Mieville, China - Perdido Street Station

This story takes place in the sprawling, dirty, steam-powered city of New Corbuzon, only some of whose inhabitants are human. Isaac Den der Grimnebulin is one, a freelance scholar and scientist. His lover, Lin. is a talented sculptor and a kephri, a beetle-headed alien humanoid. One fateful day, they both undertake new commissions. During the course of his, Isaac will inadvertently release a terrible, inconceivable danger into the city, putting potentially all of its population at risk, and directly threatening Lin, whose ruthless employer misinterprets Isaac's actions as a direct threat to his own empire. Isaac assembles a ragtag band who engage in a number of remarkable escapades to stop the growing catastrophe that he started.

Mieville can definitely write. Not all of the society that he has invented makes sense, however, and the whole thing hangs together mainly because of the dramatic momentum of the story. He tosses elements together the way that I have done myself when creating roleplaying scenarios, evidently thinking "Wow, what a cool idea!" and chucking it into the mix. When things were clicking, I found myself thinking of Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" stories - "The Ballad of Lost C'mell," "A Planet called Shayol," the novel Norstrilia, and others. But Smith had a deep love of both animal and humankind, and a basically optimistic outlook. Mieville seems to me to be much more negative, and pretty disgusted with much of humanity.

Finally, Mieville's basically a horror writer. He dwells lovingly on every scene of pain, terror, and torment that occurs during the course of this story - and there are plenty of them. I don't read horror fiction. Real life is bad enough. I don't know that I will ever re-read this book, and I don't know that I will ever read any more of Mieville's adult fiction. His children's book Un-Lun-Dun has received some stellar reviews, and I may give it a shot, simply because I seriously doubt he'd subject younger readers to the kind of thing that upset me about this book.

( Read on for a bit more, including some spoilers )