Perdido Street Station - China Miéville

2000; 710 pages. Genre : Steampunk Horror. Laurels : 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award; 2001 British Fantasy Award, just to name a few. New Author? : No. Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

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Welcome to New Crobuzon, a huge, dark, steampunk city-state that bears an eerie resemblance to a post-holocaust London. It hosts a variety of weird satient species, and is run by a semi-repressive government.

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Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a geeky tinkerer who is visited one day by a garuda. Garudas are birdmen, but this one has had his wings savagely ripped from him as punishment for an unspecified crime. His plea to Isaac : "Make me fly again."

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What's To Like...

Perdido Street Station is a dark, complex saga with three major plotlines; the main one of which doesn't get started until around page 200. They all get resolved, although not simultaneously, and perhaps not in the way you would anticipate.

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What really shines here, though, is the world (called "Bas-Lag") that Miéville convincingly paints. You can "see" the various species that inhabit Bas-Lag (and there are a bunch of them), and you can touch and taste the dark, the grit, and the grime of New Crobuzon.

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The individual characters are 3-D and lushly detailed. Miéville spins the horror tale with a deft touch. One of the plotlines is an inter-species love story. There is a sprinkling of dark humor, as well as a bit of Miéville's insightful social and political views.

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Excerpts...

Lin got half to her feet, her headlegs bristling with astonishment and terror. She gazed at him.

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded. (...)

Mr. Motley paced towards her like a hunter.

"So," he said, from one of the grinning human mouths. "Which do you think is my best side?" (pg. 42)

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I will hear the sounds of Perrick violining or the Gnurr Kett funeral dirge or a Chet stone-riddle, or I will smell the goat porridge they eat in Neovadan or see a doorway painted with the symbols of a Cobsea printer-captain... A long, long way from their homes. Homeless. Home. All around me will be New Crobuzon, seeping through my skin. (pg. 506)

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"I do not know where I will be, Grimnebulin. I shun this city. It hunts me." (pg. 50)

Perdido Street Station is not for everyone. The descriptiveness is superb, but often lengthy, and it sometimes overshadows the story itself. 700+ pages may be too long for some readers. You could probably cull a couple hundred pages from this novel and still tell the story. But then you'd miss the vividness and the detail, and IMHO, that would be a serious loss.
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In a world of copycat writers, China Miéville goes his own literary way. Perdido Street Station was my third Miéville book (see here and here for the other two), and I've enjoyed them all. 8½ Stars.