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Perdido Street Station
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 24 hrs and 21 mins
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Utterly brilliant in it’s tedium
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By: Gene Wolfe
Publisher's summary
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies.
Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released.
The city is gripped by an alien terror. The fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades. A reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of brick and wood and steel under the vaults of Perdido Street Station.
It is too late to escape.
Critic reviews
Winner of the August Derleth Award
"Primal awe and erudite references have always mingled in Miéville’s work—along with a healthy dose of pulp playfulness.”—The New Yorker
“Flawlessly plotted and relentlessly, stunningly inventive: a conceptual breakthrough of the highest order.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Perdido Street Station is brimming with enchantment. Written in intense, evocative prose, set in Dickensian New Crobuzon, peopled with characters of Boschian demeanor and diversity . . . the book flourishes and shuffles the conventions of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.”—Tordotcom
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- By Bomberwizz on 11-30-14
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Dawn of Eden
- By: Julie Kagawa
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Before The Immortal Rules, there was Red Lung, a relentless virus determined to take out all in its path. For Kylie, the miracle of her survival is also her burden - as a doctor at one of the clinics for the infected, she is forced to witness endless suffering. What's worse, strange things are happening to the remains of the dead, and by the time she befriends Ben Archer, she's beginning to wonder if a global pandemic is the least of her problems....
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A (bad) Harlequin romance with zombies
- By Barbara on 05-14-13
By: Julie Kagawa
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The Many Selves of Katherine North
- By: Emma Geen
- Narrated by: Katy Sobey
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Kit has been projecting into other species for seven years. Longer than anyone else at ShenCorp. Longer than any of the scientists thought possible. But lately she has the feeling that when she jumps, she isn't alone.... Since she was 12, Kit has been a phenomenaut, her consciousness projected into the bodies of lab-grown animals for the purpose of research.
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Dull and Dragging
- By Penny on 06-02-16
By: Emma Geen
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Geomancer: Well of Echoes, Book 1
- By: Ian Irvine
- Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
- Length: 23 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Two hundred years after the Forbidding was broken, Santhenar is locked in war with the lyrinx - intelligent, winged predators who will do anything to gain their own world. Despite the development of battle clankers and mastery of the crystals that power them, humanity is losing. Tiaan, a lonely crystal worker in a clanker manufactory, is experimenting with an entirely new kind of crystal when she begins to have extraordinary visions.
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About As Satisfying as Coitus Interruptus
- By Craig G. Clark on 07-26-13
By: Ian Irvine
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The Peculiar
- By: Stefan Bachmann
- Narrated by: Peter Altschuler
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Don't get yourself noticed and you won't get yourself hanged. In the faery slums of Bath, Bartholomew Kettle and his sister Hettie live by these words. Bartholomew and Hettie are changelings - Peculiars - and neither faeries nor humans want anything to do with them. One day a mysterious lady in a plum-colored dress comes gliding down Old Crow Alley. Bartholomew watches her through his window. Who is she? What does she want? And when Bartholomew witnesses the lady whisking away, in a whirling ring of feathers, the boy who lives across the alley - Bartholomew forgets the rules and gets himself noticed.
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An Unexpected Adventure
- By Shannon on 05-30-13
By: Stefan Bachmann
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The Ninth Rain
- The Winnowing Flame Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Jen Williams
- Narrated by: Jot Davies
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Jen Williams, acclaimed author of The Copper Cat trilogy, featuring The Copper Promise, The Iron Ghost and The Silver Tide, returns with the first in a blistering new trilogy. The great city of Ebora once glittered with gold. Now its streets are stalked by wolves. Tormalin the Oathless has no taste for sitting around waiting to die while the realm of his storied ancestors falls to pieces - talk about a guilt trip. Better to be amongst the living, where there are taverns full of women and wine.
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Couldn’t put it down!
- By Renae on 09-09-22
By: Jen Williams
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In the Ocean of Night
- Galactic Center, Book 1
- By: Gregory Benford
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 2019. NASA astronaut Nigel Walmsley is sent on a mission to intercept a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Ordered to destroy it, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal….
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Like some Space with your Soaps?
- By Bradley on 05-15-12
By: Gregory Benford
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A Shadow on the Glass
- The View From the Mirror Quartet, Book 1
- By: Ian Irvine
- Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
- Length: 21 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Once there were three worlds, each with their own human species. Then, fleeing out of the void came a fourth species, the Charon. Desperate, on the edge of extinction, they changed the balance between the worlds forever. Karan, a sensitive with a troubled heritage, is forced to steal an ancient relic in repayment of a debt. It turns out to be the Mirror of Aachan, a twisted, deceitful thing that remembers everything it has ever seen.
