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Summary: A super reading experience
Review: This book swept me away from the very first pages, and I carried it with me wherever I went from then on. It's the work of a talented and creative mind. I appreciate books that challenge the reader, and Mieville does just that. His world is both dangerous and unfamiliar and yet in no time I understood the politics, the art, the science, the foods, the magic, the neighborhoods ect... I am very glad to have discovered this book via Amazon, and will read anything Mieville writes from now on.
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Summary: get this book!
Review: I have been an avid reader for almost 30 years, and I have never read a novel that captivated me like Perdido Street Station. This book was the most engrossing, immersive, wonderful reading experience I've ever had--I finished it in 2 marathon readings over a 36 hour period, and when it was done, I wanted more. Mr. Mieville has an eye for detail, and a rich, vivid prose that makes you feel like a citizen of New Crobuzon, the city he brings to such incredible life in the pages of this novel.
I'm afraid my review is already beginning to suffer from an overuse of superlatives, but in this case they are deserved. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Aside from a very interesting plot (which I will give no hints to--get the book!), the account of the city the plot takes place in is worth the price of the novel ; I have never seen a better-imagined or better described place, even in a non-fiction book :)
I will end this now with the initial exhortation--GET THIS BOOK! You won't regret it.
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Summary: This is a great book
Review: I read a lot of sci-fi books, and have been wading more and more into the realms of fantasy; This book is the best combination of the two I have read. It's dark and twisted, but it is also humorous and somewhat uplifting. I highly recommend Perdido Street Station to anyone looking for a good long read.
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Summary: I did...and I didn't
Review: This is a book that is beautifully written, amazingly imaginative and unique in both style and content. However, had I known what it was about before I read it, I likely would have passed. This is not a book for the easily shocked or the weak of stomach. I won't tell you why. A friend who read it commented that when she was done she wanted to "floss her mind." Nor is it a book to be read if you've had a rough week and are looking for escape. There is no escape here, either for the reader or for Mr. Mieville's beleaguered characters. Save a visit to Perdido Street for a time when your mind is in a positive frame. But if you're looking for a book that will shatter your image of what speculative fiction is about and give the middle digit to those snobs who insist genre fiction has no literary merit, then so NOT miss this book.
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Summary: What can I say?
Review: This book is completely indescribable. I have no way to express with my limited vocabulary what China Mieville has accomplished in over 700 pages with a complete mastery of the English language. There's no way I could ever explain his complex plot and wonderful characters. The book was very moving at times, it sent goosebumps down my spine at others, and occassionally made me laugh, and I was always astounded at the inventiveness of his created "city", which is more like an entire world, and at the very least a country. The first time I tried to write a review about this book, it didn't work. I just couldn't explain the little things all over the book that make it great. It has to be read. Well, I'll stop rambling now......just go out and buy it.......
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Summary: A tsunami of dark invention
Review: Once a decade or so, a writer of fantastic fiction arrives with a volume containing such a torrent of vivid and unpredictable ideas that it seems surprising one book could contain it all. Last time around, it was Stephenson's "Snow Crash." Three decades earlier, though some might quibble with the genre, it was Pynchon's "V." This go-round, it's Mieville's "Perdido Street Station." Readers ignore these writers at their peril. Comparisons to other writers in such cases are inept and all but pointless. No, there's nothing of Dickens here except the welter of placenames tinged with Victorian London. There's nothing of Peake except the way a rotting labyrinth of mountainous slapdash architecture becomes a major character. Like Peake, Mieville is a visionary, who paints his scenes indelibly on the eye in all their riotous profusion; and you could come closer to describing him by comparing him to painters. Specifically, I'd liken him to a chimerical union of Hogarth and Hieronymus Bosch. His city of New Crobuzon is gigantic and detailed. Its inhabitants, human and non-human, flood into it from the far larger world of Bas-Lag, the shape of which is only hinted at. The action builds slowly, but the strangeness strikes instantly, as we are introduced to the rogue scientist-for-hire Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, and to his lover Lin, an artist in exile from the hive society of the khepri, a race of beings with human bodies and insect "headbodies". Each of them embarks on the most challenging and lucrative commission of their careers. For Lin, it is sculpting an image of New Crobuzon's most powerful crime boss, whose polymorphic, polypoid body type harks back to Yog Sothoth, and whose mind is rather less pretty than that. For Isaac, the client is a mutilated Garuda, an outcast from a desert society of winged beings, whose criminal offense is not translatable into human terms, and the scientist's object is to restore his power of flight. Expect no standard, straightforward struggle between good and evil here, with a clear-cut victory for the forces of the right. This isn't that kind of fantasy. Mieville's human sympathy for his characters runs deep, but the world they live in is one of unsalvageable moral anarchy. A vicious totalitarian pseudo-democracy runs the city state. A thriving but wary commerce runs relations between the various sentient races. Heroism and survival are not often on speaking terms, and Mieville's own flawed heros sometimes choose to survive. It can be hard to blame them, and hard to excuse them. And it's hard to know which, if either, Mieville wants us to do. All of which makes for a tale as unsettling as it is compelling. For all its science-fiction trappings (cyborgs and AI constructs and critters that feel a little more like aliens than like mythological beasts), the book doesn't work as sci-fi. The rules of the game aren't spelled out well enough, and it's not clear that Mieville would know how to spell them out. (For example, "crisis energy" seems to be available to perform some tasks and not available to perform others, with no discernible rhyme or reason.) But that's okay. The novel shows signs of not being thoroughly thought through; but it is thoroughly imagined through, and thoroughly felt through. So as fantasy it succeeds brilliantly. It will grip your imagination, and leave upon it claw marks that will not go away.
