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3.97 AVERAGE
3.97 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Contains a handful of spoilers from the midway point. Hopefully not enough to ruin the plot in the long run, but be warned.
I have persevered through this book waiting to be wowed due to the multitude of positive reviews it has received from fans of sci-fi and fantasy. Unfortunately I have been left disappointed by it. Sure, Mieville creates an engaging and multi-faceted world. But it's not exceptional, just competent, and there are many competent imaginations in the world of writing.
The characters were lacking, especially the women. Lin is seemingly pointless, and could be completely removed from the story without damage to the plot. She seemingly exists only to give the reader some insight into the Khepri (another sentient race), as well as allowing for Isaac to be painted as an outsider as well as masculine yet emotional. To spite her unimportance there are pages dedicated to her history and her and Isaac's relationship. This all builds up to nothing when she vanishes abruptly half way through the story. Derkhan is dreadful. She has two emotions: a mix of sour angriness, which she's incapable of acting on, and sadness. This one she acts on, crying frequently. This is possibly why she generally gets left at the door when the men go off on dangerous missions. Yag and Lemuel both rely on stereotypes (noble savage and dandy, respectively) that allow for the reader to fill in the blanks in their characters instead of being fleshed out with words and coming across as unique or interesting.
The plot is either running or crawling, seemingly not know where it's going, even at the end. There are plot lines that just die, and others that appear from nowhere at all, or after being left in the dust 400 pages ago. Parts of this book are just boring. There is no other word for it. For example: towards the end the motions of a plot are meticulously explained over a substantially drawn out period without letting us in on what the plot is. This becomes monotonous.
From other peoples reviews it seems that those who like it are drawn in by the well crafted universe that is New Crobuzon and Bas-Lag. Personally I feel it can't be considered a great book on the strength of one asset and have been left feeling like this book could have been much more that it was.
I have persevered through this book waiting to be wowed due to the multitude of positive reviews it has received from fans of sci-fi and fantasy. Unfortunately I have been left disappointed by it. Sure, Mieville creates an engaging and multi-faceted world. But it's not exceptional, just competent, and there are many competent imaginations in the world of writing.
The characters were lacking, especially the women. Lin is seemingly pointless, and could be completely removed from the story without damage to the plot. She seemingly exists only to give the reader some insight into the Khepri (another sentient race), as well as allowing for Isaac to be painted as an outsider as well as masculine yet emotional. To spite her unimportance there are pages dedicated to her history and her and Isaac's relationship. This all builds up to nothing when she vanishes abruptly half way through the story. Derkhan is dreadful. She has two emotions: a mix of sour angriness, which she's incapable of acting on, and sadness. This one she acts on, crying frequently. This is possibly why she generally gets left at the door when the men go off on dangerous missions. Yag and Lemuel both rely on stereotypes (noble savage and dandy, respectively) that allow for the reader to fill in the blanks in their characters instead of being fleshed out with words and coming across as unique or interesting.
The plot is either running or crawling, seemingly not know where it's going, even at the end. There are plot lines that just die, and others that appear from nowhere at all, or after being left in the dust 400 pages ago. Parts of this book are just boring. There is no other word for it. For example: towards the end the motions of a plot are meticulously explained over a substantially drawn out period without letting us in on what the plot is. This becomes monotonous.
From other peoples reviews it seems that those who like it are drawn in by the well crafted universe that is New Crobuzon and Bas-Lag. Personally I feel it can't be considered a great book on the strength of one asset and have been left feeling like this book could have been much more that it was.
Absolut excepțională. Am citit destule SF-uri, fantasy-uri, și steam-punk-uri, dar niciodată un melanj atât de fluid între ele nu mi-a fost dat să văd. Nu degeaba e Mieville considerat probabil cel mai bun autor de SF/fantasy al ultimilor 20 de ani.
