Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12165 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-23
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Like the author's 1998 debut book King Rat, this is an urban-gothic novel full of rich city squalor--but this time the setting isn't London but the grimy fantasy metropolis of New Crobuzon. The city sprawls like a mutant Gormenghast, contains strange ethnic minorities such as the khepris (women with huge scarab-beetles for heads), and seethes with seedy technology and thaumaturgy. There are Babbage engines, coke-powered robot "constructs", and an underclass of biomagically "Remade" victims of cruel justice who may be part-machine, part-animal or wholly nightmarish. A visiting garuda--a winged being now stripped of his wings--approaches the overweight, eccentric amateur scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in hope of buying back the power of flight, and the resulting research programme has accidental but monstrous consequences. Something appalling is loosed, a horror whose deadliness is underlined when New Crobuzon's corrupt government begs help from the Ambassador of Hell ... who refuses, because even the demons are frightened. Dealing with the flying terror becomes a job for Grimnebulin and a much-harried group of cronies--including his khepri lover, the garuda, a reporter for a brutally suppressed subversive newspaper, the group mind of New Crobuzon's constructs, a secret traitor, and one of the strangest giant spiders in fiction. A big, powerful, inventive, mesmerising and memorably horrid novel. --David Langford

Synopsis
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng 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. "A work of exhaustive inventiveness...superlative fantasy." - "Time Out". "A well-written, authentically engrossing adventure story, exuberantly full of hocus-pocus...Mieville does not disappoint." - "Daily Telegraph".

From the Publisher
Publisher's comment
Early reactions to PERDIDO STREET STATION

When Macmillan published China Miéville's first novel KING RAT in 1998, we knew we had found a rare new talent - to quote The Times, "an author to be watched". When his second novel, Perdido Street Station, arrived earlier this year, I was interested to note it was very much longer. Six hundred and nineteen pages later, I was gasping for breath - I just could not believe the scale and ingenuity of what I had been reading. The intricacy of the imagination, the sheer power of the action scenes.

Imagine elements of Mervyn Peake, Charles Dickens, Alice in Wonderland, Gene Wolfe, Philip K. Dick and Iain Banks all drawn together, yet in a completely individual way. Perdido Street Station is epic urban fantasy on a dazzling scale. It centres on the huge chaotic metropolis of New Crobuzon. To quote one reader: "He has created a real city with districts, areas, arteries, character, a frightening `city of dreadful night' in places, peopled by weird and wonderful creatures." Creatures that (apart from human beings) include aliens, hybrids, mythical beings, constructs and chilling `Remades'. Unknown to most of them, a terrifying and growing force has been innocently unleashed, and it falls to a small group of social misfits and rejects to rescue their countless unwitting fellow citizens from a fate of nightmarish horror.

Another reader adds: "Devising a metropolis as magnificent in its rich corruption as the London of Great Expectations or the Los Angeles of Blade Runner , there can be no doubt that Perdido Street Station offers an entirely new perspective on fantasy fiction." I second that wholeheartedly, for Perdido Street Station marks the arrival of a sublime imagination, and it will indubitably take its place as one of the definitive works of fantasy literature.

All I can say to you now is enjoy it!

Peter Lavery, Editor

Here some early reactions to Perdido Street Station:

`I salivate when I tell other people about this book. I can barely find words for it now. Perdido Street Station is a huge, crusty otherworld fantasy, all corroded clockwork and mutant scabbed organics, putrid cityside rivers and ungainly anti-heroes, rooftop cloak-and-dagger and sewer romance. Oh, my, oh, my. Miéville's debut novel, 1998's King Rat, was excellent, but this one is just astonishing. You want darkness with your fantasy? Get it here. Yes, I'm biased, because I've always wanted to read about a world like this. Miéville has created a world that feels and moves like the criminal best of cyberpunk, but which is blasted and crumbling, crawling with oddnesses like a berserk and insectile Oz. The descriptions of the world, the city, and the inhabitant races are rich and varied: Miéville never cheats and uses a race as a shortcut to characterization via stereotyping, though his characters might. His plot is tricky and excellently crafted: every problem besetting the characters is the result of their own actions, be they noble or inadvertent. Though the novel comes close to eight hundred pages, this isn't your normal tome padded with extraneous fat to give it that classic contemporary doorstop appeal. Believe it or not, every word counts. (Rumor is that the book will include a map, which means that it really is a fantasy. Miéville's descriptions, however, were enough to enable me to easily visualize the layout of the city without a map.) I could go on forever about this novel, and I probably will, but I can boil it down for you: this book is stunning.' MEHITOBEL WILSON (Carpe Noctem)

