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3.97 AVERAGE
3.97 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-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:
Complicated
It introduced me to the world of weird fantasy. A book with a very rich story and world-building. I loved the questions it raised, and the story was very interesting.
adventurous
dark
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
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence
Moderate: Torture, Violence, Police brutality, Schizophrenia/Psychosis
Minor: Drug abuse, Sexual violence
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Rather than "plot" or "character" focused, this book is the secret third thing: worldbuilding focused. The events of the story and the types of characters introduced all serve to tell the reader something about the world and its culture, which is where Perdido Street Station shines the most. Most fantasy worlds build on existing tropes, but Bas-Lag is different, distinct. The worldbuilding is my favorite part of the book. I especially liked reading about the different races and cultures, from fairly mundane humanoids to weird, otherworldly beings. Their different practices and religions, types of magic and fantasy science. It's fresh and new, far outside the usual template of "humans and slightly differently flavored humans."
The flaw of being worldbuilding-focused is, for me, that it doesn't hook me. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed reading it. It's just that I tended to forget to pick it up again after I put it down. It doesn't help that I usually read while eating, and this book is...unappetizing? New Crobuzon is a gross, polluted city, full of vice and violence. Doesn't make for light lunch reading, as interesting as it is to learn about it.
Other things that should be addressed...Well, I saw other readers who find the writing pretentious? It does use a lot of obscure vocabulary, but it doesn't feel particularly pretentious to me; it doesn't feel like it's using big words just for the sake of sounding smart, I mean. It gives the writing a kind of detached, almost scientific vibe which highlights the world better than the characters' emotions. I think it works with what the book is going for.
All in all, a book for a specific type of nerd. I'll probably read the next book in the series, but I need better habits than reading almost exclusively when eating if I want to finish in a reasonable timeframe lol
The flaw of being worldbuilding-focused is, for me, that it doesn't hook me. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed reading it. It's just that I tended to forget to pick it up again after I put it down. It doesn't help that I usually read while eating, and this book is...unappetizing? New Crobuzon is a gross, polluted city, full of vice and violence. Doesn't make for light lunch reading, as interesting as it is to learn about it.
Other things that should be addressed...Well, I saw other readers who find the writing pretentious? It does use a lot of obscure vocabulary, but it doesn't feel particularly pretentious to me; it doesn't feel like it's using big words just for the sake of sounding smart, I mean. It gives the writing a kind of detached, almost scientific vibe which highlights the world better than the characters' emotions. I think it works with what the book is going for.
All in all, a book for a specific type of nerd. I'll probably read the next book in the series, but I need better habits than reading almost exclusively when eating if I want to finish in a reasonable timeframe lol
Content Warnings
(I'll try to add content warnings later if I can still edit this review)
I remember reading this. It is a book filled with evocative phrases. The story though. As I read it again I see it for what it is. Pointless misery. Perhaps if there had been a single moment of redemption for anyone, I might have kept my 5 star rating. As it is though, I really don't think I can recommend this highly. It is well written. The characters are vivid. It is a tough book to re read.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This is the weirdest book I have ever read. Almost everything that happens sounds like it's from a bizarre dream, which is rather fitting with the themes of the story. The terrible choices and mistakes of the characters keep them and the reader on their toes and I never really knew what qpuld happen next or how it would end. It's a bit of a slow read especially earlier in the book but for the last half I couldn't stop thinking about it and couldn't put it down.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I read this in reverse order of the New Crobuzon books (after The Scar) and I'm glad. I'm not sure I would have read a second Miéville book if this had been my first. Perdido Street Station was...fine.
Miéville has a glorious imagination and you can feel how much he loves every dirty inch of New Crobuzon. And my god, the *planning* that must have gone into this world to make it feel so lived in. Miéville was sold to me as an author who writes dialogue and information dumps in a very realistic way. He'll list off three different races or mention a famous battle, but you don't get it explained to you at that moment because that's not how people actually talk. If it's important to the plot, he'll loop back around chapters later and give you more information about the Vodyanoi or the Scaramundi Riots or whatever, and in the meantime you have just kind of bob along in the narrative current, letting weird fantasy shit flow past you, trusting that anything important will be explained later. And that's a frustrating way to read a book this long.
