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Perdido Street StationVolume 1 of the New Crobuzon Cycle by China Mieville
Winner of Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy Awards, Perdido Street Station burst upon the SF world in 2000, making China Mieville an almost overnight success.
New Crobuzon; the megapolis at the heart of the world of Bas-Lag; where humans live alongside avian humanoids the garuda, half-human half-insectile Khepri, the plant men of the Cactacae and scores of other races; where meteoromancers conjure storms from their vast engines "in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night." New CrobuzonInto China Mieville's vast, sprawling ur-city, a lone traveller journeys along the railway lines into the city clutching his gold, desperate to overturn the awful punishment that he must carry with him wherever he goes. Yaghurak is a garuda who has his wings sawn off, and he dreams that one day he will fly again. Isaac Dan der Grimnabulin is a former university lecturer who has resigned his post and dabbles in small commissions to pay the rent. His lover Lin is a khepri spit-artist who sculpts. Mr Motley is a 'businessman.' When Yaghurak commissions Isaac to find some way of making him fly again, their lives intersect with tragic results. For Isaac decides to study the natural world for inspiration, and the word goes out to the various procurers of merchandise that someone is willing to pay for winged creatures. And from a consignment of bio-hazardous material, a single grub is diverted. It is a grub that will grow, and when it hatches, will feed and prey upon New Crobuzon as nothing ever has before. Even the dukes of Hell will not help the city's Parliament. China MievilleChina Mieville burst upon the world of speculative fiction with this gigantic, sprawling novel that tops over a third of a million words in 2000, and became a major writer almost over night. It's significant that Mieville won both the British Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (in theory, an award for science fiction), the first time that this had been done. The breadth of those awards shows the appeal of Perdido Street Station. Speculative Fiction loves to categorize; science fiction, fantasy and horror --themselves three heads of the same Cerberus-beast-- love to classify and name new sub-genres. In the 1960s the New Wave was an SF-nal punk movement in print a decade before the Stranglers and the Clash. In the 1980s Cyberpunk gave the world works such as Neuromancer that would later influence films like The Matrix. In the 1990s, Steampunk fused pastiches of nineteenth century literature and SF. The New WierdPerdido Street Station bears all of these influences (the Crisis Engine is a wonderful link between William Gibson's Burning Chrome and his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine) but such is the difficulty of categorizing it that Mieville and other writers unwilling to become pigeon-holed were classified as New Wierd. Mieville is unwilling to stick either standard SF or fantasy tropes, and instead merges them in a blinding coruscation of ideas. If the novel has one weakness, it is that New Crobuzon is too obviously London shone through a refracted lens, but that's a small criticism to make of such a fine novel. Mieville's astonishing inventiveness is buttressed by detail piled upon detail as he builds New Crobuzon almost a brick at a time. Novels are as much about character as ideas, and in the dilettante Isaac and his bohemian friends, Mieville shows that he is drawn to the outsider (it would be interesting to know how much the amoral Parliament are reflections of Mieville's view of the New Labour Government), and the small band of renegades are sympathetic characters, because -rather than in spite-- of their flaws.
The copyright of the article Perdido Street Station in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Perdido Street Station in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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