Remade into this killer, but no, he just showed up, helped Isaac killed some militamen, and disappeared again without ever saying a word. Eh??

I'll wrap this up, as I realize it's not the sort of review I normally write. In a novel that was as well done as this one, the absolute pointlessness of the buildup, disappearance, and then sacrifice of Lin's character, as well as some random other problems, is really confusing. ...more

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Sep 04, 2009 Kara Babcock rated it really liked it

Shelves: artificial-intelligence, 2010-read, ebook, fantasy, steampunk, hugo-nominee, nebula-nominee

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Perdido Street Station is a supersaturated story. The city of New Crobuzon teems with life as weird as China Miéville can imagine it—and he has a very flexible imagination. This is one of those touched cities so often the focus of a fantasy or science fiction novel: the city where anything can—and does—happen, sometimes with shocking regularity. In New Crobuzon, there's the law enforced by the militia, and then there's the law observed by everyone who isn't important enough for the militia to bo ...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Lori rated it it was amazing

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

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Jun 04, 2008 Nicky rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative-fiction, fantasy, steampunk

The description in this book is very good, in terms of the fact that it creates a very vivid picture. Of course, it also grossed me out, and maybe went a little bit overboard with that. Just two chapters in, though, I was ready to say that his world building was excellent. Sentence building? Maybe not so much. At one point I stopped and counted how many words were in one sentence, which took up half a page just by itself. One hundred and nineteen words without a single full stop! Although, admit The description in this book is very good, in terms of the fact that it creates a very vivid picture. Of course, it also grossed me out, and maybe went a little bit overboard with that. Just two chapters in, though, I was ready to say that his world building was excellent. Sentence building? Maybe not so much. At one point I stopped and counted how many words were in one sentence, which took up half a page just by itself. One hundred and nineteen words without a single full stop! Although, admittedly, there was other punctuation -- thankfully, or I'd have gotten even more lost in the sentence than I did. People can write stories in fewer words than that! I suppose you can make a case for it being a deliberate choice. The last three words of the sentence are, after all, apparently central to the book: Perdido Street Station.

One hundred pages in, I was very much intrigued by the world, by how things came to be that way, by whether there was any connection to our world, despite its strangeness, or whether it was just something entirely different. I wasn't so hooked by the characters, about whom I knew little than the fact that one was a scientist obsessed with his work and the other was an artist, his somewhat illicit lover.

By one hundred and fifty pages in, I was getting tired of all the description of the city. And I still didn't really care about the characters. I was intrigued by Mr. Motley, but only because I wanted to know what had happened to him, and I was curious about the garuda, but I didn't really care. If anything, the main character in this book is the city itself, and the plot designed to take you on a tour of every corner of it. That's interesting enough, but not really my thing. When the slake moths came in and the story became more focused on that, it began to be more interesting. The little glimpses into Yagherek's mind and crimes made me somewhat more interested in him as a character, and the strangeness of the Weaver made it interesting too.

Jack Half-A-Prayer came out of nowhere. I can see foreshadowing for him coming in, but his presence wasn't necessary to the plot -- it was just another little detail about the city-character, really.

This book didn't care about being ruthless to the characters. In some ways that's good, but in actuality I didn't care enough about the characters to be really hurt by the ruthlessness.

I wasn't disappointed, per se, and I did find it an interesting, absorbing and, in places, exciting read. I just don't quite know if all the raving I've been reading about it is entirely justified. ...more

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Apr 16, 2009 Simon rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, fantasy, horror

Next on my quest to aquaint myself with some modern fantasy and SF (my last effort was Stardust by Neil Gaiman), I tackled this volume with some trepidation. Between three and four times the length of the books I normally read these days I was quite intimidated. To devote so much time to just one book, I hoped that it would be worth it. It had better not be another example of the bloated stories that are so prevelant these days.

I was pleasantly suprised. I felt drawn into the complex and rich wo ...more

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Jan 30, 2008 Wealhtheow added it

Shelves: sci-fi, fantasy, urban-fantasy, didn-t_finish

After a hundred pages of no action whatsoever, I gave up on this novel. Apparently it gets very exciting, but it seems like Mieville gave up on plot and characters in service of building his crazy little world.

