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3.97 AVERAGE
3.97 AVERAGE
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Surrealism had a child with fantasy and Perdido Street Station came out. Darting from dream-logic to gritty Victorian-esque worlds. I've never found a fantasy world more alien.
I've never seen someone remove their fantastical world from that of our own as much. It felt like every page was true discovery. Almost puzzle solving.
I was lost and found over and over again.
I would hesitate to call this fantasy / sci-fi like it tends to be lumped in with.
Elements of the fantastical are woven in to a genre-defying narrative that feels almost like an exercise in losing me in a world.
I've never seen someone remove their fantastical world from that of our own as much. It felt like every page was true discovery. Almost puzzle solving.
I was lost and found over and over again.
I would hesitate to call this fantasy / sci-fi like it tends to be lumped in with.
Elements of the fantastical are woven in to a genre-defying narrative that feels almost like an exercise in losing me in a world.
Forgive the crude description, but I can't help but think that this book felt like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde meets Starship Troopers, but instead of fighting the bugs you are f****** them. I loved it.
I’m a very emotional person, or at least that’s what all personality tests claim. That being said, I’m not a Yorick (I mean Sterne’s Yorick, not Shakespeare’s). I’m not easily impressed and I always like to weigh the pros and cons, and relate the smaller fragments to the big picture – which, I think, makes me very rational as well. My belief is that the reason I’m always diagnosed as emotional is because, besides being quite instinctive, my automatic response in general is to react emotionally in relation to my rational conclusions.
So, yes, I confess, reading this book kind of made me develop a crush on Mr. Miéville.
Now I’ll try and prove to you that I can be rational as well by stating why is it that Perdido is so amazing.
First thing to keep in mind is that this is a fantasy novel and it is mainly focussed on world building. What mesmerizes me is how the fantastic correlates with the real in order to construct a critique or a tale not only of fictional beings and characters, but also ourselves. New Crobuzon is a fictional city in which different sapient species coexist. The category of sapient species becomes a source of tensions that mirror those that often occur from race, gender or class differences, for instance.
Perdido also makes a good point concerning posthumanity (I mean AI) and ethics. The relation of the machine and waste makes for an interesting source for further thought. I liked the insistence in stating that being rubbish, magically turns something invisible. It certainly does – which doesn’t mean rubbish won’t come back to bite you somewhere suggestive.
The thing I was mostly drawn to was the prolonged statement of how science and art must unite to be beneficial for humanity (or sapient species, if we’re talking inside the world of the novel). I truly believe that science is worth a rotten mattress without art, without literature, without aesthetic and ethical thought. And I think Perdido is with me on this. And I love it for it. Inside joke/comment(?) for those who have read the book (no spoiler): our webs are tremendously ugly lately, I think. Because we aren’t paying attention. We are all stuck inside our tiny labs trying to come up with the secret of flight... But do we deserve to fly – at all?
Last but not least, Mr. Miéville writes some sexy prose. I can understand complaints about his vocabulary – as a non-native English speaker I found myself consulting the dictionary quite frequently the first few pages. But this only adds to the reading experience. New Crobuzon is such a weird place, it definitely requires some odd words to tell its story. So much oddity together seems to belong and fit each other neatly. And the writing is truly beautiful, flows nicely, sometimes makes you pause and stare at a wall awestruck, imagining. “It [Perdido Street Station] sat weighty and huge in the west, spotted with irregular clusters of light like an earthbound constellation”. Sigh.
I just noticed I didn’t refer to the plot at all. Maybe it’s better this way. Go into New Crobuzon with no expectations. Enjoy your stay. Don’t forget to bring your moth repellent.
So, yes, I confess, reading this book kind of made me develop a crush on Mr. Miéville.
Now I’ll try and prove to you that I can be rational as well by stating why is it that Perdido is so amazing.
First thing to keep in mind is that this is a fantasy novel and it is mainly focussed on world building. What mesmerizes me is how the fantastic correlates with the real in order to construct a critique or a tale not only of fictional beings and characters, but also ourselves. New Crobuzon is a fictional city in which different sapient species coexist. The category of sapient species becomes a source of tensions that mirror those that often occur from race, gender or class differences, for instance.
Perdido also makes a good point concerning posthumanity (I mean AI) and ethics. The relation of the machine and waste makes for an interesting source for further thought. I liked the insistence in stating that being rubbish, magically turns something invisible. It certainly does – which doesn’t mean rubbish won’t come back to bite you somewhere suggestive.
