- Paperback: 880 pages
- Publisher: Tor; New Ed edition (23 Feb 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330392891
- ISBN-13: 978-0330392891
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 11.2 x 5.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (121 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 78,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Perdido Street Station
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Like the author's 1998 debut book King Rat, this is an urban-gothic novel full of rich city squalor--but this time the setting isn't London but the grimy fantasy metropolis of New Crobuzon. The city sprawls like a mutant Gormenghast, contains strange ethnic minorities such as the khepris (women with huge scarab-beetles for heads), and seethes with seedy technology and thaumaturgy. There are Babbage engines, coke-powered robot "constructs", and an underclass of biomagically "Remade" victims of cruel justice who may be part-machine, part-animal or wholly nightmarish. A visiting garuda--a winged being now stripped of his wings--approaches the overweight, eccentric amateur scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in hope of buying back the power of flight, and the resulting research programme has accidental but monstrous consequences. Something appalling is loosed, a horror whose deadliness is underlined when New Crobuzon's corrupt government begs help from the Ambassador of Hell ... who refuses, because even the demons are frightened. Dealing with the flying terror becomes a job for Grimnebulin and a much-harried group of cronies--including his khepri lover, the garuda, a reporter for a brutally suppressed subversive newspaper, the group mind of New Crobuzon's constructs, a secret traitor, and one of the strangest giant spiders in fiction. A big, powerful, inventive, mesmerising and memorably horrid novel. --David Langford
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'China Miéville, poster boy for the so-called "new weird", is one of the most interesting and promising writers to appear in the last few years in any genre. Perdido Street Station is a fantastic yarn that follows the roads set by M John Harrison in his Viriconium world and brings an enormous energy and creativity to the table. A reinvention of modern fantasy with guts, brains and plenty of glory. Plunge in.'
--Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Guardian Books Blog
--Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Guardian Books Blog
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth reading, but needs editing down by at least 200 pages.,
By
This review is from: Perdido Street Station (Paperback)
That said, the dark, almost medieval atmosphere is conjured up most effectively and the idea of a world like our own, but gone strangely awry, is undoubtedly compelling. The inhabitants of the City have an understanding of "chymistry" and physics akin to that of a modern day alchemist and ally this with "thaumaturgical", i.e. limited magical or supernatural power, to achieve their idiosyncratic technology. This peculiarly employed and strangely dated technology, and the cumbersome ways of achieving many of the things we take for granted, are intriguing. Mieville has also come up with some inspired life forms to populate his city: the Kephri and Weaver are particularly evocative. The man sized Garuda are also an interesting development of a classic myth and restoring flight to one who has lost his wings is a central theme in the book. However,how do you get past the old schoolboy problem of angels: where are the muscles to power their wings and how can all that weight ever be lifted?. That may be a bit pernickety, the real flaw is that the ideas in the book are over stretched. Far, far too much space is devoted to constant reference to places: it is intrusive and completely unnecessary. The map at the beginning is a bit of a giveaway and re-affirms my suspicion of any science fiction book that needs such a detailed geographic map to guide the reader. Places and scenery should be generated by, and flow naturally from, the passage of the characters through the narrative, as they do in a "Snowcrash" for example. The topography should be secondary, rather than dominant, yet one feels that for Mieville the map and the names and the rail lines are an end in themselves! Many readers are going to find themselves skipping over repetitive and superfluous descriptive passages. The book would be a far better one if less rein were given to this grandiose world designing and the plot was allowed to flow a little better. Perhaps Perdido is intended to be the setting for a series of novels; if so, maybe the plot and the characters should be allowed more space on the stage and less time and room be devoted to the backdrops.
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overwritten but bursting with ideas.,
This review is from: Perdido Street Station (Paperback)
In this excellent second novel, Mieville delivers on the potential hinted at in his first work 'King Rat'. Whilst 'Perdido Street Station' is very strong on characterisation and plot, its major achievement is the creation of a unique metropolis, which never fails to surprise and engage the reader. Mieville is a true polymath, with an ingenious imagination and a formidable vocabulary. He seems able to write with authority on most subjects and weaves technical language and metaphors in to his work with ease. However, one of the greatest joys of this novel is its accessibility; the author uses his obvious intelligence to entertain rather than to impress. The result is an engaging, exciting and highly enjoyable read. However, a valid criticism of this book is that it is overwritten. This becomes a serious nuisance towards the end of the book, when the highly descriptive prose slows down the plot instead of allowing the pace to pick up as the finale approaches. This loss of momentum caused me to lose interest at what should have been a critical point in the book. Although this is a great novel, it is certainly not the best that this author can produce. The follow-up, set in the same world, is a far more accomplished novel and if you like 'Perdido Street Station' you will love 'The Scar'.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Overblown and ultimately tedious,
By b00le (Roma, Italy) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Perdido Street Station (Paperback)
Ooof! An 867-page proof that more is less. Miéville has a prodigious imagination and he has built his, nasty, cloacal world in exhaustive detail - and the reader is spared absolutely none of it. The Times says he writes with 'admirable confidence', a confidence that might just be misplaced. The problem is that even as it collapses under its own weight, this novel lacks so much. Miéville has no restraint, no ear, no feel for rhythm or form, no sense of humour, no point of view, no interest in people. His human characters, whatever their gender, age, station, all speak with the same voice - the voice, for some reason, of a London van driver: oafish, coarse, inarticulate and larded with repetitive, pointless cursing. The effect is at first comic, then numbing and tiresome. (His "The City And The City" has the same lazy defect.) Only the non-human characters are interesting, but it is a patient reader who will not start skimming the pages after about halfway. Inside this fat book is a thin one trying to get out - a much better book: lively, strikingly original and about 567 pages shorter.
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