Sale Alert: Amazon Daily Deal 18Jul18 1.99I finished this about a week ag0 and I still can’t seem to decide if I love it or hate it. I think it is kind of a little of both. The writing is wonderful and the world is fantastic. That easily made me like so many things about this book. BUT this isn’t an “and they all lived Happily Ever After” kind of book and so at the end I was left with this sad empty feeling that I didn’t like. ツ On the Plus Side ツThe world is fascinating and super complex. There...

Body horror, steampunk grindpunk grind punk (or grimdark? not sure) dark fantasy hybrid dystopian worldbuilding, and this unique style make it a different genre mixup than one is used to from science fantasy with a grain of terror.Love knows no boundsInterspecies relationships have so much potential, how the main protagonist´s relationship with a, not just mentally, heavily armored person is described and how her cultural preferences are integrated into the plot are a highlight of the underused

A brilliant page turner.First of all, any book that begins with a quote from Philip K. Dick is alright in my book and promises a great story to come. This promise was kept, with interest. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville is to steampunk weird fiction as Neuromancer was to cyberpunk – it is the definitive benchmark. An urbane, nightmarish fantasy, Perdido Street Station is similar to Mieville’s The City and the City; but where the later novel was Monte Python absurd, PSS is Charles Dicken...

I feel like I've been reading this book forever. It's long, largely unstructured, and I never became particularly invested in any of the characters, so it just dragged on. The best thing I could say about it is that it's diverting. One of the quotes on the back describes it as "phantasmagoric," which seems accurate. All sorts of crazy random things, soul-devouring moth creatures, interdimensional homicidal spiders, creative reconstructive surgery as state punishment. That's all amusing to a degr...

The universe got stuck in the age of steam… And in this bizarro universe a lot of bizarro creatures do a lot of bizarro deeds…The clouds swirled in the city’s filthy microclimate. It seemed as if all of New Crobuzon’s weather was formed by a massive, gradual crawling hurricane that centred around the city’s heart, the enormous mongrel building that squatted at the core of the commercial zone known as The Crow, the coagulate of miles of railway line and years of architectural styles and violation...

💀 DNF at 11%. Go me and stuff.Yet another overhyped book with a cult following bites the dust! Yay! I obviously read this one wrong! Or maybe I read it right but didn't enjoy it because I'd mistakenly purchased the Swahili version and read it back to front and upside down. This is the most plausible explanation, since I don't belong to the People of Despicable Book Taste Horde (PoDBTH™) and always read books right. Had I bought the English version, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have noticed how exc...

I've read three other Mievilles before this, and they were 2*, 4*, and 5*.I'm so pleased this was another 5*. What a wonderful, rich, steampunky, fantastical phantasmagoria this is.PLOTIt opens with one of several short, first-person impressions: a newcomer arriving by boat at night. He’s wealthy but anguished, and the boatman fears him. The story then opens in New Crobuzon: an ancient city (some houses nearly 1000 years old) inhabited by many exotic sentient species. We meet Lin, a khepri (inse...

Finished. I am stunned. 5-star stunned. After having read The City & the City I new I was in for something special, but I had no idea is was going to be anything like this. Perdido Street Station is a rich steampunk fantasy novel. The world is unique and filled to the brim with creative ideas and details. Every sense is involved when wandering through it. If you want to read this, don't be faint of heart. The visuals are sometimes shocking and early on there are animal experiments, then - no spo...

To paraphrase Pratchett, "There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork New Crobuzon. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork New Crobuzon, but sometimes people walk along them the wrong way."(A stunning image of New Crobuzon from http://www.curufea.com)A word of warning: if you read only for the story and plot, this book is not for you. Yes, there is an interesting storyline with mystery and danger and love and betrayal - but it is neither the strength nor the focus of Perd...

