I finished *Perdido Street Station*, ISBN 0345443020. It was a good book, and I recommend it to any one who appreciates a strange mix of urban sprawl, techofantasy and interesting vocabulary snatched from cyberpunk novels. The plot is a better than what I am accustomed to from authors such as BruceSterling. Don’t get me wrong, I like reading Bruce Sterling’s books, I just think that their plots are often lousy from a dramaturgical point of view. The story just dribbles off. It’s an interesting pack of ideas, and Perdido Street Station has the interesting mix of ideas I love, and even better, it also has a plot that works a bit better. Some of the ideas are not so fresh, of course, such as the pile of industrial junk turned intelligent, and some ideas are very fancy but make a short appearance only – such as the ambassador of Hell. There was also a point during the book where I wondered whether it was actually necessary to be so sordid. The wyrmen were the only comic relief offered and the few tender moments between Isaac and Lin did not make up for all the depressing decrepitude of the urban cacaphony. I particularly liked the mix of technology and magic: “biothaumargy” and I chuckled to myself when they hired a band of “adventurers”, mostly “tomb robbers”, dangerous, deadly, monster killers, out for gold and experience... Hehehe!
I did buy another of China Miéville’s book, *The Scar*, which I will be reading shortly.
I found a review of the book in German at Bibliotheka Phantastika ¹ that is spot-on regarding the plot: The katharsis takes too long so that towards the end, the outcome is basically known, and the little suspense that remains is due to a trick – Miéville has his characters following a plan that the reader doesn’t know. Oh well.
The other review on the same site mentions the difficulty of reading the book for non-natives. If you cannot handle the weird jumble of word-creations, artificial jargon and strange metaphors, you will be lost. I remember when I tried to read *Neuromancer* in English as a youth and thinking my English to be very good. And then I could barely follow the story... Those were the days! 😄
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