China Mieville ~ Perdido Street Station

Is Fantasy and Science Fiction dead? Is there a salvation in sight? Is Weird Fiction the new Fantasy and Science Fiction?

Weird Fiction. My new favorite genre. China Mieville is, for me, the brightest star in this new realm. Perdido Street Station, the first in a trilogy by Mieville, was a difficult book for me to get into. It violated everything I was expecting. It gave me a place which seemed real enough in its seedy, dirty waterlogged antiquity: New Crobuzon. Then it gave me bizarre people like the Khepri, women with red skin and scarab beatles for heads, complete with head-legs, carapace, and wings; Vodyani, froggy lookin’ fellahs’ who can work water into forms like it was clay; Cacticae, half man, half cactus; and an assorted menagerie of other creatures and peoples taken haphazardly from all different sources, mythologies, and traditions.... Whew!

Mieville then paints these characters onto a plot canvas that is convoluted and unpredictable with many different facets, each with their own end causes. Giant dream stealing moths terrorize the city, leaving people in a coma from which they never rise. A gargantuan, interdemsional spider, spouting metaphysics, becomes an ally of those trying to stop the moths, along with clockwork robots which become self aware via programming cards.

And this is all just the surface.

Just plain weird. Totally, consumingly, delicious once I gave over my assumptions of where the line is drawn between Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Anyone else had a read?

Wow! There are a few pages to wet the appetite on the Amazon website.

http://www.amazon.com/Perdido-Street-Station-China-Mieville/dp/0345459407#reader

I have to get my hands on this book! Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Yeah, I'll be looking for that one on my next trip out to the book store.

Thanks for sharing, Wrey.