Lots of people like to accuse China Miéville of writing with a thesaurus open next to his laptop. How else to explain the frequent appearance of "ossified," "salubrious," "susurrus" and "inveigled" within the 623 pages of Perdido Street Station? Ok, so you can maybe argue that if you write a 250,000 word book, probably less than six of those words should be "palimpsest," but really, I just think he's a smart guy who carefully controls his prose.So the language in The City & The City is stripped

My friends call me Senex ('The Old Man') because of my taste in fantasy, or they would, if I had any. It's often been noted that I'll give at least four stars to any fantasy from the Italian Renaissance, and yet rarely give more than two for anything written since the nineteen-sixties. Some have accused me of a staunch prejudice in period, but lo! it is not so.I really love the fantasy genre, but the corollary of this is that I hate most fantasy books, because of how they mistreat that which I l...

This Steampunk meets New Weird meets Cyberpunk meets Fantasy novel has so many themes, that I'm not even going to try to give it full credit with some sort of synopsis. I'm rather just going to talk about various aspects of the book as I go along with my review.The way I felt when I finished the novel, I wanted to give it 7 stars. For a few reasons, I'm having second thoughts.Let me start off the bat with some aspects that niggled me.Firstly, certain aspects of the world-building:Mieville used

my dear Perdido Street Station,perhaps it is fated not to be. or perhaps i need to grow a bit more, until i am able to understand and appreciate your unique charms. but for now, i am just not ready. please don't take this personally - i promise that i shall try you out again sometime, perhaps soon. too many people love you, and they love you too, too much for me to give up on you altogether. i will admit that my first impression was off-putting - the way you talked and gestured and sought attent...

WARNING: This review probably contains some (but not many) spoilers, so you may not want to read this if you haven’t read Perdido Street Station yet. This review also contains plenty of vulgarity. Please don't read this if you do not want to see the "f" and other words. Thanks.Me reading my review: I decided to read this on SoundCloud, since BirdBrian has turned me into a recorded voice madman. You can listen right here if you'd like.I fucking hate moths. Seriously. I hate them. They freak me ou...

While China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station sometimes takes wide detours around the plot, the atmosphere he conjures, with its dark and sinister underpinnings, is interesting and compelling. There are parts of the book that make you smell what’s happening in this world. Let me say this off the bat: it’s not a good smell! Even the way Mieville demonstrates the artistic method (in the form of MC’s insect girlfriend) is rather unique. And while it doesn’t advance the plot, it had me thinking abou...

I Love You, I Love You, I Love YouFor the fortnight it took me to read this novel, I was in another world and I was in love.Perhaps, now, I’ll retreat from that world and substitute another or others (or perhaps even return to my own world), but I will remain in love.Is this a fantasy love or is it real? I think it’s real.After all, is there any love that is not partly a product of your own mind?How can a writer make this happen? How can a reader experience this? How can a person experience it i...

I'm not feeling overly inspired to review this book. I was. At first. At around the 300 page mark, still riveted by the world that Miéville created, I started feverishly composing what would have been... what could have been... I researched Miéville's background and was prepared to tell you all about his growing up in a lower-class household with just his mum and his sister, but that he was super smart and won scholarships to all the best schools. I was going to tell you about his love for role-...

Lesson learned after reading this?Don't Experiment With Cheese.Can you imagine how many problems could have been avoided had this novel had access to time-travel? It's practically the only trope not explored, and that's saying a damn lot.Off and on through the entire reading, I wanted to declare that this is one of the most brilliant novels ever written. The sheer level of creativity and attention to detail, the fantastic explorations of ideas, the explosion of plot items and complications, and

A story about a rogue scientist trying to harness unbelievable powers to help a de-winged birdman fly again. This should have been awesome. It wasn't. Plot lines get mashed together, or abandoned all together. It ends as a vastly different story than it started. I wanted to like this book, I really did. But now the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am. The story is so off the wall you'll never know what's coming next. Sometimes story elements are introduced and won't make any sense

What did I just read?! This book is crazy. Mievelle’s imagination is insane.What is Perdido Street Station? Is it fantasy, is it sci-fi, or is it just outright weird fiction? It’s a little hard to explain but I’ll give it a shot.The story is set in a totally made up universe in the city state of New Crobuzon. The setting could loosely be described as steampunk with an early industrial era feel, dirty, dank, corrupt, with a dictatorship for government and an underworld that rules the streets. Tec...