Name: Perdido Street Station
Rating: 3.930232558139535 (86 reviews)
ISBN: 9780330392891

China Mi'ville

For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers, spies, magicians, and junkies. Now a stranger has come with an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. A reckoning is due and it is too late to escape.

Perdido Street Station

China Miéville

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 . . . Miéville does not disappoint' Daily Telegraph

Diana

Pointlessly depressing. There were some creative concepts, but the weak resolutions (deus-ex machinas), the tedious writing (inspired by but failing to capture the same feeling as Peake's Gormenghast), and predictable plot points (Yagharek being a <spoiler>rapist</spoiler>) made reading this book a chore.

In squalid and brutal New Crobuzon, a Garuda requests eccentric crisis theorist Isaac to work with lab specimens, particularly a caterpillar that feeds on a hallucinatory drug until its evolution, when it will invoke malignant terror.

Wacky, curious, and fascinating. Hyperdescriptive. Sometimes reliant on telling rather than showing, especially during emotional scenes. The plot twists are not quite believable. Overall, a rollercoaster of a book.

Mel L

China Mieville

Really cool fantasy elements that the author loves to go on tangents about for long stretches with little pay off.

Some really interesting explorations of morality and law and personhood through those fantasy elements. Writes about these explorations in much the same way as he does the fantasy itself, though.

Came into this after being fairly disappointed with The City and the City a while ago, but heard this one tends to shore up many of the faults in that books character writing only to be generally disappointed from that angle, too.

Caelan

Really cool fantasy elements that the author loves to go on tangents about for long stretches with little pay off.

Some really interesting explorations of morality and law and personhood through those fantasy elements. Writes about these explorations in much the same way as he does the fantasy itself, though.

Came into this after being fairly disappointed with The City and the City a while ago, but heard this one tends to shore up many of the faults in that books character writing only to be generally disappointed from that angle, too.

Sherry

I think I would have enjoyed it more if almost every paragraph didn't contain words like putrid, rotting, vile, shit. It seemed to me like everything was described as though it were the most disgusting thing ever. That was exhausting. Otherwise the book was ok. The author seemed a bit in love with his own theories but that isn't uncommon. I probably won't be reading any more of the Bas Lag series.

Sarah Sammis

The book reads like an exquisite corpse written by James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, Philip José Farmer and Lovecraft. At 880 pages, it takes its time to unfurl the story, block by grimey block.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the book but it's taking a long time to read. Regardless of where I am in the book, I will mail it a week from tomorrow. Apologies for keeping it so long.

John Nettles

Know What You’re about to invest in

This is not a short book, nor is it a shallow one. I read this on recommendation that it had an gothic, grim aesthetic like my favorite book, Titus Groan. And that’s true, I loved that part. But there were some parts of the story that I just had a hard time buying into, such as why the characters were so hellbent in these dangerous struggles. The writing was excellent, may revisit some day, in sure this one will stick with me a long time. But for now, I’m just glad it’s over.

Abhimat Gautam

Wow, this book’s a super long epic and an adventure and a half… So much deep world-building, deep character exploration, and even an examination of consciousness, thoughts, and crisis. I am incredibly impressed by the depth of the story and the multileveled city and world built to support it. Damn!

Michael Springer

This was one of the most creative and surprising fantasy books I've ever read. Set in the strange and eerie city of New Crobuzon, Mieville quickly establishes how utterly different (and utterly disturbing) the city is. I remember when I read the first Dune novel being somewhat awed by how real such a strange world felt. This might be the first time since then I've had that sensation. 

I don't want to spoil the story, but I will say Mieville weaves together three or four storylines that could've easily been books on their own. A thinking, rational robot with human servants. A godlike spider that is only concerned with making the web the world weaves aesthetically pleasing. Moths that . . . well, I don't want to spoil that one. 

Part of this book's strength is that these individually compelling ideas all end up weaving together to create an incredibly fun climax. In short, if you like fantasy and/or sci fi, read this one.

