Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

Perdido Street Station (Bas-Lag, #1)

by China Mieville

Winner of the August Derleth award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative urban fantasy thriller, and the first of China Miéville's novels set in the world of Bas-Lag.

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants linger in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians, junkies and whores. Now a stranger has come, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror – and the fate of millions depends on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crime-lords alike.

The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground as battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings. And a reckoning is due at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape.

Reviewed by nannah on

Share
DNF @ 34%

What a wordy and sluggish book!

The prose is very evocative, but it's so descriptive it's pretty much purple prose. So much so that by 100 pages in, the story/plot hasn't evolved yet, and by 200 pages, there still really isn't any urgency. Things are interesting, sure, but where's the need to keep going? Where's the need? The motives (beyond curiosity, that is)? There's only so much adding a new creature every 50 pages can do.

There's also some animal death/violence that isn't so fun to read. And reading the word "autistic" as an adjective was the killer here. I had to put it down as a DNF.

Last modified on

Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 31 August, 2015: Finished reading
  • 31 August, 2015: Reviewed