Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Oct 09, 2008 Amy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, fantasy, read-in-2009

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This has not been the most enjoyable fantasy novel I've read, but I think it might be the most compelling. From the beginning, I was in awe of how language was used to create a city teeming with life.

In New Crobuzon, humans are a minority among the sentient beings. Isaac, a human, is a renegade scientist. He accepts infrequent jobs from the university he used to teach at so he can still have access to their equipment and libraries. He is in an illicit relationship with the Khepri artist Lin. (T This has not been the most enjoyable fantasy novel I've read, but I think it might be the most compelling. From the beginning, I was in awe of how language was used to create a city teeming with life.

In New Crobuzon, humans are a minority among the sentient beings. Isaac, a human, is a renegade scientist. He accepts infrequent jobs from the university he used to teach at so he can still have access to their equipment and libraries. He is in an illicit relationship with the Khepri artist Lin. (The khepri have some human and some bug features. An open cross-species relationship would hurt Isaac's standing in the stuffy scientific community. He still needs to publish to be able to continue his research.) Isaac shares a lab with two other scientists. One day, the garuda Yagharak (part-human, part hawk, and rare in the civilized portions of New Crobuzon) approaches Isaac. He has had his wings physically removed by his clan, for a crime he will not discuss. He commissions Isaac to help him restore his ability to fly.

While researching flight, and the creatures that fly, Isaac unleashes some terrible predators on the city. With a small group of unlikely allies, Isaac struggles to defeat the evil creatures he has unintentionally freed.

Much of the city is bleak, corrupt, and harsh. The idea of the remade is repugnant. It is reminiscent of societies that cut off a hand as punishment for theft - only instead of a hand, you could lose almost any body part AND have it be replaced by part of a machine. The author didn't really explore the psyche of the remade in this book - they were mainly secondary characters, pawns to be used by those in power. The ultimate outcasts.

I found the author's use of technology for his world to be somewhat arbitrary. Obviously, some electrical capabilities exist, but steam is used as a driving force for most of the equipment. Punch cards are used to provide inputs to the steam driven systems, mostly known as constructs. The programming of the construct is sophisticated enough for the development of a spark of intelligence. Mostly, the stages of development in the various technologies just did not seem to match. A world that can successfully remake such a large portion of it's population should have some type of functioning communication system.

This arbitrary borrowing of technology didn't really bother me too much. It actually made me think about the ideas quite a bit. Are new products developed and refined to become the best possible product? Or by choosing to refine one product, do we hamper development of another product? Would the second product eventually be superior to the first, if it received the same research and development attention?

In addition to thinking of evolution in a technological sense, this book also made me think of evolution in a biological sense. New Crobuzon is full of many different forms of sentient life who are able to communicate with each other. Why didn't our world develop that way? Was it a possibility at some remote point in the past? Plus, the idea of cactus youth punks, hanging out on street corners and self-mutilating for the scars, was one of the many highlights of the book for me.

Another interesting concept in this book is the idea of crises energy, and related to that, the torque. Crises energy is kind of like the search for a perpetual motion machine. Isaac initially hopes to use it
to help Yagharak fly, but it ends up central to the resolution of the main plot. The torque is much more dangerous; it is described as rogue energy. The results are unpredictable. The discussion between Yagharak and Isaac about the torque reminded me of descriptions of the use of atomic bombs in WWII.

The ending is not exactly happy; I don't want to give it away in the review so I won't say anything more. The crime of choice-theft of the garuda is an interesting concept. When the crime is translated to a near-human equivalent at the end of the book, I felt that the punishment was perhaps too harsh for the crime.

I was absorbed in this world, and I liked the characters well enough to want to know what happens next. I'm so glad that the authors are in charge of ending their books - I always have a hard time letting go.
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Oct 15, 2007 Amy rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy, british-fantasy-society-award

I was lucky enough to get to see China Mieville give a reading and talk about his work at the San Francisco bookstore The Booksmith. The guy was completely bald, wore a small curved earring, looked like he worked out 5 days a week, and spoke like Christopher Eccleston (the dude from Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later, a year of Dr. Who, etc.). Has a master's in history and ran for Parliament - something like that. And the guy was like 30.

Aaanyway, this book is above all about a crazy wacked-out city - ...more

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Jul 04, 2011 hh rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2011, sff, fiction, reread

what to say about Perdido Street Station... i reread this after having the opportunity to see China Mieville read from his new book Embassytown. he mostly chatted, which was incredibly entertaining. i couldn't stop raving about him for a while; and since a few friends were reading this for the first time, it seemed i should pick it back up.

i've had more graduate-level training than i'd had the first time i read this, and it made for a wholly different encounter with the novel. one of my research ...more

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Sep 13, 2009 Leon rated it really liked it

Pretty good. The story is fair, but Mieville manages to imagine a whole world, full of magic, complex but sensible, all believable.

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

Shelves: read-2009, fiction, 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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Oct 28, 2011 Joey Manley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy

My brain felt like it was 14 again, by which I mean I haven't, since then, until now, felt as alive and open to a work of fiction.

Two flaws:

It took a while to get going.

Some of the loose ends were wrapped up too quickly and predictably at the end (for example: the mysterious stranger appeared exactly one paragraph after I thought to myself, 'ah, it's time for the mysterious stranger to appear and reveal who he/she is').

So not perfect, no. Still the best book I've read in years. ...more

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Jul 07, 2008 J.M. Brister rated it liked it

Shelves: 2008

Mieville's a master of creating dark and fascinating settings. The world he creates is intricate, yet terrifying, and it was not what I had expected when picking up this book. This was much different from the usual Sci Fi/Fantasy that I read. However, I think that along with creating such an intricate setting, the author runs the risk of writing a novel that is a bit too long with a bit too much details. Mieville was dabbling with that a little... ...more

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Jul 23, 2008 Sarah Sammis rated it liked it

Shelves: scifi, read-in-2004

The book reads like an exquisite corpse written by James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, Philip José Farmer and Lovecraft. At 880 pages, it takes its time to unfurl the story, block by grimey block.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the book but it's taking a long time to read. Regardless of where I am in the book, I will mail it a week from tomorrow. Apologies for keeping it so long. ...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Peter rated it really liked it

Shelves: sciencefiction

Interesting combination of (semi) hard sci-fi and steam-punk. Plenty here to keep you thinking (about what constitutes sentience, forms of government, etc..) as well as a propulsive plot. I'm looking forward to the next book! ...more

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