Cartea asta e de o inventivitate interminabilă, plină de personaje unul mai memorabil ca altul (și sunt cu zecile), o intrigă care schimbă macazul după prima treime și un final pe trei nivele care îți zboară creierii. Gândiți-vă la un miez a la Tolkien, cu un mix de Michael Ende (în Neverending Story) și cu mizerabilismul post-uman al lui William Gibson (din primele două trilogii), și apoi puțin existențialism dostoievskian presărat peste tot. Totul se leagă atât de bine, lumea creată e foarte densă și are dubios de multă logică, cu aerul că totul e descoperit și nu inventat, și niciodată nu pare că se ridică în aer spre locurile alea insipide în care se duc să moară destule povești mult mai puțin credibile.
Singura chestie pe care voiam să i-o reproșez cărții e lungimea. Dar după final, m-am răzgândit. E perfectă.
Abia aștept să citesc The Scar, despre care lumea zice că e chiar mai bună decât asta.
P.S. Dacă Perdido era o carte de debut (nu e, a mai scris DOAR una înainte de asta) mă întorceam la toate celelalte cărți de debut citite și le scurtam ratingurile de câte o stea. ATÂT mi s-a părut de bună.
Cartea asta e de o inventivitate interminabilă, plină de personaje unul mai memorabil ca altul (și sunt cu zecile), o intrigă care schimbă macazul după prima treime și un final pe trei nivele care îți zboară creierii. Gândiți-vă la un miez a la Tolkien, cu un mix de Michael Ende (în Neverending Story) și cu mizerabilismul post-uman al lui William Gibson (din primele două trilogii), și apoi puțin existențialism dostoievskian presărat peste tot. Totul se leagă atât de bine, lumea creată e foarte densă și are dubios de multă logică, cu aerul că totul e descoperit și nu inventat, și niciodată nu pare că se ridică în aer spre locurile alea insipide în care se duc să moară destule povești mult mai puțin credibile.
Singura chestie pe care voiam să i-o reproșez cărții e lungimea. Dar după final, m-am răzgândit. E perfectă.
Abia aștept să citesc The Scar, despre care lumea zice că e chiar mai bună decât asta.
P.S. Dacă Perdido era o carte de debut (nu e, a mai scris DOAR una înainte de asta) mă întorceam la toate celelalte cărți de debut citite și le scurtam ratingurile de câte o stea. ATÂT mi s-a părut de bună.
I really wish I could give this book more stars. The author clearly loves it so much, and thinks everything in it is so great, that I feel almost guilty disagreeing. But that's the whole problem with it! You have to be willing to kill your darlings if they clutter the grander arc of the story. And this book is jam-packed with darlings he couldn't see his way to pruning. An embarrassment of darlings. There's too many cute ideas for the best characters and most interesting aspects of the plot to get developed as much as they deserve. (There will be spoilers in the following.)
My major problem, and this is initially going to sound kind of crazy, is that there's no antagonist. Clearly there's bad guys, we have literal demons menacing the city? Foul thought-vampires bent on destruction!
But they are not compelling to me at all, and it took some soul-searching to come to why. They're not interesting because the slake-moths are the fantasy equivalent of malarial mosquitoes. Their grand endgame is to eat a bunch and then breed. There can't be meaningful opposition if one side of the struggle isn't even sentient. It'd be like if the first 70% of Return of the Jedi were about Luke tracking down and finishing off the wendigo that roughed him up early on. If the solution to your dramatic tension is literally constructing a giant bug-zapper then the conflict can fundamentally not be emotionally compelling.
The 70% thing is the other painful part. There's this sinking feeling associated with reading poorly-paced novels, where it's dragged on and on getting to the confrontation with the main villain, and then you can look forward and see you've got another 100 pages to go. You just know the denouement is going to be painful and/or nonsensical, but at this point you're pretty well stuck, sunk costs.
