Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) by China Miéville

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 . . .

A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination.

WHAT
A hard sci-fi world for people who enjoy alien forms of life, unusual characters and an imaginative city able to hold all of them in the same space. No plot or it takes too long to get interesting.

PLOT
A disgusting human scientist is challenged with finding a way to give a winged humanoid his sawed off wings back, while his insect humanoid artist lover is commissioned with sculpting the most bizarre creature that ever existed.

SUMMARY
Isaac is a brilliant, repugnant human scientist that ostracized himself from the science community because of his unusual interests. He does not care to specialize in any field, his interests lies in the bizarre, mysteries that can benefit from a combination of any of the other fields, like biology, engineering and thaumaturgy.

His lover is Lin, an artist from a insect like race, also an outcast by choice since she didn't think like everyone else in her hive community.

The city of New Crobuzon is teeming with weird forms of life, a most bizarre combination of different races and cultures living in an strange harmony. It is gritty, disgusting and steam-punkish like.

One day a garuda comes to Issac and tells him the sad story that resulted in his wings being cut-off by his own people, giving him the unusual challenge of finding a way to grow them back, not to find an artificial substitute. His girlfriend Lin is also defied with a unique task: a crime lord wants her to create a sculpture that captures his essence, which he considers to be the essence of the city itself. He is a combination of many different creatures sown down together.

ANALYSIS
Quoting the top reviewer: “if you read only for the story and plot, this book is not for you”. Well, after a few hours there was no plot or story whatsoever. I did not care for the hyper biological sci-fi scenario presented, so I stopped reading.

The book is a bit hard to read, typical of hard sci-fi. I think the prose was fine, I just could not enjoy the city and its inhabitants being described without giving me any sort of emotional or intellectual attachment to them.

Read 2:40/31:00 9%

This was a wild blending of elements: fantasy, cyber-punk, steampunk, horror, and classic mythology to name a few. So many different creatures it's impossible to remember how you're supposed to be imagining them as you come across different characters. As Douglas Adams put it in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, “the things are also people.”

I'd be better off reading this alongside a companion book, The Visual Guide to Bas-Lag (as yet non-existent). I like to think I have a visual imagination, and it's not so much the elaborate descriptions as it is the sheer number of species and locations. Bonus, everything is covered with slime and feces.

Oh yeah, I enjoyed the story as well, though I never got too cozy with any of the characters.

Full review at SFF Book Review

This was an excellent read.

I'm still stunned by the inventiveness, the abundance of ideas and the thrill of the plot. I normally post short impressions on goodreads and a full review on my blog, but I'm afraid I can't just talk about this book “a little”. Either it's all the way gushing about how awesome the monsters are and hot terrifying the threat to New Crobuzon and how surprising each plot twist, or it's just a simple: Read this! It is brilliant.

9/10

A brilliant book of well-rounded characters and a lavish dystopian world. All at once it manages to be urban fantasy, science fiction and fantasy.

When the protagonist takes on an unusal job from an even more unusual client, he unleashes a terrible evil upon the city that can siphon dreams from sentient beings, leaving them a shallow husk. Engaging the aide of friends and associates alike, and enraging both the city government and a powerful drug lord (for whom which his girlfriend has secretly gone to work), he must race against time to save them all.