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Oct 29, 2011 Taueret rated it really liked it

Shelves: have, speculative-fiction, audiobook, literary

hmm. I haven't read any other reviews yet, I wanted to do my own first, in case I am being really dumb.

I tolerate, no, enjoy Mievelle even though he is often labelled "fantasy"- and I'm not a big fantasy fan. Sometimes I'm a bit unsure that I really understand why certain books and authors are classed as fantasy instead of sci-fi. Sometimes I'm confused about what makes sci-fi Sci-fi. I know a lot of people think the idea of genre labels is stupid and shows how small-minded I am, so you know. S ...more

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May 31, 2007 Michelle rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, book_club, award_winner, dtb-own, wow-wtf

Yagharek is a garuda, an eagle-man from the desert, who has lost his wings in punishment for one of the worst crimes among his people. feeling trapped earthbound, he journeys to the crowded, crumbling city of new crobuzon to seek help from

Isaac is a rogue scientist; he can't be bothered to teach a steady class at the university, and he'd much rather dabble in research on whatever topic catches his fancy. Yag's need to fly, and the possible solution in Isaac's pet theories on crisis energy launc Yagharek is a garuda, an eagle-man from the desert, who has lost his wings in punishment for one of the worst crimes among his people. feeling trapped earthbound, he journeys to the crowded, crumbling city of new crobuzon to seek help from

Isaac is a rogue scientist; he can't be bothered to teach a steady class at the university, and he'd much rather dabble in research on whatever topic catches his fancy. Yag's need to fly, and the possible solution in Isaac's pet theories on crisis energy launches him into a creative frenzy. when he comes up for breath, he slips away from the censure of the nearby faculty to live his open secret cross-species love for

Lin, an up & coming bohemian artist, is a khepri - a russet-skinned woman with a scarab beetle head. she's just taken a once-in-a-lifetime commission for a truly grand sculpture, one that will require her most bravura work. she'll never gain fame from this potential masterpiece, given the requirement of secrecy from the patron

Motley is possibly the city's prime crime lord, a shadowy figure with webs extending everywhere into the city's underbelly. he's cornering the market on a new drug who's effects are far worse than sobriety ever could be, something that will take many lives in its production.

these people's lives interlock in ever-closer patterns along with beautiful monsters, , robo-monkeys, steampunk clockworks, demons that exist in alternate planes of existence, AI, Shelob (?!), Crime and Punishment and Justice, and the crumbling mucous-dripping stained stench of the decaying city streets. Mieville gets full marks for creativity - this book is overflowing with imaginative ideas & nightmares. getting to all those pearls, though, necessitates have to wade through a whole lot of baroquely ornate prose rife with excessive descriptors. more than once, it starts to feel a bit too clever for its own good (e.g., my dictionary says that palimpsest = "writing material used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased", though each of the half-dozen times that word ostentatiously crops up, it generally means something closer to "a stench of many layers"). the first 200 pages are a slowly meandering stroll through the gritty, tired city before the story sharply veers off into exciting horror novel territory, and then finally fizzles some under its own weight. it felt like work to push through the last chunk of it, and i put down the book feeling it was solidly (somewhat disappointingly) a 3 star read.

24 hours later, though, all those ideas are still boiling up through my brain, and it occurs to me that the idea of "choice-theft" as the highest form of crime is a far more elegant way of phrasing my own personal morality. something that gets that far under your skin is pretty damn impressive, even with all the palimpsests of mucous. ...more

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May 10, 2009 This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy, fiction, ebooks, steampunk, urban-fantasy, arthur-c-clarke-award

As with the other book by China Miéville which I have read (The Scar), Perdido Street Station takes quite a bit to get into. If one perseveres through the miasma of broken-down decadent description (Miéville really loves inventing cities and beating the reader over the head with the intimate dark details of every slum and ghetto) a fairly interesting plot does develop. Whether it is really worthwhile to wade through the book to reach that point is perhaps debatable. I also found the ending to be ...more

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May 29, 2009 bsc rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, read-2009, fantasy

An up and down read for me. At times I really enjoyed it but at others, I was really bored. I tend to have this issue with authors who are a bit overly descriptive. I did love the ending, but I don't think it was enough to get me to read the sequels any time soon. ...more

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