Here's 7 stupid things that should've been cut:
1. sentient steam-punk robots
2. frog-people
3. hand-people
4. cactus-people
5. rare-beast-hunting mercenaries
6. chimeric crime-bosses
7. the newspaper woman
You're allowed maybe one crazy fantastic innovation every 200 pages. The Weaver, Lin (and associated bug-people), and the slake-moths are allowed to stay. All other darlings must die. Now the story is essentially that Isaac accidentally releases the moths, Lin helps him (instead of the newspaper woman), the moths are nesting in Perdido Street Station, he defeats them with the help of the crisis engine and the Weaver.
The whole plot arc where they track the moths down to the cactuar stronghold is awful. It's the kind of garden path story device that makes you say "wait, what? why?" when you realize where China is going with it. I thought it had been fairly heavily implied that the moths were in the Station in the heart of the city... but no, they're nesting here, because oh my gosh I have this idea about my cactus people and Oh My Gosh It's So Cool Let Me Tell You About It! New bit-players are recruited and immediately dispatched in a sequence which doesn't move the main plot at all and worse, doesn't feel justified by in-world logic. It didn't serve any purpose, and was thus frustrating to read.
Also, Lin's kidnapping and subsequent replacement by a different character is totally bizarre and I don't at all understand why it was written this way. There's a love interest for the main character. She gets character development time and is arguably a more interesting person than the main character. Then she gets kidnapped. The main character writes her off as dead, because the kidnapper mailed him her ear-analogue. A new character who serves no narrative purpose joins the party and doesn't ever do anything useful. It's confusing, and weakens Isaac as a character because he doesn't behave like an actual person would. I mean this is his long-term girlfriend, and he's been previously characterized as having an obsessive personality. But no, that's it, he is fine with that answer, she's gone forever. Okay, extended simile time: In Harry Potter #7 during the teleport away from Grimmauld Place, Hermione gets captured by Death Eaters (instead of just getting injured by the botched apparation). Harry and Ron decide that she's probably dead by now and they shouldn't go back. They meet up with Dean Thomas in the woods, and the newly formed threesome decides to investigate Godric's Hollow together. (Hermione isn't mentioned for the next 500 pages then suddenly reappears during the Battle for Hogwarts.) That's what this feels like.
I would here and now like to propose a new rule for fiction, namely: Thou Shalt Have But One Dramatic Plot Twist In The Finale. Corollary: the twist must both enrich and be logically consistent with the rest of the story. You’re maybe allowed two if they’re both cool and seriously Sanderson-in-Mistborn levels of premeditation. The conclusion of this is like if at the end of Sixth Sense Bruce Willis was a ghost, and also the kid and also his mom, and Bruce Willis’s wife was really the murderer. Or maybe a better comparison is that at the end of The Village it turns out that the Outsiders are really the villagers but also! they are ghosts (i.e. the initial plot twist is disappointing and shabby and poorly calculated, perhaps even more so than the addenda). The love interest is alive! Ha-ha! But now she’s dead! I got you so good! Bleh. It’s tiresome and feels disingenuous. I don’t need emotional whiplash to compound your inability to convincingly conclude a story.
This has all been very negative, so why two stars? The first maybe third of the book is comparatively tightly written, especially the construction of the grand escape of the demon caterpillar, and the sketch of the main characters’ love affair. The Weaver is probably the most interesting creature I’ve experienced in the fantasy genre. China came up with a bunch of great ideas,but kept too many for any one or two to get fair shrift, and in general couldn't keep his arms around everything. There’s the skeleton of a great story in here, and it’s frustrating to see it choked by so much adiposity.
My major problem, and this is initially going to sound kind of crazy, is that there's no antagonist. Clearly there's bad guys, we have literal demons menacing the city? Foul thought-vampires bent on destruction!
But they are not compelling to me at all, and it took some soul-searching to come to why. They're not interesting because the slake-moths are the fantasy equivalent of malarial mosquitoes. Their grand endgame is to eat a bunch and then breed. There can't be meaningful opposition if one side of the struggle isn't even sentient. It'd be like if the first 70% of Return of the Jedi were about Luke tracking down and finishing off the wendigo that roughed him up early on. If the solution to your dramatic tension is literally constructing a giant bug-zapper then the conflict can fundamentally not be emotionally compelling.
