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frasersimons 's review for:
Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville
What an enthralling and wild ride this is. Grim dark grotesque city with a dash of literary influence. Bug people and humans, and an amalgamations of the two, living in a fairly literalized organism of a city. Tied together with a fairly simple plot that becomes intricate and cyclical, thematically. Even the romance angle worked for me.
It is 100% filed under authors who have done so much comprehensive worldbuilding and want to show it off, stylistically. Which will be only for some. Personally, I appreciated the hard world building techniques and how information was rolled out. Both evocative and informative, without being overwhelming. You can always tell when someone is flying by the seat of their pants with soft world building (Harry Potter), and sometimes it works, but for something this different, I really think it would have lost some of the magic.
The only thing I did not like that much was a part of the ending. While it had a open at the close satisfaction, it sure felt overly hard nosed and not really following the fiction as established. Like an editor said it needed to be more punchy at that particular spot, and so it got the gauntlet. Still rounded up to a 5 from a 4 and change. But it did curb my enthusiasm slightly. However, all the times I was completely mesmerized by how different and awesome the imaginative powers brought to bear about seemingly every single detail of the setting, as well as how far I read quite a massive book, really does point to it still being a 5 star read, I think.
It is 100% filed under authors who have done so much comprehensive worldbuilding and want to show it off, stylistically. Which will be only for some. Personally, I appreciated the hard world building techniques and how information was rolled out. Both evocative and informative, without being overwhelming. You can always tell when someone is flying by the seat of their pants with soft world building (Harry Potter), and sometimes it works, but for something this different, I really think it would have lost some of the magic.
The only thing I did not like that much was a part of the ending. While it had a open at the close satisfaction, it sure felt overly hard nosed and not really following the fiction as established. Like an editor said it needed to be more punchy at that particular spot, and so it got the gauntlet. Still rounded up to a 5 from a 4 and change. But it did curb my enthusiasm slightly. However, all the times I was completely mesmerized by how different and awesome the imaginative powers brought to bear about seemingly every single detail of the setting, as well as how far I read quite a massive book, really does point to it still being a 5 star read, I think.