Perdido Street Station

Perdido Street StationBeneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none not even to Isaac, a

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none--not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.

Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.

While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger--and more consuming--by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon--and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .

A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination.

Praise for Perdido Street Station

" A] phantasmagoric masterpiece . . . The book left me breathless with admiration."--Brian Stableford

"China Mi ville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination."--Peter Hamilton

"It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's."--John Clute

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Published: 02/27/2001
ISBN: 9780345443021
Pages: 720
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.40d
Award: Hugo Award - Nominee
Award: Nebula Awards - Nominee

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2001 pg. 23
Publishers Weekly 01/08/2001 pg. 52
Booklist 02/15/2001 pg. 1122
Asimov's Science Fiction 10/01/2002 pg. 226
Library Journal 02/15/2001