Scan barcode
A review by outcolder
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
4.0
This is the darkest of the three, and the one I read last. All three are amazing and if you like fantasy at all and you haven't been to Bas Lag yet, get on it already.
This next bit might be a spoiler, so, be warned.
I thought it was interesting how the two consciousnesses that Isaac combines to make the crisis engine in a battle with the slake moths were both, like, sociologists. The Weaver just automatically sees all the connections as a web and it's cosmic. The Construct Council is ... okay, just trying to "maximize" itself as Isaac puts it ... trying to learn everything about the city and to do so it must connect itself into a giant network everywhere. Well, okay, I guess it is a stretch to say sociologists, but they are both about making connections across society and the space it occupies and then experiencing those connections inside themselves yet they are opposite enough in the way that they do it so that they can kind of represent pure id and pure ego respectively. Like the id and the ego of New Crobuzon. Yeah, so that was cool. Like, philosophy.
I like this kind of urban fantasy a lot more than Tolkien and his derivatives. Also, I dig the politics.
This next bit might be a spoiler, so, be warned.
I thought it was interesting how the two consciousnesses that Isaac combines to make the crisis engine in a battle with the slake moths were both, like, sociologists. The Weaver just automatically sees all the connections as a web and it's cosmic. The Construct Council is ... okay, just trying to "maximize" itself as Isaac puts it ... trying to learn everything about the city and to do so it must connect itself into a giant network everywhere. Well, okay, I guess it is a stretch to say sociologists, but they are both about making connections across society and the space it occupies and then experiencing those connections inside themselves yet they are opposite enough in the way that they do it so that they can kind of represent pure id and pure ego respectively. Like the id and the ego of New Crobuzon. Yeah, so that was cool. Like, philosophy.
I like this kind of urban fantasy a lot more than Tolkien and his derivatives. Also, I dig the politics.