Most of the things I loved about this book were ideas or vignettes or scenes where he's clearly having a lot of fun exploring a concept or a cool visual moment. There were things in here that I hadn't seen before in fantasy or sci-fi: the communicatrix who could physically embody someone while being a conduit to communicate with them; the mid-air fight between the slake-moths and the Handlingers; everything about the Weaver; the khepri's sexual dimorphism; Lin's weird cult past; the bit where the voices of the damned aren't the echoes of a demon's voice, they *are* the demon's voice. But these were mostly rewards for slogging through the rest of the book and I'm sad that for me, these were the high points of the book as a whole.
Long stretches of it just weren't fun to read. And I don't believe that everything we read should be wall to wall fun, but how delighted I was by the gems (the Council using a hollowed out body as an avatar! The whole concept of the Remade!) really put the rest of the book into sharp contrast.
And then there's the two thorny characters I keep coming back to & don't quite know what to do with: Yagharek and Lin. Yag's crime reveal really feels like both a cheap rug pull and an excuse for making a clumsy point about rape and how rape is (it turns out) bad. Ha, you got me, Miéville! I sympathized with a rapist because I didn't know he was one! Sure taught me a lesson about something or other. It's just...clumsy.
And Lin's fate also feels cheap to me. Which maybe is the point? (smart people do stupid things all the time, get over it and welcome to reality, wake up sheeple etc etc.) But ugh, man. You make a brilliant male scientist and a brilliant female artist, she gets kidnapped and physically abused and traumatized to the point of no recovery so that you can make a point about how caring and broken male scientist is? Sigh. Okay. Also her turning to face the slake moth was set up as something she couldn't help but do because of her creative and inquisitive nature, which again: cheap.
Or maybe Miéville isn't trying to make any point at all, and maybe that's the problem (for me, a person who had mixed feelings about this beloved book). If your starting premise is that society and civilization are savage and chaotic and brutal then I don't want to read a book that posits that right out of the gate and just keeps doubling down. I want the premise to be complicated or upended or redeemed somehow and Perdido did not accomplish that. It's beautiful and dark and weird and harsh all the way through, which for me was too much of the same thing for too many pages.
Miéville has a glorious imagination and you can feel how much he loves every dirty inch of New Crobuzon. And my god, the *planning* that must have gone into this world to make it feel so lived in. Miéville was sold to me as an author who writes dialogue and information dumps in a very realistic way. He'll list off three different races or mention a famous battle, but you don't get it explained to you at that moment because that's not how people actually talk. If it's important to the plot, he'll loop back around chapters later and give you more information about the Vodyanoi or the Scaramundi Riots or whatever, and in the meantime you have just kind of bob along in the narrative current, letting weird fantasy shit flow past you, trusting that anything important will be explained later. And that's a frustrating way to read a book this long.
Most of the things I loved about this book were ideas or vignettes or scenes where he's clearly having a lot of fun exploring a concept or a cool visual moment. There were things in here that I hadn't seen before in fantasy or sci-fi: the communicatrix who could physically embody someone while being a conduit to communicate with them; the mid-air fight between the slake-moths and the Handlingers; everything about the Weaver; the khepri's sexual dimorphism; Lin's weird cult past; the bit where the voices of the damned aren't the echoes of a demon's voice, they *are* the demon's voice. But these were mostly rewards for slogging through the rest of the book and I'm sad that for me, these were the high points of the book as a whole.
Long stretches of it just weren't fun to read. And I don't believe that everything we read should be wall to wall fun, but how delighted I was by the gems (the Council using a hollowed out body as an avatar! The whole concept of the Remade!) really put the rest of the book into sharp contrast.
And then there's the two thorny characters I keep coming back to & don't quite know what to do with: Yagharek and Lin. Yag's crime reveal really feels like both a cheap rug pull and an excuse for making a clumsy point about rape and how rape is (it turns out) bad. Ha, you got me, Miéville! I sympathized with a rapist because I didn't know he was one! Sure taught me a lesson about something or other. It's just...clumsy.
