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  • I'm really ambivalent about this intriguing effort of Mieville. The story line is a trifle slow, but the writing and characterization is richly textured and beautiful.

    It's more - a work of art. Mieville engages you, makes you really interact with his novel, challenges you as a reader, and l ... Continue

    I'm really ambivalent about this intriguing effort of Mieville. The story line is a trifle slow, but the writing and characterization is richly textured and beautiful.

    It's more - a work of art. Mieville engages you, makes you really interact with his novel, challenges you as a reader, and leads you down a dark and uncertain path. Definitely worth the read, but don't be surprised if you can't decide whether you actually like this book or not.

    

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• ― guaddess said on Aug 2, 2007 | Add your feedback

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  • 710 pages is a LONG read. This book, although it would be lacking if broken into two books, should probably be treated as two halves.

    

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• ― nashiitashii said on Dec 24, 2007 | Add your feedback

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  • My thoughts

  • I have to admit I was nervous about approaching this book again. I had started reading it years ago, but didn't get far. This time, I kept going, and I'm glad I did. Perdido Street Station is a intensely descriptive book filled with so much detail about New Crobuzon and its inhabitants. Woven throug ... Continue

    I have to admit I was nervous about approaching this book again. I had started reading it years ago, but didn't get far. This time, I kept going, and I'm glad I did. Perdido Street Station is a intensely descriptive book filled with so much detail about New Crobuzon and its inhabitants. Woven throughout is the story of Isaac and his quest to help Yagharek fly and what that quest ultimately leads to. It'll be a while before the images of this book leave me and I look forward to reading the next book in the series, The Scar.

    

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• ― krin5292 said on Dec 23, 2007 | Add your feedback

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.

• steampunksci fiHardcoverNew Crobuzonscience fictionfantasydystopian societynovelfictionUrban Fantasy
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