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Not quite good enough.
- By Scott S. on 03-13-12
By: Ian Irvine
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Relic
- Pendergast, Book 1
- By: Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human.... But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.
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Non-Perishable
- By Snoodely on 05-26-10
By: Douglas Preston, and others
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Prosper Redding: The Last Life of Prince Alastor
- By: Alexandra Bracken
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Three hundred years ago, fate bound Prosper Redding and Prince Alastor of the Third Realm together. Now the human boy and fiend heir to the demon kingdom must put aside a centuries-old blood feud to save everything they love. Alastor will guide Prosper through the demon realm - under one huge condition: Prosper must enter into a contract with the malefactor residing in him, promising eternal servitude in the afterlife. With Prosper's sister in the clutches of the evil queen Pyra, Prosper has no choice but to agree.
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Excellent Book
- By Achukma on 06-12-19
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Three Parts Dead
- By: Max Gladstone
- Narrated by: Claudia Alick
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, a first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring him back to life before his city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without him, the metropolis’ steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in.
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Great story, but the narrator was off
- By John on 07-27-14
By: Max Gladstone
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Great read for all ages
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There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.” And he wants to be able to die.
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Looking for Jake
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What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales - one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon.
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Graze Into It
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The Last Days of New Paris
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It's 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer - and occult disciple - Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.
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Can living artwork die?
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By: China Miéville
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Three Moments of an Explosion
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London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse’s bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?
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Reading Miéville is both Delicious AND Disturbing
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By: China Miéville
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This Census-Taker
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Story
In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?
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Only Feeding the Darkness
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The Windup Girl
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Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.
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Good and also Frustrating
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Ambergris
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Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.
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Entrancing “weird” novel
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By: Jeff VanderMeer
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Out of the Ruins
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A fresh post-apocalyptic anthology: the end of the world seen through the salvage and ruins, featuring Emily St. John Mandel, Carmen Maria Machado, and more.
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More misses than hits.
- By Jimmyjoejangles on 04-30-22
By: Preston Grassmann, and others
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Tigana
- By: Guy Gavriel Kay
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 24 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Eight of the nine Palm provinces of the Peninsula have been overcome by warrior sorcerers Brandin and Alberico. But the sorcerers don't know that a small band of survivors is plotting their removal. With tensions mounting, the sorcerers become increasingly at odds as each decides where his own path - and that of the land - should truly lie.
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A little self-indulgent
- By Diana M. on 05-31-20
By: Guy Gavriel Kay
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The Vorrh
- By: Brian Catling
- Narrated by: Allan Corduner
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast - perhaps endless - forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him.
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Mixed feelings
- By Christopher Torgersen on 09-05-15
By: Brian Catling
What listeners say about Perdido Street Station
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- James
- 08-19-09
Brilliant, wonderful book -- horrible recording
This review concerns the quality of the recording itself. Perdido street station is profound and titillating, no doubt.
The recording, however, is terrible. The narrator is proficient and good with characters, but the *editing* of the audio book is inexcusable. I've so far noticed three skips ahead an unknown amount of time, but leaving out important parts of the book. Listeners to this recording who have never read the book will almost certainly finish it quite confused.
Fix this audio book, Audible. I'd like a good copy for the exhorbitant price.
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137 people found this helpful
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Performance
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- Cherry
- 06-23-10
Wish I could rate it higher - skipped audio
I really wanted to be able to give this audio book a higher rating because it's a masterpiece. From China Mieville's fantastic, descriptive and dark writing (that I fell for with UnLondon), to John Lee's superb narration this book is just perfect. I seriously couldn't ask for any more. One of dark Science Fiction's best writers and one of the world's best narrators of audio books.
Unfortunately on Part 3 of the audio at 3:30:30 (not kidding) there is a jump in the audio and story. I don't know how much is missing but for such an expensive book I'm disappointed.
I've submitted a report to audible in the hopes this can be fixed and if so I will update my review accordingly.
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130 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Dean S.
- 07-05-09
Great Book. Editing Errors
I agree with the other reviewers that story and the narrator and superb. I thought the ending was more than appropriate for this book. What we get is a realistic ending to a fantastical book, rather than some feel-good fairytale conclusion.
Unfortunately, Audible's editors were not so kind to this book. Chapter 18 contains 16 minutes of repeated material, and chapter 46 has approximately two paragraphs cut out. Not a deal breaker for sure, but inexcusable nonetheless.
