Perdido Street Station
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory. Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger. While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes...
Stats for nerds
13recommend
22mentions
18people
2010–2026years
73% recommend18% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I really enjoyed Josiah Bancroft's Babel series: start with Senlin Ascends. I feel like he enjoys writing sentences -- a strange way to put it, but, I think he does. But this is an extraordinary book on its own.
For the ultimate in non-basic vocab, try Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
The English translation of Metro 2033 is amazing. You can feel the stylistic differences originating in the Russian language, and it's a very evocative horror story with slightly longer sentences and richer language than ordinary books.
Both the Babel books and Metro 2033 (especially) were inspirations for me, writing my novel. And Wolfe is one of my literary heroes, one of the most amazing writers I have ever read. Every one of his novels is rewarding, often through not just language but complexity of plot and narrator. He uses unreliable narrators a lot; beautifully, in one of his series the narrator has amnesia and cannot remember what occurred the previous day, so writes notes to himself. (Soldier of the Mist. Also rewarding once you figure out the name and location references.)
An older classic: Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan is extraordinary in language, but also in the rhythm of sentences. Definitely one written to be read with a voice, not just internally.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville has dense prose. Wonderful book, very rewarding to read.
- I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Haven't read this one but I'm adding it to my list now. Thanks!
- > Most birds spend a significant part of their life in the air, looking down onto human-designed landscapes. The aerial view of our cities is probably as familiar to them as our neighborhood streets are to us.
The opening few chapters of Perdido Street Station does a great job of conveying this difference.
- China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station” is also worth reading. It’s set in, essentially, a _bad_ Ankh Morpork; like Ankh Morpork it’s a vast chaotic fantasy city (both are probably based on London) but New Crobuzon is _nightmarish_.
(I’ve always been curious to what if any extent one influenced the other; Discworld is older, but Ankh Morpork gets fleshed out a lot later. Given how small a world UK sci-fi/fantasy is they’d almost certainly have been aware of each others’ work.)
- I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way.
Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.
- Amazing book. I would love to see a film adaptation. I also recommend his Bas-Lag series starting with Perdido Street Station.