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Summary: Utter Praise and Mania
Review: Perdido Street Station is a masterpiece. It had me utterly hooked from the first page. A book bought on a wim for the beautiful cover art, went beyond any possible expectations. In a world as real as the one we live in now, aliens and humans vie for space in a city where the poor and well-to-do stumble side by side. No character is with out its own flaws and problems, even the Aliens are not exempt. Finnaly a novel that steps beyond the safe cookie cutter world of alien human relations. Who said aliens could not be as vile criminal and human as us. If the other books by Mieville are as good as this he has caught a lifetime fan.
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Summary: Startlingly original
Review: I will begin this review with a one-sentence summary: Perdido Street Station is one of the most blazingly original books I've read in a long time. The setting is the city of New Crobuzon, which is currently in its Industrial Revolution. (It's unclear whether this world's technological development remotely resmbles our own, but this is the closest approximation.) New Crobuzon is filled with humans, several races of "xenians," and biothaumaturgical cyborgs known as Remade. Factories spew noxious chymicals into the River Tar, and militia troops pass overhead on the skyrails. In a laboratory apartment within the vast city, a scientist named Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is peacefully working on his latest obsession when an exotic visitor arrives with a very unusual request. Though the task seems difficult, how can he refuse? He immediately sends out a request for experimental subjects that may help him, but none prove interesting...except one caterpillar of a species unknown to him--and we all know what caterpillars do, don't we? This is a long book, but it doesn't feel like one. It rarely drags and never feels padded, and I stayed up quite late to finish it. Mieville continually bombards the reader with vivid and fascinating images. Of course, some of these images are a little too grotesque or graphically violent for some, and somethimes the book seemed so grim that I wondered "Why am I reading this?" (Of course, you know the answer to that by now.) Mieville's writing style somehow seemed a little off for the first chapter or two, but either it got better or I got used to it. Good as this book is, it isn't perfect. The plot isn't bad, but it's fairly standard monster-hunting stuff--though there are plenty of interesting twists thrown in. There were also a few technological incongruencies that are hard to explain away by divergent development. Also, the ending may not please everyone. It isn't exactly a tragic ending--all but one of the main characters are alive and sane at the end, and they accomplish their main goal--but it can't be called happy, either. Oh, and the names. "New Crobuzon?" "Salacus Fields?" I could have done better at 12. This seems to be a hole, if a relatively small one, in Mieville's talents. At the end of the day, though, all these flaws are fairly minor compared to the book's merits. I've sometimes wanted to tell people what the book is similar to, but I've generally failed. The back flap says that Mieville is reminiscent of Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, and Neal Stephenson. It lies. The only similarity with Charles Dickens is the setting's technological level. It's also nothing like Kafka except for a few common thematic elements. As for Neal Stephenson....it's long and strange, but those are about the only similarities. I've heard it compared to Mervyn Peake, but that seems almost nonsensical to me. The closest thing to New Crobuzon that I've read about is, oddly enough, Sigil--a city from an old Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting called Planescape...but forget it. This review is getting quite long, and you already know whether or not you're interested.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: I have read and written countless accounts of fantasy and worlds that are not our own - this is indeed the most brilliant piece of literature I have ever laid eyes upon. To call this fantasy would be downsizing, as it is unlike anything I have read before (and thus cannot be categorized). Weird, startling, and passionate, China spins a tale of another world as masterfully as an account of our own. Stingboxes instead of swords, and rogue scientists rather than valiant knights stir the imagination. Ambassadors from Hell and strange and terrifying alien races abound in this fantastic novel. It's easy to get lost in this book, and to read for hours on end. I'd pay every penny for half of this book, and more for the rest.
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Summary: Just a little bit over there....
Review: Comparatives -- something Dickens, something Stanislaw Lem, and maybe a little Faulkner. I read this book very slowly, like eating wonderful chocolates, a little at a time because rushing would ruin the experience. This is a book to consume slowly. It never foreshadowed itself, never filled me with dreadful anticipation that something would happen to ruin the careful, delicate, intricate layers, never made me too eager or too loathful to finish it. It proceeded properly, in its own time. The author impressed me with his control and precision, with the utter authority that whatever strangeness he created WAS, without a need for complicated explanation. New Crobuzon has a presence that lets it stand up and live, a character in the book, an entity in itself. Everything Mieville told me, I believed. I didn't even think to argue or second guess. I hope he doesn't get closeted into a genre ghetto. This book isn't "just fantasy". It is literature. There was a time, you know, when there wasn't really a dividing line. Perdido Street Station smudged it up a good bit.
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