Perdido Street Station: A Bas-Lag Novel 1
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4.7 • 31 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Compulsively readable." The Washington Post Book World
"A work of exhaustive inventiveness ... superlative fantasy" Time Out
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.
PRAISE FOR CHINA MIEVILLE
"[Mieville s] wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing." Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian (on Three Moments of an Explosion)
"Dark and thought-provoking." The San Diego Union-Tribune (on The City & The City)
"Richly conceived." The New York Times Book Review (on Embassytown)
"Mieville more than delivers." San Francisco Chronicle (on Kraken)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
King Rat (1999), Mi ville's much-praised first novel of urban fantasy/horror, was just a palate-teaser for this appetizing, if extravagant, stew of genre themes. Its setting, New Crobuzon, is an audaciously imagined milieu: a city with the dimensions of a world, home to a polyglot civilization of wildly varied species and overlapping and interpenetrating cultures. Seeking to prove his unified energy theory as it relates to organic and mechanical forms, rogue scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin tries to restore the power of flight to Yagharek, a member of the garuda race cruelly shorn of its wings. Isaac's lover, Lin, unconsciously mimics his scientific pursuits when she takes on the seemingly impossible commission of sculpting a patron whose body is a riot of grotesquely mutated and spliced appendages. Their social life is one huge, postgraduate bull session with friends and associates--until a nightmare-inducing grub escapes from Isaac's lab and transforms into a flying monster that imperils the city. This accident precipitates a political crisis, initiates an action-packed manhunt for Isaac and introduces hordes of vividly imagined beings who inhabit the twilight zone between science and sorcery. Mi ville's canvas is so breathtakingly broad that the details of individual subplots and characters sometime lose their definition. But it is also generous enough to accommodate large dollops of aesthetics, scientific discussion and quest fantasy in an impressive and ultimately pleasing epic.
Customer Reviews
Period Street Station
Gripping and relentless from the start, with vivid characters in an alien vision of London, the complexities unwind and draw us further into the scary reality of a world composed of multiple life forms, but achingly like our own, with greed, art, science and humanity interplaying. About the best sci-fi since Asimov, Tepper and Douglas Adams.
Phillip Hamilton
Loved it.
Beautifully written.
Perdido Street Station
Without doubt the finest book I've read.The author's imagination and writing are second to none.Perdido Street Station itself is a dark,brooding and insane edifice that forms the backdrop to the most stunning sci-fi/horror/fantasy world ever created.With The Scar and Iron Council following,this trio are quite simply amazing and deserve every award and accolade they've received.But it doesn't stop there.With the equally awesome King Rat,Kraken,Un Lun Dun,The City And The City and Embassytown,China Mieville is,in my experience,the finest living writer today.
With over 850 sci-fi,horror and fantasy novels in my collection,Perdido Street Station takes pride of place.