Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

Rereadable heroic fantasy/sci fi - Perdido Street Station

Reviews
 

Well recommended book, the atmosphere of the city really draws you in. Forget your steam punk, this has all sorts of scientific/tech-magic
Dr. Stephen Culshaw

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China Mieville crafts a Sci-Fantasy world where you would not particularly want to live. His story is as rich as it could be with his characters and storyline set in a dark filthy steam driven alternate world with strange other lifeforms as well as humanoids. The story flows and is compelling. He is up there with the very best in contemporary writers such as Iain Banks, Joe Abercrombie, and Richard Morgan. All in all a great story and a great read that is well written and gripping from start to finish.
Gassucker

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Ah, China Mieville. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!

After having read Mieville's collection of short stories my interest was sufficiently piqued to investigate his novels. Having read the synopses for all his books I decided this would be my best entry point for exploring China Mieville proper.

I was both right and wrong. This, the first of the Bas-Lag series is not an easy read, in the same way that Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is not an easy read. However, like Peake's idiosyncratic trilogy, Perdido Street Station is an instant classic and I can see why it has earned Mieville so many admirers in the world of fantasy fandom.

Good fantasy writers are able to create a believable alternate world. Excellent fantasy writers are able to create a believable and engaging fantasy world alive with cultures and politics. Mieville's world is populated by so many fascinating, bizarre and endlessly endearing peoples that it would be impossible to keep track of them were they not so beautifully realised. As the novel progresses we are intoduced to the insectile / humanoid Khepri, the Cacatae (human cactuses, the amphibious Vodyanoi, the cybernetic Construct Council and the avian Garuda as well as their religions, hisories, cultures, subcultures, countercultures (and yes, even drug cultures) in a way that is never dry or dull but always a dynamic part of the narrative.

For those who demand more than a diverse racial cast of players from their fantasy Perdido street station doesn't disappoint in the plot department either. Told from the point of view of Isaac, a good hearted but rough around the edges academic the story follows Isaac on an epic adventure precipitated by an unexpected visit from a mysterious stranger. This stranger, Yahgarek, is a Garuda who comes to Isaac with a simple proposition, to enable him to fly even though his wings have been severed (the harshest punishment possible for a Garuda reserved only for the foulest crime). Elsewhere his secret lover, a prodigious Khepri artist named Lin is comissioned to create a sculpted dopelganger for a gangster whose appearance so horribly and intricately malformed his appearance can only be insinuated by the author.

There is so much depth, richness and complexity to this book it would be a long winded travesty to try and recap it here. Suffice to say if a world ruled by a totalitarian government with a direct line to Hell, where scientifically explainable magic can co exist with steam powered robots floats your boat then this is for you!

D. Laurikietis

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Ooof! An 867-page proof that more is less. Miéville has a prodigious imagination and he has built his, nasty, cloacal world in exhaustive detail - and the reader is spared absolutely none of it. The Times says he writes with 'admirable confidence', a confidence that might just be misplaced. The problem is that even as it collapses under its own weight, this novel lacks so much. Miéville has no restraint, no ear, no feel for rhythm or form, no sense of humour, no point of view, no interest in people. His human characters, whatever their gender, age, station, all speak with the same voice - the voice, for some reason, of a London van driver: oafish, coarse, inarticulate and larded with repetitive, pointless cursing. The effect is at first comic, then numbing and tiresome. (His "The City And The City" has the same lazy defect.) Only the non-human characters are interesting, but it is a patient reader who will not start skimming the pages after about halfway. Inside this fat book is a thin one trying to get out - a much better book: lively, strikingly original and about 567 pages shorter.
b00le

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Describing this book as fantasy could be misleading. It is a long way from sub-Tolkein/Arthurian swords and sorcery. It is set in an early industrial city, New Crobuzon on an unidentified, and, to the plot, irrelevant world. The entire book (flashback aside) is set in the city which is the real central chracter of the book. It is a city of bizarre arcane science and technology combining with industrialised para-science, a city of wild architecture, of trains and monorails, of oppressive centralised government, of dark and dangerous slums and ghettoes.

Peopling this brooding metropolis are a weird assortment of humans, bird men, sentient amphibians, intelligent insects, walking cacti and ultimately mechanical artificial intelligence. It should be said at this point that the first task of the writer of any form of fantasy is to get the reader to suspend disbelief. This is a tricky task for Mieville with this list of anthropomorphised creatures but somehow he pulls it off, possibly through his confident, naturalistic prose which doesn't accommodate doubt.

The central (animated) characters are Isaac, a rogue scientist and his insectoid lover, Lin. Lin, an artist, is given a secret commission by an underworld chief while Isaac is recruited to investigate flight. In the course of his studies Isaac inadvertently releases an apocalyptic horror on the city , a horror which links to the city's corrupt despotic regime and to Lin's mafiosi patron. The body of the book is taken up with Isaac's struggle to contain the nightmare he has released on the city.

Perdido Street Station is a uniquely creative vision which creates a fantasy world completely at variance with the usual pseudo-mediaeval mumbo jumbo which carries that tag. It is an exhausting read, with incredibly dense prose crammed with the incidental detail of Mieville's imagination. If I could find a picture of what it is like, I would probably say Dickensian London on acid.

On the downside Mieville sometimes allows too much detail to interfere with the momentum of the plot, but overall, well recommended.
P. G. Harris

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