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Perdido Street Station Audiobook
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(3.00) - 21,339 listener ratings
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Publisher Description
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 Miéville'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
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"Perdido Street Station started out a bit slow for me. It is at least partially due to how foreign the world of Bas-Lag, and how much information about the world/city/races/etc. needed to be conveyed. Once the base information was passed on, we got to the meat of the story and things started moving. In the end, I quite enjoyed the story and will be interested to read more of this world."
— Bill (4 out of 5 stars)
Awards
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Winner of the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award
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Winner of the 2001 British Fantasy Award for Best Novel
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Finalist for the 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novel
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Nominated for the 2002 Locus Award Nominee
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Nominated for the 2001 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
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Nominated for the 2002 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Perdido Street Station Listener Reviews
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" The text of Perdido Street Station has problems of focus, and a lack of reasonable conclusion (the conclusion doesn't work well on any level -- an unhappy ending that made sense would be O.K.) But on top of that, John Lee's read doesn't do the text justice at all. There's plenty of heavily ornate exposition of space and place and smell in the text, but the overwrought speaking of it only makes it feel all the more off-putting. There also cases of getting the tone all wrong. The Ambassador of Hell's voice echoes sound ridiculous, the Construct Council's avatar's waver is annoying, as is the fight between the Handlingers and the Moths, completely failing to identify a scene climax, and repeating elongated sounds and screams over and over. Its a difficult text to do justice, and the strange otherwordly things like the Weaver or the Moths are a challenge, but John Lee does not come close to meeting the challenge. "
— jrodman, 9/9/2015 -
" Narrator so annoying. "
— jrodman, 9/9/2015 -
" Amazing book, just takes a little effort to get through the first 1/3 "
— Bretton, 2/14/2014 -
" Well, I read this as part of a book group read and I have to say that this was disappointing. Mieville was really creative in creating this unique world, but in my opinion he was in dire need of an editor. I've heard it said that this book reads like he sat w/ a thesaurus next to him the whole time, and I have to say that I agree with that analogy. Deep down, underneath it all, I think there's an interesting story and I pushed on to find out what happened. Once I got there, I had to ask myself "what the?" It really made me wonder if I could've made better use of my time reading something that I would enjoy? Sorry. "
— Kathy, 1/24/2014 -
" Love this book so much. "
— Mike, 1/11/2014 -
" It's brilliant and it will probably spoil a lot of the lesser (but not altogether awful) offerings of the genre for the rest of your life. "
— Tpring, 10/9/2013 -
" I tried twice to read this novel because of Mieville's reputation, but it's just not happening. "
— Lynn, 2/5/2013 -
" A compelling story of friendship & betrayal among a variety of sentient and pseudo-sentient beings, set in an elaborately fantastic sci-fi world. Each Mieville book I read makes me a bigger fan. "
— Rick, 1/15/2013 -
" Too weird by half. Or maybe three-quarters. "
— Tom, 10/31/2012 -
" Good book. Takes a while to get started. "
— Joshua, 12/24/2011 -
" Fantastic piece of world building. The characters are fascinating and fairly deep, but nothing goes well for anybody. Sad, sad ending. "
— Stephen, 6/23/2011 -
" Sometimes a bit over-descriptive, contained some redundant and off-topic paragraphs or chapters (depending on what you want the book to be), but man, what a fantastic and tremendously strong ending. Also, the ambiance it portrays is great. "
— Tim, 4/6/2010 -
" Good concept, love the visual descriptions. I would love to see this made into a movie. "
— Finchnixer, 3/9/2010
About China Miéville
China Miéville is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; and Un Lun Dun, a New York Times bestseller.
About John Lee
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.