About the Book
Arthur C. Clarke Award 2001, British Fantasy Award 2001. World Fantasy Award nominee 2001, Hugo Award nominee 2002, Nebula Award nominee 2002.
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.
”Energetic, thuggish, constantly inventive China Mieville continues his project of rebuilding fantasy from the sub cellar up. New Crobuzon, city of clockwork engine and subterranean punishment factory, has the architectonics of a living thing. It is a site of elation, dispute, danger and change: a city raucous with dreams.” – M. John Harrison
”A phantasmagoric masterpiece whose grotesquerie is unmatched by any other work of contempory imaginative fiction. Its surreal imagery recalls the work of Hieronymus Bosch, and only a writer ov the very highest quality could bind such a hectic torrent of exotica into a plot as taut and compelling as this one.” – Brian Stableford
”China Mieville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination. A kind of imaginary world you pray stays imaginary, because we really don't need characters and stories this real finding a way to cross over.” – Peter F. Hamilton
”...something very special indeed. At 700 pages it's not to be taken lightly, but I defy anyone to stop once they've allowed themselves to be drawn into the amazing, intricate and grotesque world he has created.” – Alastair Reynolds
