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

Oct 09, 2008 Amy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, favorites, 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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May 07, 2010 Jyllian Martini rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I am enjoying the HELL out of this book. It is multi-layered. The metaphors are stunning. The characters are well drawn and complex. It isn't your run of the mill fantasy or science fiction--this is literature. ...more

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Nov 27, 2011 Jday rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: k-books-read

I liked this book, but it took me almost a year to read it. I kept getting bogged down in the detail. The names and descriptions of all the different portions of the city, the descriptions of all the different races inhabiting the city, etc. I would get bored, put it down and pick it up again months later. I will read the sequal, but it won't be anytime soon. ...more

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Feb 24, 2019 Alan rated it it was amazing

Absolutely loved this. The city is very real, very alive, and very dangerous, and the universe it inhabits is wild and weird and marvellously inventive. I loved the characters too, each of them felt complex and unique, and followed their own motivations and ambitions. It's the first time I've read a China Mieville book: looking forward to reading the others. ...more

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