I read the back of Perdido Street Station, by China Miévelle, just after it came out in paperback. I saw it in Waterstones, while browsing the Science Fiction and Fantasy section, and was attracted by the cover. Not the best way of picking a book out, but I work on the general principle that when a sci-fi or fantasy book has a nice cover, which isn’t very showy or ridiculous, then it’s possible they feel that the content is enough to sell the book. So far this theory has held up fairly well. Anyway, I picked up the book and read the back. “Fantasy”, I thought, “not my favourite, but this sounds interesting”. It was almost the end of the month, near pay-day, so I didn’t buy the book I just filed it away for future reference.
Fast-forward to a couple of Christmases later and my parents buy Perdido Street Station and The Scar for me. Despite receiving the books then it took another few months for me to get around to reading Perdido, due to the eternal book backlog struggle which haunts me. One day though I was looking through a shelf of unread books and I picked Perdido Street Station, and that was a fine decision.
Perdido is set in New Crobuzon, a sort of steam-punk medieval city. It sounds strange, and it is, but is works as a setting. The population of the city is a menagerie of strange and unusual creatures; including cacti who live in their own enclosed neighbourhood, people who have been grafted onto machines, various flying gargoyles, parasites, multi-dimensional spiders and many even stranger ones. The inhabitants provide a rich background for the main story to play out against. Events impinge on the main story and give the impression of really taking place in the city, not of just conveniently taking place for the benefit of a plot twist. Civil strife is alive and well, political intrigue abounds, immigrants arrive, commerce continues.
Against this background Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a scientist of the New Crobuzon variety, receives a visitor who wants his body restored to its former state. Thus begins a road that almost leads to the devastation of New Crobuzon and death of its citizens. The story takes many twists and turns, and goes off in some very strange directions, but it’s magnificently held together by Miévelle. Some of the ideas are truly bizarre, even for a fantasy book, but they make sense within the world that has been constructed.