Gavin

Enormous steampunk social commentary dressed in gorgeous nasty prose (think Nabokov on America). His dank, evil city, 'New Crobuzon', is a dark reboot of Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork (itself a funhouse mirror of Elizabethan London) without its animating sense of fun and justice. Instead, it has class consciousness; satires on academic, tabloid and political speech, misogyny, and a tainted political economy of science/capital/government. 
Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. 

What I take to be the central metaphor: one of the oppressed races are found to have a native power - the 'potential energy of crisis' - which, with a scientific harness, could revolutionise the world: i.e. Classical Marxism. Our heroes are not especially heroic.

Prashanth Srivatsa

A majestic work of fantasy fiction; exhilarating, vivid in its grotesque imagery and fascinating in its exploration of chaos theory. The city is alive, its heart stained with the multitudes that populate it, an invention of superlative imagination and detailing. Mieville is an artist with words, who drags you into the bowels of this city with brazen wizardry and leaves you panting, tickling your every bone of curiosity and ultimately, grinning with satisfaction at the end of this magical, magical ride where physics meets the surreal. What a book!

Kayla Ndife

DENSE. Brilliant story, but the guy is pretty wordy. He's obviously intelligent, too... but I had to look up some of the words he was using... and I NEVER have to look up words. 
I started this in June and just now finished it... and I'm an avid reader.

His characters are solid, his story flows well, his setup for the city is fantastic. But you aren't necessarily going to get the happy ending that you think you are, and this isn't a "quick" read... this is long, and in depth, and every so often you're going to have to put it down so that you can breathe. Definitely not for anyone under 17, but definitely worth a reader's time.

Jeff James

Originally posted at Full of Words.

After reading Perdido Street Station, I can't decide what China Miéville loves more: feverish world-building or the sheer impenetrability of his prose, and I say that as someone who (occasionally) enjoyed the book. It took me a good six months to make it through that dense little tome, mostly because I only managed to read it in 30-50 page chunks about once or twice a month, and I have to admit that in the end I only finished out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

This was actually my second attempt at Perdido Street Station. I first bought it in 2003 and only made it about 50 pages in before putting it down for more than a decade. This time around, I gave it a bit more persistence, but it was never an easy book to pick up. Each of those 30-page sessions was hard-fought over the course of several hours, and I oftentimes found myself reading and re-reading passages just to make sure I'd fully comprehended their contents and meaning. I enjoyed many parts of the book, but I can't help feeling a certain amount of exhaustion and relief after struggling to finish it for so long.

In broad strokes, Perdido Street Station tells the story of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, inventor and disgraced academic, and what happens when a disfigured garuda – a sort of half-man, half-bird creature – named Yagharek comes to his laboratory in New Crobuzon and asks Isaac to help him fly again. Yagharek is flightless, his wings removed as part of a brutal judicial punishment, and he's travelled hundreds if not thousands of miles just to ask Isaac for his help. Yagharek's gold is plentiful and Isaac is in need of a patron, so he soon sets off on a quest to restore the garuda's flight. What Isaac does not know – cannot know – is that he will inadvertently set into motion a series of events that bring only nightmare, catastrophe and death to his city and everyone he knows and loves.

However, before the novel gets to the point where the plot kicks in, Miéville spends several hundred pages on setup, character development and a huge amount of world-building. If one of the characters visits a new neighborhood, Miéville includes a minimum of a few paragraphs describing how it looks, smells, sounds, pulses with life and interacts with the city around it. These passages are oftentimes beautiful, carefully drawn and incredibly dense, but over the course of the 600+ page novel, it becomes hard not to react with impatience when Miéville's attention strays yet again to the architecture of his imagined city.

The idea is, of course, that New Crobuzon is another character in the story, but the problem is that Miéville seems intent on including too much of everything; the kitchen sink, a few bathtubs and maybe a swimming pool for good measure. Every new neighborhood has enough detail to support an entire storyline, but Miéville barely takes a breath before introducing even more obscure and bizarre details. What seems magical and fascinating for maybe a hundred pages or so becomes overkill when it just keeps happening past the halfway point of the novel.

