Perdido Street Station
2000
- long now manual for civilization
- fiction, science fiction, general
- fiction
- science fiction
- strangers
- general
- dissenters
- alienation (social psychology)
- dystopias
- city and town life
The story
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 it’s like
Dense, sooty and baroque on the page: the prose piles up grime, smoke and iridescent detail in long sentences that pull you through a city built around an enormous bleached carcass. Think gaslit squalor, factory haze, rivers thick with alchemical effluent, and a constant sense of machinery and magic grinding against each other. The sound is implied rather than scored, a busy urban roar of hammering, shouting and strange animal calls, broken now and then by stillness in a laboratory. Vibe: grimy, feverish, weird-industrial, with a creeping sense of dread and wonder at once. It suits a long stretch of uninterrupted reading, a cold evening alone, or a patient weekend when you want to sink into a world rather than skim a plot. Pacing is sprawling and digressive, with the middle third slowing into observation and then accelerating into mounting horror. The emotional core is a reclusive scientist who slowly, reluctantly opens up to strangers and to his own curiosity, while the wider city is shaped by alienation, prejudice and state violence. Intensity runs fairly high: frequent brutal violence, body horror, drug use, sexual content and grotesque cruelty, with the menace landing hard rather than lingering in gore. Written for readers who love elaborate invented worlds, weird fiction and sprawling urban fantasy, and who can tolerate darkness for the sake of texture.
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