And Lin's fate also feels cheap to me. Which maybe is the point? (smart people do stupid things all the time, get over it and welcome to reality, wake up sheeple etc etc.) But ugh, man. You make a brilliant male scientist and a brilliant female artist, she gets kidnapped and physically abused and traumatized to the point of no recovery so that you can make a point about how caring and broken male scientist is? Sigh. Okay. Also her turning to face the slake moth was set up as something she couldn't help but do because of her creative and inquisitive nature, which again: cheap.
Or maybe Miéville isn't trying to make any point at all, and maybe that's the problem (for me, a person who had mixed feelings about this beloved book). If your starting premise is that society and civilization are savage and chaotic and brutal then I don't want to read a book that posits that right out of the gate and just keeps doubling down. I want the premise to be complicated or upended or redeemed somehow and Perdido did not accomplish that. It's beautiful and dark and weird and harsh all the way through, which for me was too much of the same thing for too many pages.
i've read thus far and still do not care at all about what's going on. also huge stretches of this story just completely bored me, where we'd be following random unnamed characters doing. stuff??? idk; i don't wanna read this any longer. there were good parts scattered within, so that's why i'm giving 2 stars and not 1.
If you'd have asked me half a novel ago I'd have told you that Perdido Street Station is a showcase for the ASTOUNDING world that Mieville has created in Bas-Lag, but that the plot exists primarily as a means for him to guide the reader in exploring this world. But hey, I was so impressed with said world that I was totally satisfied with what I’d been given; the elements that were on display - the varied races that inhabit the city, their unique and detailed societies, the incredible physical places of the city itself - were so engaging that I was more than content with just being led around between them.
And then, around the middle of the story, the shit hit the fan. The elements all came together and it was unveiled the intricate, multitude ways that they had already been interacting under the surface of the plot. It - was - awesome.
But that’s not to say that the action then overshadows the protagonists, who are each well developed, deep of character, and realistically flawed (there are no cardboard-cut-out heroes here). The same is true of the complex and multifaceted relationship between Isaac and Lin, which was a realistic and interesting portrayal of a particularly strange breed of ‘forbidden love’.
I’m awarding Mieville several bonus points for implementing a number of races with varying degrees of Lovecraftian-ism. The fact that a number of the multiple planes of existence in Bas-Lag had been quantified and codified did nothing to detract from the horror and awe that was inspired by some of the more esoteric races native to (or between) strange other planes. Let me just say that The Weaver was unquestionably my favourite character.
I’d suggest Perdido Street Station to anyone interested in the new weird genre, for those looking for some sci-fi/urban fantasy that’s unlike anything they’re likely to have tasted before, and for those who think they might be interested in what is “basically a secondary world fantasy with Victorian era technology” and “an early industrial capitalist world of a fairly grubby, police statey kind”.
And then, around the middle of the story, the shit hit the fan. The elements all came together and it was unveiled the intricate, multitude ways that they had already been interacting under the surface of the plot. It - was - awesome.
But that’s not to say that the action then overshadows the protagonists, who are each well developed, deep of character, and realistically flawed (there are no cardboard-cut-out heroes here). The same is true of the complex and multifaceted relationship between Isaac and Lin, which was a realistic and interesting portrayal of a particularly strange breed of ‘forbidden love’.
I’m awarding Mieville several bonus points for implementing a number of races with varying degrees of Lovecraftian-ism. The fact that a number of the multiple planes of existence in Bas-Lag had been quantified and codified did nothing to detract from the horror and awe that was inspired by some of the more esoteric races native to (or between) strange other planes. Let me just say that The Weaver was unquestionably my favourite character.
I’d suggest Perdido Street Station to anyone interested in the new weird genre, for those looking for some sci-fi/urban fantasy that’s unlike anything they’re likely to have tasted before, and for those who think they might be interested in what is “basically a secondary world fantasy with Victorian era technology” and “an early industrial capitalist world of a fairly grubby, police statey kind”.