Also, it doesn't help that Miéville seems to delight in writing incredibly dense prose. I'm sure a large part of why I took so long to finish the book is that it felt like I was barely making any progress even though I would sit down and read for hours at a time. I was finally able to increase my pace a bit once the actual plot became clear, but at the same time I was a little disappointed to discover that all of Miéville's baroque wordplay leads up to a relatively straightforward man versus monster story.

Ultimately, Perdido Street Station was a difficult book that I respected and sometimes liked but can't help finding fault with as I think more about it. I'm glad I finally finished it so that I can mark it off my near-infinite list of unread books, but it will be a good long while before I pick up another one of Miéville's books. Of course, there are at least three others on my shelves, waiting for me to read them.

Pavonini

This was excellent. I got really into the world he'd created, and the different races. Feels like a bit of a love letter to London. 

"Choice theft" is a concept I particularly loved. I think I'd be interested to read more about garuda society.

It was almost like a few books in one (certainly felt like multiple books when I was carrying it), as there were different things going on. I liked all the different aspects - none felt like they failed or shouldn't have been there.

Willkommen in der unmöglichen Stadt! Eine Stadt, eine Welt für sich, ein Moloch: Das ist New Crobuzon, bevölkert von Milliarden Menschen und Mutanten, unterjocht von einem strengen Regime und angefüllt mit den ungezählten Sehnsüchten, Ängsten, Problemen und Kämpfen seiner Bewohner. Als eines Tages ein seltsames Wesen den geheimen Laboren der Stadt entflieht, ahnt niemand, dass dies der Untergang New Crobuzons sein könnte. Auch Isaac Dan dar Grimnebulin ahnt die Gefahr nicht, als er dem Wesen begegnet ... China Miéville hat mit seinen phantastischen Romanen bereits zahlreiche Preise gewonnen, unter anderem den Arthur C. Clarke Award, den World Fantasy Award und den British Fantasy Award, und begeistert mit seiner Phantastik Kritiker und Leser gleichermassen. China Miéville lebt in London.

Kirsten Simkiss

This was a gift from a dear friend of mine who introduced it as being one of their formative books for their personal writing style. Right off the bat, I could see how this book had shaped their writing style, which was truly fascinating to me. Mieville’s writing style is very different from most of the books that I’ve read, using copious amounts of words that would probably kill at Scrabble. To be honest, I thought some of it was overkill from time to time. The multiple uses of palimpsest and circumspect were notable enough to me that it did take me out of the story on occasion, but most of the descriptions used are lush and magnificent. I think it was just the repetition of these words that caught me off guard more than anything.

The story itself is very dark. The setting is very dark. Most of the characters are very dark in a variety of different ways. I don’t want to spoil things, so I’ll leave it at that. It was a great adventure, albeit not necessarily a happy ending. The world building is mind boggling and extensive. It definitely gave a feel of a real city as I read because without occasionally referring to the map at the front of the book, I would have had no concept of how far things really were from each other.

And on a final note, this review is 4 stars because god damn it Lin deserved better.

Mundy Otto Reimer

So the other weekend I was looking for a book to read as an All Hallow's Eve treat 🎃 and then remembered this one recommended to me a year ago when I randomly met this guy who handed me a business card with his wacky but interesting religion he created 😅 Although horror wasn't a genre that I'm usually drawn towards, I did mention that I really like stories with fantastic world-building and especially wacky biologies and I'm glad that regardless of its presentation to me that I took this recommendation seriously.