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64 people found this helpful
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- Steph
- 01-31-13
Stick with it
Rarely have I been so disgusted with a book in the first three chapters. *I wanted to stop listening and if I had it would have been a terrible mistake.* I don't want to give spoilers so I will not say why I wanted to stop. I will say that I kept with it mainly since I had spent a credit and didn't have anymore and could not cope with not having an audiobook to listen to. The book is wonderful and rich with imagery and is a very imaginitive take on society, government, criminal underworld, corruption, and how a blend of science and technology can change everything. John Lee's performance was wonderful and has led me to see what else he has read on audible. This is the first China Mieville book I have read and intend to read more. I would say, however, you truelly have to accept that this is fantasy, this world is not your world, and you can not judge it based off of our societal norms. It is absolutely worth reading.
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- Robert
- 01-23-12
Mixed feelings
Wow, did I ever have a time with this one. It was a love-hate-love relationship. At first the book drew me in with the language. I am almost always about writing over plot so I was immediately drawn in by the words and their construction long before the plot even began to quicken. Some has been written about how Miéville repeats certain words and, while I noticed that (for me it was pugnacious and detritus), it was not too distracting. Actually, given that the landscape was usually strewn with detritus and and its inhabitants pugnacious, these were probably the best choices of words. That being said, the words were wonderful. I spent some time with my dictionary.
For me, the physical, steampunk world and the environment of Perdido Street Station were vividly drawn and easily recognizable, its technological content not so much. Atmospherically, it is vaguely 19th century, Victorian but that only a trope; this is a world definitely not that of our own. This is a world of many sorts of alien life that sometimes includes the humans themselves, humans who copulate with sentient, insect-like creatures. While we may not be at all sure about the time, the place is very well constructed.
Actually, let’s just cut to the chase; at the core, this is a story about the love and mating habits of a human (at least I think he’s human) and a vegetarian insect (my imagination had her looking kind of like a cross between a praying mantis and Angelina Jolie) who is an artist and spits a lot. Oh, and also it’s about giant, psychedelic, mesmerizing moths that literally have s#it for brains and that suck the dreams out of everyone in sight and turn them into zombies. I am not making this up. This is what this wildly acclaimed book is about. The sex and the insect wasn’t too bad but when we got to the moths and zombies, I started to wonder WTF was I reading.
Okay, Robert, calm down... Remember Angelina? The artist? I mean, the insect? Well her real name is Lin and she [sic] really isn’t an insect, she’s khepri, uhhh, she only looks like an insect. I guess that makes it better. And the s#it for brains stuff? It really isn’t s#it. It’s only called that. It’s really the moths’ milk. I guess that makes it all better now. Are you confused yet? I would not be surprised. And we haven’t even gotten to The Weaver, the multi-dimensional spider who speaks in torrents of free-verse poetry. The Orkin Man would’a had a field-day here.
It sounds like there’s a lot going on in this book and there is. There just might be too much going on, especially toward the end. While there was no lack of narrative stamina this reader weakened, weakened to the point of nearly giving up. Weakened not out of fatigue but out of a loss of interest. The narrative toward the end seemed to drone on and on. I actually had to get a fix from my fellow reviewers. I plugged into Goodreads, read some of my friends’ positive critiques of PSS, regained my strength and resolve to continue and continue I did to finish the book. I am not sorry that I did. But even in the ending, I was a bit disappointed.
The narrative of the book is all over the map. We have all kinds of contrivances, some biological, some technological. They come and they go almost as suddenly. However, there was one particular subplot that seemed to be somewhat central but for me, very poorly developed. A garuda, a winged creature by the name of Yagharek comes to our main protagonist, Isaac, for help in restoring his (its?) wings, wings which were lost as a result of a sentence passed on to him (it?) for having committed a particular crime. We do not find out what the crime was till the end of the book but it is how our hero, Isaac, responds to finding out what the crime is that seemed so unsatisfying. Something so central to the book here did not seem to me to be sufficiently fleshed out. It was at that point that I realized there were so many other instances of just that incompleteness in the book. Miéville throws everything but the kitchen sink into this novel but never fully or even moderately develops any of it.
While I found the author’s use of the English language often quite wonderful and beautiful, I found nothing terribly unique in construction nor could I identify any particular stylistic invention with perhaps one exception. The way the spider character, The Weaver, spoke was brilliant. The other characters: Meh. The author’s command of the language, the construction of sentences, how they were phrased were competent. I just expected more about that which he wrote. This was not a short book and to have spent so much time on drivel seemed a waste.
