Take a photo of a barcode or cover
halfmanhalfbook 's review for:
Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville
New Crobuzon is a city that is almost a state in its own right. The upper echelons are governed by a dictatorship, and the underclass are subject to the whims of the criminal elite. Miéville has created a city that you can almost smell when reading it. It has a feel of somewhere in the middle of the Victorian age and is dark, damp and imposing.
The tech in the book is steampunk, and is straightforward and uncomplicated, with basic pistols, clockwork devices, steam powered computers that use cards to programme them, but he has raised it to another level with the addition of elyctricity from simple batteries and magic.
But it is with the characters and people that inhabit this city state that he has made this so very different. There are regular humans with the regular count of legs and arms, Khepri with insect heads, cactacae who are green people with spikes like cactuses, the garuda, part bird part human and the vodyanoi, amphibians with human form, and the Remade who are those who have extra limbs or machines or other parts added.
And in this richly imagined, vivid, alien and yet slightly familiar landscape the plot is draped. Isaac has agreed to help a garuda who no longer has his wings, to be able to fly again. Whilst researching methods of flight of birds and other creatures he acquires a grub with fantastic colouring. It nearly dies, but when he discovers that it likes the new narcotic on the street, it starts to grow rapidly and changes into a cocoon and one night is gone. But this is no regular insect, this is a slake moth, a huge humanoid insect that feeds on fear, and the excretions make the new narcotic. It finds its four other companions and frees them, and shear terror descends on New Crobuzon as the victim count grows. And the authorities scrabble to find these creatures, the criminal want them back for the drugs and Issac seeks to destroy them too.
Miéville has taken the genres of Steampunk, gothic horror and fantasy, popped them in a blender and turned the dial to 11 with this book. The way that he describes the city and the inhabitants is full of detail and intensity. There are parts that are chilling too. The only reason that I didn’t give this five was I though that the plot was not so strong, but it is a solid 4.5
The tech in the book is steampunk, and is straightforward and uncomplicated, with basic pistols, clockwork devices, steam powered computers that use cards to programme them, but he has raised it to another level with the addition of elyctricity from simple batteries and magic.
But it is with the characters and people that inhabit this city state that he has made this so very different. There are regular humans with the regular count of legs and arms, Khepri with insect heads, cactacae who are green people with spikes like cactuses, the garuda, part bird part human and the vodyanoi, amphibians with human form, and the Remade who are those who have extra limbs or machines or other parts added.
And in this richly imagined, vivid, alien and yet slightly familiar landscape the plot is draped. Isaac has agreed to help a garuda who no longer has his wings, to be able to fly again. Whilst researching methods of flight of birds and other creatures he acquires a grub with fantastic colouring. It nearly dies, but when he discovers that it likes the new narcotic on the street, it starts to grow rapidly and changes into a cocoon and one night is gone. But this is no regular insect, this is a slake moth, a huge humanoid insect that feeds on fear, and the excretions make the new narcotic. It finds its four other companions and frees them, and shear terror descends on New Crobuzon as the victim count grows. And the authorities scrabble to find these creatures, the criminal want them back for the drugs and Issac seeks to destroy them too.
Miéville has taken the genres of Steampunk, gothic horror and fantasy, popped them in a blender and turned the dial to 11 with this book. The way that he describes the city and the inhabitants is full of detail and intensity. There are parts that are chilling too. The only reason that I didn’t give this five was I though that the plot was not so strong, but it is a solid 4.5