The thing I was mostly drawn to was the prolonged statement of how science and art must unite to be beneficial for humanity (or sapient species, if we’re talking inside the world of the novel). I truly believe that science is worth a rotten mattress without art, without literature, without aesthetic and ethical thought. And I think Perdido is with me on this. And I love it for it. Inside joke/comment(?) for those who have read the book (no spoiler): our webs are tremendously ugly lately, I think. Because we aren’t paying attention. We are all stuck inside our tiny labs trying to come up with the secret of flight... But do we deserve to fly – at all?
Last but not least, Mr. Miéville writes some sexy prose. I can understand complaints about his vocabulary – as a non-native English speaker I found myself consulting the dictionary quite frequently the first few pages. But this only adds to the reading experience. New Crobuzon is such a weird place, it definitely requires some odd words to tell its story. So much oddity together seems to belong and fit each other neatly. And the writing is truly beautiful, flows nicely, sometimes makes you pause and stare at a wall awestruck, imagining. “It [Perdido Street Station] sat weighty and huge in the west, spotted with irregular clusters of light like an earthbound constellation”. Sigh.
I just noticed I didn’t refer to the plot at all. Maybe it’s better this way. Go into New Crobuzon with no expectations. Enjoy your stay. Don’t forget to bring your moth repellent.
There are good--great, exciting, thrilling--ideas in this book. But the author seems to spend too much time world-building (for my tastes) and tells a story that (while okay) is not the story I would have liked to have read. Added to this, the writing is unpolished and contains tropes and mannerisms that annoyed me (an editor by trade), but which I am sure 95% of readers will not be fazed by.
I was excited to read China Mieville before reading Perdido Street Station, and now I am less so, but I will certainly look forward to sampling one of his later books. I know Perdido Street Station was just his second or third novel, and I hope and suspect that his later ones increase in quality.
I was excited to read China Mieville before reading Perdido Street Station, and now I am less so, but I will certainly look forward to sampling one of his later books. I know Perdido Street Station was just his second or third novel, and I hope and suspect that his later ones increase in quality.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Gore
Moderate: Rape
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Perdido Street Station truly is a summation and foundation to the new idea of Weird fiction: science fiction, fantasy, and horror are taken from with equal relish, clear tropes are laid out before us and, like a child with its bowl of neapolitan ice cream, mixed and swirled together into something almost unrecognisable. As you might expect, the result is entirely to each individual’s taste.
Maybe the metaphor is a little mean, instead we could draw upon Frankenstein and his monstrous creation, born a stitched mess of what was leftover, but whose life is as real as any other, whose emotions are as powerful and uncontrollable as any other’s. In a sense this is simply how all art comes about until the author is capable of smoothing over the boundaries, or, even, fully integrating ideas together, like the sinews of muscle.
What Miéville does differently here, though, is celebrate those boundaries. He not only allows you to see where one influence comes from, but happily points it out, then the next, then another, over and over. He compiles this mixture of mad scientists, demon bargains, sentient parasites, developing artificial intelligence, and so much more all so he can smash them together in his little playground.
On top of that is the vast array of creatures he borrows and makes himself to populate to his city: bird people; frog people; sentient cacti; people that look like humans, but have scarabs for heads; and, again, so much more.
He also fills the world with history and culture. Not every question gets its answer, but many of the peoples living there are not native and, in fact, a few are the children of refugees going back different numbers of generations. Each people had a way of life where they came from and had to give up some amount to live in the same city as everyone else. Some still have family out there that practice those beliefs. Some don’t even have a country to return to.
All of this is proof of a healthy imagination, what actually makes Perdido Street Station so great is Miéville’s ability to weave numerous threads together. Stories of a mob boss’ narcissism, of political upheaval, of a man re-inventing flight, of unspeakable evils unleashed upon the (mostly) innocent populace. This story doesn’t just borrow from all those old ideas, it takes them and leashes them together into a nigh untamable beast. Yet Miéville does it.
For the most part we follow Isaac, renegade — or so he hopes we believe — scientist. He is commissioned by a garuda — bird person, more or less — into finding a way for him to fly again after his wings were sawn off. We also follow Lin, a khepri — a scarab-headed person — Isaac’s lover and an artist who’s recently been introduced to a new client. What at first seems noble, ordinary, or only slightly odd begins to fall apart into confusion, pain, and disarray, and it’s not until the final chapters the threads Miéville has laid out become taut, revealing the full picture of his world, and the consequences of each character’s actions.
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Love the language. Characters are not deep.
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
reflective
sad
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
Interesting world-building and a solid story with a satisfying conclusion. It’s a bit on the wordy side, and the first half felt dragged out – I almost dropped it because of that. Luckily, just before the middle, it really picked up. It left me curious about the rest of the universe, and I’ll definitely give the other books a shot.