`Perdido Street Station is a phantasmagoric masterpiece whose grotesquerie is unmatched by any other work of contemporary imaginative fiction. Its surreal imagery recalls the work of Hieronymus Bosch, and only a writer of the very highest quality could bind such a hectic torrent of exotica into a plot as taut and compelling as this one. The city of New Crobuzon is an archetypal decadent metropolis populated by magnificent monsters and Isaac Dan de Grimnebulin, Yagharek and the Weaver are the perfect heroes to meet its hour of desperate need. The book left me breathless with admiration.' BRIAN STABLEFORD

`Energetic, thuggish, constantly inventive, China Miéville continues his project of rebuilding fantasy from the sub-cellar up. New Crobuzon, city of clockwork engine and subterranean punishment factory, has the architectonics of a living thing. It is a site of elation, dispute, danger and change: a city raucous with dreams. You catch the train to Perdido Street Station at your own risk: but leave a corner unexplored and you'll always regret it.' M. JOHN HARRISON

Customer Reviews

A story with no ending
I have a very ambiguous feeling about PSS. I loved the book and hated the ending.

The book:
An incredible story! Mieville's imagination blows you away. There are a lot of absolutely new things introduced in the book, races, monsters, engines, contraptions, ideas ...they are so fresh, new, interesting. The story is like a fantasy thriller. When you read the book you cannot help but immerse into the new world. Just when you thought, you know everything, he throws a new race at you, a race unlike any other you have ever read about before.
The book is superb from the very start to...the end or almost to the end.

The ending:
... is terrible. Only some issues are being resolved at the end of the story. There are a lot of cliff-hangers left. The story is just being cut-off in the middle? ¾? 99.9% into the story? We don't know. Most of protagonists who managed to stay alive move on to another story? But there is none. And probably will never be. It is rather frustrating. You spend so much time with characters, you want to know more about them about their life but you are denied the knowledge. (Please, don't confuse me being upset with having no ending and having not a happy ending. I didn't expect a happy ending, but I did expect the end of the story, which I never received)

Some people believe that the journey is more important than a final destination. If I belonged to this category, I would love the book. But I am not. For me the ending is as equally important(if not more important) as the journey. So, I am not happy with PSS. Unfortunately, hatred outweighs love.

I am not sure I am going to read The Scar in the near future... if ever

Once I put it down I could not pick it up again
...to quote Groucho Marx, or somebody. (no doubt somebody will correct me if I'm wrong).

This is true on two levels. On the mundane level, in paperback this is a great big slab of a book that is just plain difficult to read, especially when lying in bed. I know this shouldn't affect my opinion of the content but it does.

On a more intellectual level though, I just found that after reading a few chapters, that it was just getting too depressing to want to pick it up and plough on through all of those pages that you can see lie ahead with a book like this. Lord, but it's po-faced. Maybe it's a symptom of my rapidly aging brain, but I just can't be bothered with books that indulge in miserabilism; I want to be entertained and, more importantly, amused. So if you like gritty cyberpunk stuff, this is probably for you; if you don't, I suppose you can always use it for weight training.

Mind-blowing second novel!
Perdido Street Station a wonderful, terrible novel. Its gritty steampunk setting and breathtakingly realised characters and creatures are astounding. As an avid reader and writer picking up that densely bound tome was probably the best thing I ever did, introducing me to an entirely new world that is far more satisfying to read about than any sword-and-sorcery universe, even the masterfully-penned world featured in Tolkein's books. It is not that kind of fantasy - most fans classify Miéville's works as New Weird - but it is a fantastic achievement to lure readers from such masterpieces.

Picking up one of Miéville's Bas-Lag books in particular unearths a rich source of enthusiasm, that will leak into the you and after only a few pages make you want to throw the book down and write something yourself. Starting and, just a few short days later, finishing Perdido Street Station was a life-changing experience, of the kind you might have after reading Iain M Banks or Frank Herbert for the first time. Its success and its sequels are a testament to the breadth and imagination of its genre-twisting world, one that is available for all to visit and, ultimately, take away with us forever.