Book Review - Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

 

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rollicking example of the steam-punk subgenre of SF. Mieville revels in his favourite milieu – the urban jungle

I eat whatever organic thing I find that will not kill me. I hide like a parasite in the skin of this old city that snores and farts and rumbles and scratches and swells and grows warty and pugnacious with age

This is how an exiled dewinged garuda excommunicated for the crime of rape hides in this excrescence of a city – a city like Peter F. Hamilton’s semi-organic Makkathran in the Void in an alternate history moulded by GEORGE R. R. MARTIN.
The book is a nauseating olla podrida of bodily excretions, mucus, phlegm, nameless effluvia marinated with sortilege, alien xenomorphs from Neil Asher’s Polity timeline, steeped and fermented in a Tolkienesque alternate world, stewed in a Star Wars alien bar, garnished with Lovecraftian horror and served with a slice of Mary Shelly. Hitchcock Alfred’ suspense and Ian Fleming’s seat-of-the-pants action are side dishes.
Malevolent oneirophagus pan-dimensional moths terrorize New Crobuzon’s residents. Armed with thaumaturgy and weird weapons powered by chymicals an obese physicist (besotted with a chimerical insectoid female), the amputated garuda, water-shaping vodyanoy and robotic constructs of garbage, band up to rid the city of the evil predators, while battling crime-lords and the city militia. Ominous omens and a torrid fulminant climate are no helpto the protagonists.

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments. Birds and wyrmen lingered in the sky like particles of filth in water.

A tad overdone, hence the four stars.

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