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Perdido Street Station
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780345459404
ISBN: 0345459407
Label: Del Rey
Manufacturer: Del Rey
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 640
Publication Date: July 29, 2003
Publisher: Del Rey
Release Date: July 29, 2003
Studio: Del Rey
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Editorial Review:
When Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," she could have been talking about China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. The novel's publication met with a burst of extravagant praise from Big Name Authors and was almost instantly a multiaward finalist. You expect hyperbole in blurbs; and sometimes unworthy books win awards, so nominations don't necessarily mean much. But Perdido Street Station deserves the acclaim. It's ambitious and brilliant and--rarity of rarities--sui generis. Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's Dickensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.
Generous, gaudy, grand, grotesque, gigantic, grim, grimy, and glorious, Perdito Street Station is a bloody fascinating book. It's also so massive that you may begin to feel you're getting too much of a good thing; just slow down and enjoy.
Yes, but what is Perdido Street Station about? To oversimplify: the eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for flying things to study leads to verification of his controversial unified theory of the strange sciences of his world. It also brings him an odd, unknown grub stolen from a secret government experiment so perilous it is sold to a ruthless drug lord--the same crime boss who hired Lin. The grub emerges from its cocoon, becomes an extraordinarily dangerous monster, and escapes Isaac's lab to ravage New Crobuzon, even as his discovery becomes known to a hidden, powerful, and sinister intelligence. Lin disappears and Isaac finds himself pursued by the monster, the drug lord, the government and armies of New Crobuzon, and other, more bizarre factions, not all confined to his world. --Cynthia Ward
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Rewarding fantasy world for those who have the patience
I read this novel after reading another of Mieville's works - Un Lun Dun, which I enjoyed immensely for it's twisted, fantastical plot. However, Perdido Street Station came up a little short for me. The plot of this novel was again, exactly what I expect from Mieville - weird, twisted, grungy and 100% unique. Mieville takes the reader through a fantasy world like nothing you expect and nothing you'll see again. From bizarre races of creatures with woman bodies and beetle heads, to deals with demons ... Read More
Rating:  - Not your typical fantasy (Thank God!)
For the past 30 years or so, the fantasy genre has, with the exception of a few great works from a few great authors, mired itself in a situation where it has become unimaginative and unoriginal where works have become practically clones of each other. In recent years though, a few inspired souls have gradually tried to take the genre out of its familiar and commercially safe elements hoping to take fantasy back to an environment when it was wide-open in terms of storyline, setting, characterizations, ... Read More
Rating: - Thick, Unsavory and Wonderful
Perdido Street Station is a dense book, crowded and alive like the city of New Crobuzon where it's set. Not necessarily in plotting - while Mieville sets up a large number of plot threads, once that is done they coalesce rapidly, leaving a large part of the book with a straightforward narrative. But the writing and imagery bring you into the city itself, the lives of the inhabitants and creatures; it's a remarkable bit of writing, though perhaps not the easiest book to read.
New Crobuzon ... Read More
Rating:  - Review of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station
SUMMARY: No one can fault Miéville for a lack of imagination; but a jumble of cool ideas does not save a book hampered by glacial pacing and major style problems.
The sprawling, dilapidated city of New Crobuzon is the main attraction of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, and it is a place where anything goes: there are golems made out of trash, and immensely powerful dimension-traversing giant spiders (which speak in frenzied, delirious poetry), and moths with prismatic wings that eat ... Read More
Rating: - Never met an idea he didn't like
This book is interesting, at first. There is a strange new world, richly visualized and described. There are unusual characters, about whom the reader learns gradually instead of having everything spelled out. But it soon starts to feel like the author was making it up as he went along. And it could definitely have used a stronger hand in the editing process. It's clear the author never had an idea he didn't like and didn't feel obliged to cram into the story. Every new character is cooler and more outrageous ... Read More
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