Anyways, it's really difficult to pin down one specific subgenre for this book, but it's somewhere between New Weird (like Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy), Bio+Steampunk, and Lovecraftian Horror. It basically gave me the same kind of fascinatingly disgusting creeps as teasing pulsating maggots out of one's festering skin to then be struck with eldritch paralysis when finding out that even more seem to be incubating in fractal-fashion further within you 😱🐛🤮 And frak does this book get scary at times! It might even be worse for those of us cursed with a wide-ranging imaginative repertoire of potential biological forms. Miéville not only draws inspiration from various mythologies but also seems to have a naturalist-born bent to him in that he enriches his world with scary biological traits that normally would come intuitive for someone like an entomologist or marine biologist (of which the latter, like Peter Watts for example, seem to possess the most biologically horrific of imaginations). And for those who are reading this basilisk-text and whose mental hygienic operating systems are already crashing in an ever downwards Gödelian spiral of disgust, Miéville seems to take great joy in having you also witness perversions that I myself haven't experienced since reading let's say Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West 🐞🍑😉

While we are on those notes of disgust that Miéville seems to write with such a natural-born aesthetic touch, I'd also like to forewarn any potential readers of the author's not-so-subtle rape imagery throughout the novel. Themes of personal transgression and violation feature quite heavily in this book. Not only is it obviously reminiscent of something like the Alien franchise, but Miéville also does an excellent job of capturing the philosophical and moral nuances involved in these themes of disgust, transgression, and violation. For instance, I highly enjoyed the drawn-out explanation of the moral "matrix-nature" of this certain tribe of seemingly highly individualistic nomadic beings and the traditions they use to govern themselves that we slowly get introduced to. I especially loved the particular bits about the differences between calling someone a "Concrete Individual" versus an "Abstract Individual", intended to represent whether a person saw another as a similar holistic individual possessing agency of their own in the here and "concrete" now, or whether they've "abstracted" their personhood away by considering them as just another object to be manipulated like a mere data point in some aggregated moral framework calculus. Not only did I find this conveyed in such a subtly smart manner with its opaque introduction purposefully designed to initially obscure, but I also began to slowly appreciate Miéville's background in political theory here. These politically subversive flavors are sprinkled in a few choice places, and I really appreciate it when I get to witness the author's intellectual passions through these brief windows between their words.



To build upon these light brushstrokes on the nature of individuality and existentialism, we are also treated to a really neat metaphysical and ontological system of mathematics/physics/magic that Miéville paints for us. Nicknamed "Crisis Theory" by one of the main characters who happens to be one of those passionately anti-disciplinary heterodox scientist types that I seem to find great affinity towards, its similar to something like a mashup between our real world's Chaos theory / non-linear dynamical systems, René Thom's Catastrophe theory, thermodynamics, and some weird panpsychist interpretation of the philosophical notion of 
  Agency.
 



Tying together concepts like the degrees of freedom of objects being interdependent upon the relationships of all other surrounding objects such that there are tipping points that can occur due to the interwoven 
  causal potential
 of an object's future intention towards another object, Miéville creates a really cool pseudo-(meta)physics that underpins the key parts of this story. I don't know if I am reading too much into it, but I think that here too we can again see Miéville's political background as it seems that he repurposed the real-life political version of the theory of Crisis and combined it with this pseudophysics one he creates. Part of me wishes that he would also tie this "crisis" concept in with his moral matrix of abstract versus concrete individuals, but that might just be my inner apophenic tendencies surfacing.

Speaking of causality, I just briefly want to mention how awesome of a character the Weaver is! I don't want to spoil it too much for people, but I really found this character quite charming and cleverly written. You can really see Miéville's D&D background coming out as the passages containing the Weaver were quite stylistically brilliant, especially during the introduction of this character via echoes of scissors returning as melodious and melancholic whispers of the Weaver 🌬️🎶✂️🕸️. The lilting, poetic, and stream-of-consciousness voice that characterizes the Weaver's oneiric/dream-speak is an imaginative one that I think I'm going to steal as fodder for my personal dream stories, and the whole causal world web and aesthetic-maximizer thing was a delicious cherry on top. Other notable world-building features include Qabalah-like thaumaturgy and mysticism. Oh, and I'm well aware that I might be prone towards casually sprinkling in weird terms whenever I speak, but gosh am I impressed with Miéville (which could also be construed as a disclaimer for those that don't want to always have Google handy whenever they read). Rare is the pleasure of deeming my vocabulary inadequate! Seems that reading Miéville is akin to being gifted with a poetic glimpse of a horrifying lexical grimoire 🌙🕯📖🧙‍♂️

