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.
"[A] phantasmagoric masterpiece... The book left me breathless with admiration."
BRIAN STABLEFORD
"China Miéville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination."
PETER HAMILTON
"It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's."
JOHN CLUTE
"Ambitious, beautifully written, enormously imaginative, engrossing... A complex fable that blends several genres -- fantasy, horror, gothic, science fiction, and social protest with believable, interesting, and utterly weird, fantastic creature-characters... I could feel my imagination stretched and tweaked by the haunting narrative -- redolent of dreams, nightmares, intuitive whisperings, visions, and tastes of the unconscious.... With its inventive plot, fascinating characters, evocative language, and underlying themes of coexistence among very different beings, economics and politics, crime and punishment, computer consciousness, science and art, Perdido Street Station is in the end both complex and satisfying. And China Miéville is an author to read both for fun and for quite serious amusement."
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
"Revolutionary in the sheer bravura range of its invention... This is the point in the review where prefabricated accolades like 'this novel heralds a promising new voice on the fantasy horizon' are usually offered up. To hell with that. Miéville isn't on the horizon, he's roared to the center of the map, kicked ass, taken names, and jumped straight to the top of the heap."
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION
"With his new novel, the gargantuan, intricate, and thoroughly grounded Perdido Street Station, China Miéville moves effortlessly into
