I finally finished reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville after being loaned the book a while back by meriko and Russell.
The book received a glowing review from the Borogoves, and equally glowing reviews on Amazon, where it got something like an average of 4 1/2 stars out of five. But I thought the book ... well ... sucked.
Mostly I think it would have been a good 250-page book. Instead it is 720 pages. Way too much of the book is devoted to conjuring up scarier and more monstrous things, almost all of which exist solely so the scary, monstrous things can express how scared they are of the big, bad, awful uber-monster that the protagonists of the book are trying to kill. Really, after a while, I got the picture: these are some bad-ass moths. OK, got it. Let's move on. After a while, I just felt beaten by the message.
The book had some other interesting subplots, but those mostly petered out part way through the story, as the author put more and more of the focus on the aforementioned bad-ass moths.
The author gets points for creating an interesting, different world for his characters. But he should have had an editor attack the book with a chainsaw. That said, most people seem to disagree with my assessment. Your mileage may vary.
Posted by Mike at November 3, 2002 08:30 PMI think that's a valid criticism of the book, and the same things that ruined the book for you are things that lessened my enjoyment, but didn't turn me off completely. I could have done without, for example, the Construct Council (or whatever it was called) subplot; that was just one thing too many (plus, I am seriously turned off by steampunk cybernetics; I know too much about computers to suspend my disbelief, even in a nominally "fantasy" setting -- Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine, for example, didn't work for me at all). The imaginative detail of the world and the shininess of the prose made up for the excesses, as far as I was concerned, though.
I doubt we'll convince you to give The Scar (semi-sequel to Perdido, set in the same world but not directly connected to those events or characters) a chance. The Scar, like Perdido, uses the "think that's big and scary? Check THIS out!" technique, but I thought it was much better focused and, for me, more enjoyable than the earlier book. It's got pirates, too, does that help?
Posted by: russell on November 5, 2002 12:55 PMThe prose was shining, much like an oil slick on a rainy day, only without the cool rainbow effect.
Pirates are good, though. Is it a short story?
Also, what's up with the Fox Theatre? You go see David Sedaris without me, Joan went to see Seamus Heaney without me. I hate working nights.
Posted by: Meredith on November 6, 2002 10:49 AMShiny shiny.
The Scar is a short story in much the same way that California is a small state.
The Fox Theatre is cool.
Posted by: russell on November 6, 2002 10:37 PMHmm ... I think I will skip The Scar, then. Maybe I'll go re-read the unabridged version of The Stand, instead.
Posted by: Mike on November 8, 2002 11:30 AMSpoilage below.
Definitely hated the book, even though many of his ideas I felt to be very creative and sometimes even strokes of genius. Didn't feel like his names fit his characters at all either. But I have a huge gripe with the ending.
The ending felt like a rush job, with much deus ex machina applied to tidy up the loose ends. Jack Half-a-prayer gets 20 words dedicated to him until about 70 pages to the end, when he suddenly saves the day. And Isaac, who is as straight-edged as they get in New Crobuzon, becomes a kidnapper? I knew I was going to hate the book when one of the moths came to take Dr. Barbile, and /both/ Isaac and Derkhan knew to shoot behind them while aiming through the mirror. We are supposed to believe that they somehow resisted their natural instinct and did something as awkward as shooting a gun at a target behind them, while aiming with a mirror. Without being that doing so was the only way to save their lives. Right.
On the point of Steampunk computing, you may know computers well, but historical perspective is what makes it plausible. Charles Babbage's difference engine would have been able to perform all basic arithmatic operations, had internal memory (including a stack), and was steam driven. Pretty much everything that the earliest computers from our time could do. And they're not a whole lot more ridiculous than those scenes of vacuum tube computing from the 50s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine
Posted by: Jesse on January 13, 2006 07:09 PM