Anyways, I give this book a 5/5! 👏 (rare for a piece of fiction if you are familiar with me) I am more than glad I randomly got recommended this and gave it a shot, and even moreso to just find out that this book is not alone in taking place within this universe. I'm definitely treating myself to more servings of Miéville in the near future :)

river k

China Miéville does incredible, truly original world-building. Although I will say that it started to feel like a bit much at times--I felt like I was getting bogged down in ultimately irrelevant details when I just wanted to get on with the story, especially in the first half. It took me almost a year to finish the book. To be fair, I do think that that was in part because of how grim the book gets- Miéville does not shy away from darker themes and bleak endings for certain characters. I had to take a few breaks (especially near the end) to give myself a bit of a rest before diving back in. Overall: 3.75 stars? 4 stars seems like a bit much but 3 stars seems like too little. I found it to be very original and much more exciting in the second half.

Sarah Escorsa

💀 DNF at 11%. Go me and stuff.

Yet another overhyped book with a cult following bites the dust! Yay! I obviously read this one wrong! Or maybe I read it right but didn't enjoy it because I'd mistakenly purchased the Swahili version and read it back to front and upside down. This is the most plausible explanation, since I don't belong to the People of Despicable Book Taste Horde (PoDBTH™) and always read books right. 

Had I bought the English version, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have noticed how excruciatingly boring the story is. Or thought that reading the book was a more tedious chore than being on cleaning duty at the barnacle shed. But I didn't, so I did. Bloody stinking fish, rarely have I had to suffer through such painfully over descriptive prose. And I thought The Lies of Locke Lamora was bad! Silly little shrimp that I am. Locke Lamora is a complete joke compared to this painfully harrowing effort, like reading one of Noddy's fascinating adventures or something. Anyway, I have to admit this wasn't completely unexpected. I mean, I was going to read the ebook version of this most beguiling tale but a friend (whom I shall be eternally full of grate to) mentioned the book was awfully, um, generous, in the details department, and recommended I listened to the audio version to ease the pain enjoy the book to its full potential. That was one of the mostest brilliantest ideas ever, I have to say. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made it past the prologue, had I read the printed version. Okay, so I didn't make it past the 11% mark, which isn't much better, but that's completely irrelevant right now. Of course it is. Anyway, the cool thing about the audio for this book is that even if you forget to hit the pause button while you're busy slaughtering puny humans running errands, you don't miss a bloody shrimping thing. Because then you come back and realize the narrator is still babbling about the same stuff he was rambling about half an hour before! How cool is that?!



Talking about the lovely narrator. I'm pretty sure Mr. John Lee is a positively delightful human being, but never in my crustacean life have I listened to a more pompous, overly theatrical narration. It sounded like the guy was chanting ancient poetry, for fish's sake! Okay, in his defense, Miéville's exceedingly convoluted and needlessly wordy writing probably didn't help his performance. Quite the Perniciously Deadly Combination (PDC™) these two make. So. Long story short: I got to chapter 8 and started feeling a teensy little bit like…



My murderous troops obviously started getting very concerned about my mental health, so I decided to hit the pause button one gloriously final time, and proceeded to DNF the fish out of this most wondrous piece of literature. Yes, I did it for the kids' sake. I hate to see them distressed, you see. Had it not been for them, I would gladly have continued listening to this delightful story. Obviously. Right. Absolutely. Indeed. No doubt about that and stuff. Okay, so to be disgustingly honest, it kinda sorta sucks big time that I was forced to DNF this book against my nefarious will. Because, to be revoltingly candid, the world Miéville created here is pretty fishing amazing and creative and original and unique and beautifully dark and stuff. Also, the very diverse cast of characters and creatures is pretty shrimping awesome. Especially Lin the insectoid artist. Yeah, she's sort of cool for a, um, you know, bug. And I'm kind of an expert on the topic. I mean, I survived the *shudders pre-emptively* Sirantha Jax Debacle of Doom and Oblivion and Epic Proportions (SJDoDaOaEP™), so I know a lot about hexapod invertebrates in books, and how they can viciously and most thoroughly ruin potentially stupendous series and stuff. Damn, I'm convulsing just thinking about it. Better change the subject before my allergic reaction comes back in full swing, and my exoskeleton starts getting all swollen and blotchy and stuff. 