If I had to characterize the depth of scope for PSS, it would have to be superficial. Perhaps these characters just had no great depths to plumb, but damn it, I wanted to know more about Isaac and the garuda. How could the author be so incredibly detailed about the landscapes of this world but tell us so little about the psyches of its inhabitants? While I realize this work has received many awards, for me, in constructing it, I do not feel this author worked on it as hard as he could have. I certainly see the tremendous talent of Miéville but I do not believe for a moment he spent that much time particularly on the ending of this book.
In spite of all of the criticism I have wreaked on the book, I’m still giving it 4 stars. If I could, I’d give it 3.5 and give John Lee’s reading of the book 5 stars. As always, Mr. Lee’s narration was absolutely brilliant.
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- Brandi
- 10-12-19
Confirmed to be Unabridged
I was worried about buying this, since other reviews mentioned this audio book was abridged (or had sections that were missing). BUT, I am happy to report this is no longer the case (at least in the version I downloaded in 2019). I listened to the audio book while also following along with the Kindle version, so unless the Kindle version was also missing the same sections, this audio book seems to be the complete book.
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- Ryan
- 05-08-10
Almost brilliant
Mieville is a literate, imaginative writer and creator of alternate worlds. Picture a baroque, stylized blend of fantasy, steampunk, and dystopian sci-fi, the sort of work that might result if Charles Dickens, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Guillermo del Toro decided to collaborate. Mievelle's New Crobuzon is sprawling, grimy city reminiscent of London circa 1890, populated with all kinds of strange races (in addition to humans), each with its own unique physiology, culture, and way of reacting to the techno-magical "modern" world.
Mieville's universe is colorful, messy, and grotesque (if you're weirded out by the human-non-human romance described early on, stop reading), but has a seriousness that makes it engrossing. Characters struggle with relationships, careers, politics, racism, and moral dilemmas, even as they face conspiracies, extra-dimensional monsters, crime bosses, and a police state government. Thrown in are musings on scientific/magic philosophy and machine sentience (though the latter has been handled more interestingly by other authors). There's a lot going on in this book, to say the least. Fans of Neal Stephenson will appreciate all the meta-reflection.
Unfortunately, there's a little too much going on. Towards the end, the intricate plot snowballs under its own momentum, and both characters and themes get buried in the tumult. The last third races through battles and some grandiose, technobabble-heavy confrontations between higher-order beings, before arriving at an oddly deflating epilogue. I can't help but think that Mieville, with a little more editing, might have come up with a last act as involving as the first one, and completed his characters' personal journeys in a more memorable way.
Still, it's an impressive novel, and one that a lot of speculative fiction readers will enjoy for its writing, imagination, and audacious scope.
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- David
- 07-23-10
Great story... ending a bit muddled
Wow, China Mieville can sure write a great story! The fabric of this story is so well described, so well written, I feel I've actually been to New Crobuzon.
Great work. Wish the ending was more upbeat and focused, but no worries. Not all stories are happy ones I guess.
Big gripe... there is a chunk of the story missing on the audiobook. Dunno how much. The main character is getting ready to leave his hideout to save the day, then a skip and a millisecond later he is across town planning with his team. Could have been a missing page or a missing chapter, dunno.
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 12-07-17
Grand central station at rush hour
China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a complex, engaging tale set in a universe that defies explanation beyond "inside China's head." The menagerie of character is nearly overwhelming. A physicist, Issac, who takes on odd jobs while unraveling the mystery of chaos energy, inadvertently comes into possession of a creature capable of captivating and consuming a human mind. Meanwhile, his girlfriend who is a humanoid insect has an art commission project with a crime boss who is an amalgamation of multiple living creatures. At the same time, a corrupt politician who runs the city hires an arachnid creature with poetic and artistic flare to hunt the dangerous creatures. In the end a good time is had by all.
Mieville offers a unique blend of fantasy with a patina of science fiction. The bizarre admixture of the unique creatures all living in a sort of Victorian England seems as natural as if standard evolutionary drivers could result in this strange brew of biology and culture. In addition, the range of action from the base cruelty of the crime boss, the comical defense of laboratory chemicals for a police swat team, and interspecies love and affection results in a universe to get lost in.
The narration is first rate with a range of characters that is incredible given both the sheer number and the diversity of intelligent lifeforms. For aficionados of alternative reality fantasy, this is a feast.
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- James
- 06-03-09
Pricy but "most excellent"
Well I still hate the 2 credit for one book but I read this book years ago and I really enjoyed listening to it and, "in my humble opinion," the narrator is top notch. I actually believe I'll re-listen to this several times.
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