Perdido Street Station

China Miéville

Aug 2008 · Pan Macmillan

About this ebook

Winner of the August Derleth award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative urban fantasy thriller, and the first of China Miéville's novels set in the world of Bas-Lag.

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants linger in 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.

Ratings and reviews

The world this book creates is foul, short sighted, self centred and cruel. In other words it parallels the Author's political outlook which gives it an unusually rich depth of feeling. Coupled with the graphic and nightmarish overtones that rival the most grotesque and horrifying of visions imagined in Japanese culture (which is high praise from me) are a cast who are at once fantastic, loveable and pitiable. If you like Aliens and you like Death note then you'll love this.

This is a gripping novel with rich and textured imagery that has left me quite unsettled but wanting more.

Self indulgent mess. I've tried and I just don't see what the fuss is about. It's a tedious story set in an unrelateable universe.

About the author

China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award (Perdido Street Station, Iron Council and The City & The City) and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice (Perdido Street Station and The Scar). The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell (The Times) and Philip K. Dick (Guardian). The richly imagined Bas-Lag world is the setting for the novels Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council.