I'm trying! I'm trying! But this Sirantha Jax business was ever so slightly traumatizing and stuff, so I might need a few gallons of whisky to numb the somewhat excruciating pain and calm the fish down.

The End.

➽ And the moral of this Surprise Surprise I Just DNFed a Book with a Stellar Average Rating and Glowing Reviews Now That is Most Uncommon Indeed Crappy Non Review is (SSIJDaBwaSARaGRNTiMUICNR™): this story could have been wrondrously wondrous. Only that it wasn't. Oh well.

 



[Pre-review nonsense

Listening to 2.42 hours of this book felt like losing 30 years of my life. Patting my little self on the exoskeleton for DNFing the fish out of it. I mean, had that not been the case, I'm pretty sure I would have gone extinct before getting to the 50% mark. 



➽ Full Phew Bloody Stinking Fish That Was Close This One Nearly Did Me In and Stuff Crappy Non Review (PBSFTWCTONDMIaSCNR™) to come.

Victoria Bartlett

This book has an amazing story and style that gently unfolds to you. It was so amazing and dense and thick with description but the description didn't weigh the book down at all. I super recommend it.

Winner of the August Derleth award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative 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 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.

Nicholas Speer

Wow! This book is definitely not for everyone or even most people. I loved it. 
It is a bit of a slow start but FULL of incredible descriptions and world building.
I would also definitely put this in the realm of horror. If you don’t like horror just go ahead and not read it, it’s sold as steampunk fantasy, and it is for sure but there are some very dark elements. It was also a little hard to get through, it’s long and dense. Halfway through it is a page turner then slows back down for a simmering end that was somewhat unexpected, but made the book worth it. I Strongly recommend but only if you have an open mind, like inter-species love open mind. There are literal Phisics equations and theories used to explain magic…

The reason I give it a 3.5 is it really gets kind of lost in the world building, because of this the plot and pacing suffer significantly. The pay off is there and the story is overall very satisfying.

dead line

This book goes to the places I wanted, then goes further. Like a father who catches his son smoking, and makes him smoke the whole pack 'This is what you wanted'.

Miéville lured me in with promises of steampunk whimsy, then slapped me reality and heavy moral questions.

I loved it. And the prose is beautiful too.

La Estación de la calle Perdido

Jose Vera

“La estación de la calle Perdido” es una ambiciosa y bien escrita obra que me sorprendió. Sin embargo creo que tiene algunos defectos bastante acusados que la han hecho tediosa por momentos.

Miéville ha logrado con mucho acierto mezclar temáticas steampunk con cyberpunk y fantasía, dándole a su historia un enfoque interesante y dotando a la narración con una atmósfera muy particular y única.

Nueva Crobuzón es la ciudad en donde se desarrolla esta historia. En esta ciudad de esputo y suciedad, de olores de alcantarilla y arquitectura demencial conviven en una frágil tirantez diferentes razas tratando de malganarse la vida. Humanos, khepris, garudas, vodyanois, constructos y muchos más son la fuerza vital de esta extraña y brutal Nueva Crobuzón. La presencia de la ciudad está tan inmersa en la narración que finalmente la consideramos como un personaje más. Tan palpitante de vida como cualquiera de ellos.

Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin es un científico que trabaja y vive en la marginalidad, tratando de llevar su ciencia más allá de los límites conocidos. Isaac recibe la visita de un Garuda u hombre ave al que de una enigmática manera le han mutilado las alas. Yagarek quiere contratar a Isaac para que encuentre la manera de hacerlo volar nuevamente. No importa el método quiere volver a sentir la libertad del vuelo.

