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| Perdido Street Station | 
 enlarge | Author: China Mieville
Publisher: Tor
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.22
You Save: £7.77 (97%)
New (26) from £1.62
Avg. Customer Rating:  93 reviews
Sales Rank: 14298
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 880
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7 x 4.4 x 2.1
ISBN: 0330392891
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780330392891
ASIN: 0330392891
Publication Date: February 23, 2001
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence!
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 88 more reviews...
 A story with no ending April 18, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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? ? 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 April 10, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
...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! March 31, 2008
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 Mieville's works as New Weird - but it is a fantastic achievement to lure readers from such masterpieces.
Picking up one of Mieville'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.
A disturbing mixture of fantasy, science fiction and horror January 26, 2008
Set in New Crobuzon which is inhabited by humans, remade and a host of alien creatures including kephrin (insect people), cactacae (cactus people), garuda (bird people) and vodyanoi (water people) among others. The remade are usually fusions of humans or aliens and metal parts carried out as punnishments many times. For example one woman has been convicted for killing her baby and her punnishment is to serve 10 years in prison as well as having her babies arms remade on to her face as a constant reminder of what she did.
Isaac der Grimnebulin is a human scientist operating on the fringe of mainstream discoveries compounded by having a kephri girlfriend called Lin who is an artist. Both get drawn down different paths, Isaac investigating flight for a broken and outcast garuda, Yagharek, and Lin doing a sculpture for crime lord Motley. Isaac begins to study all creatures who fly or larvae who have the potential to fly, including a brightly coloured grub that unbeknownst to him will turn into a terrifying slake-moth with no known predator who sucks out peoples dreams. Lin is being drawn further and further into Motley's criminal world which you know can only end badly for her.
A dark mixture of fantasy, science fiction and horror with constructs who gain sentinence and giant spiders called weavers. It is a pretty long book and the first half was very slow paced introducing you to life in New Crobuzon, the different races and the different characters. The second half was much more action based with the hunt for the slake-moths taking over the main plotline with Isaac and his gang being hunted by the government militia as well as Motley's thugs. I am looking forward to seeing what the next book in the series is like.
 Classic January 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
With a revived interest in all things Steamworks etc delved into this book without much expecations.
Let me say it was a fantastic read. at a time where i was sluggishly thralling though my reading, this novel gripped me and i devoured it voraciously till finished. China's ideas are grounded i belive in his DnD playing roots and i found extra joy in seeing these influences thoughout the book. The story is well crafted, different,(well from what i was reading at the time at least) and i loved the main character real to the core in my opinion. The city too, a character in itself was brilliantly realised and felt like a living breathing thing.
Definately worth a few bob.
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