Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) in On Paths Unknown

Dec 06, 2012 Kaśyap rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy-sf

Perdido street station is an amazing work of world-building. The story of this book takes place in the city of New Crobuzon, In which humans live along with an interesting collection of bizarre, sentient species. Among them are women with insect heads, sentient cacti, the “Remade” and a giant artistic spider.

New Crobuzon is a city full of alienated individuals, groups and species. It is a huge metropolis, a place of squalor with a brutal government and a strong criminal network. A polluted, crim ...more

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Sep 26, 2016 Alex rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews

Vertiginous. Lascivious. Thesaurus.

"The slakemoth was flying, circling with vertiginousness and lasciviously over the ossified remains of the rank stench of piled dead vodyanoi left to rot over the elapse of a thousand sunsets. It dived towards Isaac pugnaciously, it's mind screeching into Isaac's.

"Fuck! Shit! Bastard!" Isaac screamed, narrowly dodging the vertiginous descent of the slakemoth, immolated with lust for mind waves. He rolled out of the flight path just in time. He nostalgically Vertiginous. Lascivious. Thesaurus.

"The slakemoth was flying, circling with vertiginousness and lasciviously over the ossified remains of the rank stench of piled dead vodyanoi left to rot over the elapse of a thousand sunsets. It dived towards Isaac pugnaciously, it's mind screeching into Isaac's.

"Fuck! Shit! Bastard!" Isaac screamed, narrowly dodging the vertiginous descent of the slakemoth, immolated with lust for mind waves. He rolled out of the flight path just in time. He nostalgically thought of Lin who had disappointingly disappeared halfway through the plot.

There was thunder and lightning as space-time warped. The spider made its grand entrance. WEAVER IS HERE TO BEAT SLAKEMOTH AND WIN THE PLOT WHILST MAKING A WEB OF CONFUSION IN 9 DIMENSIONS. OH YES.

I am Yagharek. I did a bad thing and feel guilty about it. It stills haunts me. New Crobuzon was rank with the festering of criminal activity throughout the streets, alleyways, tunnels and arcades of the city."

Blurb: A scientist who is in love with a scarabhead has a commission to make a humanoid-bird creature fly again. He becomes distracted by a funky caterpillar in his lab which becomes Satan embodied in a moth which feeds on mind waves. A mob boss owns some moths of the same species because they make great drugs. The escaped moth sets these other moths free. The scarabhead is employed by the mob boss to do some art. The moths go on a feeding frenzy, wreaking havoc in the city. What will Isaac do?

Overall Perdido Street Station was a good read. The steampunk, alien world of New Crobuzon was well crafted, the characters each had good depth and the plot was mostly exciting. There is plenty to like and enjoy. China Miéville clearly has a captivating imagination and is hugely ambitious with his pen, having created his own new micro-universe for this novel. There are some interesting themes in the book such as social taboos, justice and government. The writing is also very rich, but overly so, like a deep-fried Mars bar.

The prose was extremely dense and laboured throughout. Sometimes it was almost as if the author had thought that some paragraphs had too much normal English in them, and so decided to throw some thesaurus English in there for good measure.

Annoyingly, not everything in the novel was lascivious (meaning with overtly sexual desire), nor vertiginous (meaning extremely high or steep) as Miéville would have us believe. The overuse and misuse of these big words tragically reminded me of the Friends episode where Joey discovers a thesaurus whilst writing a recommendation letter. He wants to say that Monica and Chandler have big hearts, but instead says that they have "full-sized aortic pumps".

Unfortunately I felt like the author was enjoying writing with his thesaurus so much that he forgot about the reader. Intense action scenes became overly descriptive to the point of microscopic detail, so that they became protracted and lost momentum amongst the crowd of words. If the action scenes were movie scenes, they would all be in slow motion, with lots of camera panning, zooming in and out relentlessly. Although, I didn't mind the description of scenery generally as part of the world-building outside of the action scenes.

Despite all this, the good points outweigh the bad. I would be open to reading another novel by China Miéville, but I'd have to brace myself for a plethora of unnecessary words and keep a dictionary to hand, whilst forgetting some of the plot holes. Although this review is a little flippant, Miéville is not and this book is definitely worth a try.

(view spoiler) ...more

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Jul 21, 2013 Phil J rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, fantasy-sci-fi, 500-essential-cult-books

I agree with all the praise regarding the characters, creativity, worldbuilding, etc. in this novel. I also have thoughts on a couple of the common complaints against this book.

First, some readers are put off by the vocabulary. It's not really that hard to decode- just use a dictionary if you don't know words like palimpsest or ineluctable. It's not like some books I've read (Infinite Jest) in which the terminology forms a barrier to comprehension. This is just a case of an author with above ave ...more

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Aug 15, 2013 Michele rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science-fiction, favorites, fantasy, groundbreaker, liviu-rec, new-weird, genre-jumping

Ah, this book is a messy quilt of genres. It is about a city that is a messy quilt of species, cultures, and environments and one of the characters is a walking messy quilt of random multi-specie body parts. Fractals, yet never using the word fractal.

Mieville easily gets away with many things in this book that I would complain about if attempted by someone else. The execution is so perfect, I feel honored to read it.

And just when I think I get where he's going, he punches me in the face with ano ...more

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