Con esta idea Isaac empieza a recolectar, de manera ilegal o casi ilegal, todos los tipos de especímenes que puedan volar. Insectos, aves, todo aquello que sea capaz de liberarse de las ataduras de la gravedad llega de una u otra manera a sus manos. Así es como cae en su poder un desconocido gusano, que se convertirá en una crisálida luego de ingerir una extraña droga que circula por las calles llamada “mierda onírica”. La criatura resultante de la eclosión de la crisálida es una gigantesca polilla que se alimenta de la psique de los seres vivos. El temor, los sueños son su fuente de energía y cuando se alimenta drena por completo el cerebro de sus victimas.

Cuando esta polilla libera a cuatro más como ella, el terror se desata en Nueva Crobuzón e Isaac y sus amigos se ven obligados a detener a estos extraños animales que están diezmando la ciudad.

Como mencioné en el primer párrafo el libro es bastante bueno pero tiene algunos problemas.

El primero y más importante a mi parecer es que tiene demasiadas historias cruzadas que no llevan a nada. Dan la impresión de estar ahí sólo por el afán del autor de mostrar lo bizarro y extraño de su mundo. Episodios como los del circo, la visita a los demonios o la aparición de los manecros no aportan gran cosa o nada a la trama. Si Miéville eliminaba más de la mitad del libro este funcionaría a la perfección, siendo inclusive más ligero de leer. Hay demasiados cabos sueltos (me gustan los cabos sueltos, pero no tanto) y muchas historias paralelas que no llegan a lugar alguno. Esto hace el libro demasiado extenso y frágil.

Por otro lado tengo que reconocer que la capacidad de Miéville en las descripciones es increíble, pero también ha exagerado describiendo a Nueva Crobuzón. En los primeros capítulos ya entendemos que la ciudad no sólo es gigantesca, también es asquerosa. Más cerca a un tumor canceroso que a una metrópolis llena de vida. Sus continuas alusiones y comparaciones con basurales, tumores, aguas aceitosas y de mal olor llegan a cansar.

Miéville nos entrega un libro interesante, bueno, de lectura densa. Pudo haber sido mejor pero tiene demasiados callejones sin salida y puntos muertos en la trama. Un libro que vale la pena leer y un autor al que hay que seguir para ver como evoluciona.

Jessica Smith

This is very hard to get into. For the first third or so of the book, I found it mind-bogglingly boring – so boring that trying to read it on the train, I would periodically decide that my own thoughts were more attention-grabbing and my eyes would glaze over and I'd stop reading. If you're not very patient, the book starts out as a hard slog.

But I persevered, partly because the last China Miéville I'd read was brilliant and partly because I feel like a failure if I can't finish a novel. Eventually, I got sucked in.

The thing that sucked me in was the impressive world-building, of course. Miéville has constructed an intricately detailed city, New Crobuzon, partly based on industrial revolution-era Europe but with a lot of fantastical twists. This is a city where humans are not the only sentient species, and the specific part of the book that really set me to begrudgingly liking it was where Lin ponders the history of her own migrant community, the khepri, which we would consider a hybrid of beetles and humans, probably. New Crobuzon has dozens of neighbourhoods whose histories and characters get fleetingly described in the novel – too many to actually remember, which is frustrating, especially when the description goes on too long and you're impatient to get back to some action, but fascinating nonetheless.

I will say that some of the other description, not devoted to telling the history or social situation of the city, got really boring. Actual events in the plot seemed to take forever to unfold, which sapped the narrative of a lot of the urgency I think it was supposed to have. Some of the plot didn't sit well with me, either; in particular, I was really disappointed with how Miéville dealt with Lin (view spoiler)[(seeming to kill her off to fuel the male protagonist's growth, then suddenly reintroduce her at the end of the story – only to immediately have her brain half sucked out by those slake-moths leaving her permanently retarded!) (hide spoiler)]. Considering how male-dominated the narrative was otherwise (there were only two women!), it was a pretty poor way to treat her.

So… as you can see, I've given this three stars. The world-building is fantastic, but the description is excessive and I disliked elements of the plot. It's interesting to note that out of everyone who's rated this book in Goodreads, only half have gone on to rate the sequel…

Perdido Street Station

Reviews

Highlights