Perdido Street Station

Locations
Call Number: Science Fiction / Mieville, China, Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Mieville, China
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Science Fiction / Mieville, China	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Mieville, China	4-week checkout	Due 05-09-2024

"Originally published in Great Britain by Macmillan Pub. in 2000"--T.p. verso.
In the squalid, gothic city of New Crobuzon, a mysterious half-human, half-bird stranger comes to Isaac, a gifted but eccentric scientist, with a request to help him fly, but Isaac's obsessive experiments and attempts to grant the request unleash a terrifying dark force on the entire city.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Not awful but I have better books on which to spend my reading hours. submitted by eknapp on February 3, 2015, 11:58am Hell with it, it's been almost a year and I can't summon the drive to finish this book. So I'm pulling the plug. Impressions from the first twenty-one chapters, read eleven months ago:

--It was a slog.
--Terrible Star-Trek-alienitis. The non-human half of the hero duo was just a human with a--gasp--beetle for a head. Perhaps this silly, lazy morphology makes more sense by the end but I'd be surprised.
--Miéville brandished his politics like a club, they were thuddingly obvious and unsophisticated. Government is gosh-darned corrupt, counterculture is heroic, the rich are evil and selfish. Not that these ideas aren't worth some screentime, but it was just so...simple.
--The hyper-taboo, socially repugnant interspecies sexual relationship was the best part of the book. The danger of discovery felt real. The artistic subculture that exhibited varying degrees of acceptance and laissez-faire was the only thing that made me want to keep reading.

EDIT: A friend who is good at reviewing reviews pointed out that thus far my rating is not in alignment with my "scathing" criticism. So I should add that:

--Miéville writes real purty.
--His world-building was actually quite good.

Had the library not been whanging me with onerous 25-cents-per-day fines I would have finished reading it. It's just not worth it to me to check it out again I guess.