• Perdido Street Station

  • By: China Mieville
  • Narrated by: John Lee
  • Length: 24 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (2,472 ratings)

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Perdido Street Station  By  cover art

Perdido Street Station

By: China Mieville
Narrated by: John Lee
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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.

©2003 China Mieville (P)2009 Random House Audio

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

What listeners say about Perdido Street Station

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1,327
  • 4 Stars
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  • 3 Stars
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  • 2 Stars
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Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
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    1,456
  • 4 Stars
    467
  • 3 Stars
    115
  • 2 Stars
    36
  • 1 Stars
    22
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1,125
  • 4 Stars
    548
  • 3 Stars
    249
  • 2 Stars
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  • 1 Stars
    54

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

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

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

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

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

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

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

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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53 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

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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33 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

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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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

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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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

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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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

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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12 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

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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