Beautifully written. Bas-Lag is a well-crafted, steam punk world full of fantasy science and fantastic species. I would not want to live there.
Mieville put together a wonderful story that is, in his words, “new weird.” This book won a Hugo Award and it was well deserved.
I listened to this as an audio book – all 24 hours and 21 minutes of it. John Lee did a masterful job of reading the book. Simply listing him as a “narrator” is a disservice. His ability with voices and accents is superior to most.
What’s it about? Well, a lot.
The book begins with a first-person vignette. It takes quite a while to figure out whose voice it is, but it works very well.
We meet Isaac, a rogue scientist and fringe academic, immediately after the vignette. Now the book gets weird to the point of being grotesque. Isaac is a human. Lin, his lover, is a Kepri and a sculptor by trade. They have breakfast, and a morning of love. I’m all for inter-species relationships. I cheered for Captain Kirk and his many alien loves (particularly Shahna, from Gamesters of Triskelion). I draw my personal line at mates with human bodies from the neck down, and a scarab beetle for a head. Smooching a beetle’s “mouth parts” is a step I couldn’t take.
On the other hand, I end up loving Lin and cheering for her when she’s in danger from the aptly named Mr. Motley.
Isaac takes a commission to help a bird-like man (a Garuda) whose wings have been brutally sawn off as punishment for an unnamed crime. He wants to fly again, and the challenge intrigues Isaac enough to take it on.
Meanwhile, Lin is hired to create a full-scale sculpture of Mr. Motley using colored Kepri excrement.
Then things get weird.
Perdido Street Station is a steam-punk extravaganza with frog-people, wer-men, Ambassadors from Hell, cactus people, a disconcerting, dimension-sliding, giant spider, and more.
The story is a solid 9 on the Feral Scale. Anyone who can get me to care about a cast like this deserves serious accolades.
The science is a smiley-faced 2. Gravity still works—mostly—and that’s about it. I didn’t care. The story is so cool that you won’t either.
Even weirder: there’s a second book in the series. I don’t plan on reading it. The grotesque/gory aspects of this novel were enough to make me shy away. Maybe I’ll read another of Mievelle’s books, but not in this series.