Ghost in the Machine
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« on: January 03, 2012, 02:28:10 PM » |
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Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
Welcome to New Crobuzon, city of thousands of years and millions of denizens, chief city-state of the planet of Bas-Lag. New Crobuzon is the original melting pot, containing more different races than you can shake a good-sized stick at. Garuda and wyrmen wheel alongside the militia’s dirigibles through the skies. The streets throng with humans, Khepri (a race of female humanoids with large beetles where their heads should be), Vodyani (as much frogs as humans), steam-powered robots and myriad even stranger folks. It is a city of immense power, immense poverty, and, after thousands of years, immense pollution. New Crobuzon is home to incredible wonders like the Ribs, the Spike, and Perdido Street Station itself, nexus of the city’s skyrail system. It is also a city of malevolent terrors: politico-military despots, criminal overlords, dark magics and a justice system that doles out hideous and permanent tortures.
But this summer, New Cobruzon is facing an even greater evil—one that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of not just the city, but the surreality in which it exists. And it’s up to a handful of outcasts to save us all.
Okay, so that last might sound a little cliché. But that’s because compared to Miéville’s book, anything I write is going to sound cliché. Perdido Street Station is, quite simply, the most original book I’ve read since William Gibson re-invented science fiction with his masterpiece Neuromancer; and Miéville may well have even topped Gibson (while still borrowing some ideas from the Gibson/Sterling collaboration The Difference Engine). “Genre-busting” is the term that comes to mind. Perdido is both science fiction and fantasy, gothic horror and comedy, love story and high adventure, environmental screed and metaphysical/mathematical treatise. Toward the end, there’s even a group of characters who stepped directly out of someone’s Saturday night Dungeons & Dragons game. If I had a gun pointed at me and was forced to label Perdido, I suppose I’d say that it most nearly fits into the “steampunk” genre--a sub-genre of SF which sets the dystopian future of cyberpunk in a world where electricity doesn’t exist and even household machines are powered by oil, coal and steam.
Miéville’s inventiveness turns out to be not only a wondrous pleasure, but essential to enjoying Perdido. This is a long book--around 800 pages, and not much really happens during the first half or so. We spend this time getting to know our main characters. Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a renegade scientist who dabbles in all fields but is particularly obsessed with defining the Unified Field Theorem and building a “crisis engine” which can tap it. Lin is his Khepri lover, a sculptress who has abandoned her race’s culture. Derkhan Blueday is a writer for an illegal and seditionist newspaper. Yagharek is a Garuda, proud winged hunters of the desert, who has had his wings torn off in a matter of tribal justice and yearns to fly again. And, most important of all characters we get to know in the first half of the book, is New Crobuzon itself. Again, I know it may sound cliché when I say that the city itself is a major character. But in this case, it’s less cliché than understatement. New Crobuzon has actively shaped all the other characters into what they have become, and it continues to act upon them through the course of the book… and the others act upon it. It is the getting to know New Crobuzon that sustains the reader through first chunk of the book. As the other characters move through the city we are dazzled over and over by some magical piece of literary invention. The reader keeps asking himself “Wow! how did he think of that?” until it is almost a litany. While I will admit that I read the first part of Perdido a bit slower than is usual for me, I was never once tempted to give up on it.
Once the action kicks off, Miéville makes up for the early slowness and exposition by cranking the adrenaline and fear factors up to eleven. I hesitate to give away too much of the plot, as I don’t want to ruin the reader’s surprise and delight and awe as the events unfold. I can tell you that through a series of coincidences, Isaac accidentally unleashes a host of unstoppable, unkillable monsters upon the city. In doing so, he and his band become the target of the government, New Crobuzon’s most powerful criminal kingpin, and a secret sect that worship a fledgling Artificial Intelligence. They also pick up some unlikely allies as they set out to tackle the monsters themselves. There is real, pulse-pounding excitement and terror here, interspersed with some truly black humor for comic relief. I read most of the last half of the book in two long sittings, unable to put it down the first time until I was simply too sleepy and exhausted to go on.
If you are a fan of straight science fiction, cyberpunk or steampunk, then Perdido Street Station is an absolute must-read. I also recommend it to fans of fantasy, “urban” fantasy, or horror novels. Or dark adventure novels. Or mathematics. Screw it--anybody who treasures pure inventive originality at its most fecund and prolific will love this amazing masterwork.
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