The 70% thing is the other painful part. There's this sinking feeling associated with reading poorly-paced novels, where it's dragged on and on getting to the confrontation with the main villain, and then you can look forward and see you've got another 100 pages to go. You just know the denouement is going to be painful and/or nonsensical, but at this point you're pretty well stuck, sunk costs.
Here's 7 stupid things that should've been cut:
1. sentient steam-punk robots
2. frog-people
3. hand-people
4. cactus-people
5. rare-beast-hunting mercenaries
6. chimeric crime-bosses
7. the newspaper woman
You're allowed maybe one crazy fantastic innovation every 200 pages. The Weaver, Lin (and associated bug-people), and the slake-moths are allowed to stay. All other darlings must die. Now the story is essentially that Isaac accidentally releases the moths, Lin helps him (instead of the newspaper woman), the moths are nesting in Perdido Street Station, he defeats them with the help of the crisis engine and the Weaver.
The whole plot arc where they track the moths down to the cactuar stronghold is awful. It's the kind of garden path story device that makes you say "wait, what? why?" when you realize where China is going with it. I thought it had been fairly heavily implied that the moths were in the Station in the heart of the city... but no, they're nesting here, because oh my gosh I have this idea about my cactus people and Oh My Gosh It's So Cool Let Me Tell You About It! New bit-players are recruited and immediately dispatched in a sequence which doesn't move the main plot at all and worse, doesn't feel justified by in-world logic. It didn't serve any purpose, and was thus frustrating to read.
Also, Lin's kidnapping and subsequent replacement by a different character is totally bizarre and I don't at all understand why it was written this way. There's a love interest for the main character. She gets character development time and is arguably a more interesting person than the main character. Then she gets kidnapped. The main character writes her off as dead, because the kidnapper mailed him her ear-analogue. A new character who serves no narrative purpose joins the party and doesn't ever do anything useful. It's confusing, and weakens Isaac as a character because he doesn't behave like an actual person would. I mean this is his long-term girlfriend, and he's been previously characterized as having an obsessive personality. But no, that's it, he is fine with that answer, she's gone forever. Okay, extended simile time: In Harry Potter #7 during the teleport away from Grimmauld Place, Hermione gets captured by Death Eaters (instead of just getting injured by the botched apparation). Harry and Ron decide that she's probably dead by now and they shouldn't go back. They meet up with Dean Thomas in the woods, and the newly formed threesome decides to investigate Godric's Hollow together. (Hermione isn't mentioned for the next 500 pages then suddenly reappears during the Battle for Hogwarts.) That's what this feels like.
I would here and now like to propose a new rule for fiction, namely: Thou Shalt Have But One Dramatic Plot Twist In The Finale. Corollary: the twist must both enrich and be logically consistent with the rest of the story. You’re maybe allowed two if they’re both cool and seriously Sanderson-in-Mistborn levels of premeditation. The conclusion of this is like if at the end of Sixth Sense Bruce Willis was a ghost, and also the kid and also his mom, and Bruce Willis’s wife was really the murderer. Or maybe a better comparison is that at the end of The Village it turns out that the Outsiders are really the villagers but also! they are ghosts (i.e. the initial plot twist is disappointing and shabby and poorly calculated, perhaps even more so than the addenda). The love interest is alive! Ha-ha! But now she’s dead! I got you so good! Bleh. It’s tiresome and feels disingenuous. I don’t need emotional whiplash to compound your inability to convincingly conclude a story.
This has all been very negative, so why two stars? The first maybe third of the book is comparatively tightly written, especially the construction of the grand escape of the demon caterpillar, and the sketch of the main characters’ love affair. The Weaver is probably the most interesting creature I’ve experienced in the fantasy genre. China came up with a bunch of great ideas,but kept too many for any one or two to get fair shrift, and in general couldn't keep his arms around everything. There’s the skeleton of a great story in here, and it’s frustrating to see it choked by so much adiposity.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated