Perdido Street Station (2000) by China Mieville

 

 

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The City & The City (2009) Book Review

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Review

Set in the hallucinatory city of New Crobuzon, on a world that may or may not be Earth, Perdido Street Station is the opening novel in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series (2000–2004). A multilayered meditation on hybridity and fluidity, the novel blends science fiction, fantasy and horror in equal measure. A seminal work of New Weird fiction, Perdido Street Station also helped reinvigorate the steampunk tradition. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the British Fantasy Award in 2001.

The story follows Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a university professor turned rogue scientist specialising in exotic materials and unconventional research. His troubles begin when Yagharek, a garuda from beyond the city whose wings have been severed as punishment for a crime that defies straightforward explanation, seeks his help in regaining the ability to fly. Meanwhile, Isaac has acquired a mysterious caterpillar that develops into a human-sized slake-moth, an interdimensional, vampiric creature that feeds on human consciousness, leaving its victims comatose. When the creature escapes, Isaac discovers that others of its kind are being held by the underworld crime boss Motley, a grotesque hybrid of multiple species, who exploits them to produce the popular recreational drug Dreamshit. The resulting outbreak unleashes a nightmarish plague upon New Crobuzon, its victims trapped in states of psychic devastation. With the city’s authorities closing in, Isaac and his motley crew of companions find themselves struggling to survive while attempting to prevent the slake-moths from destroying the city.

Grimy, bustling and violent, New Crobuzon is a sprawling industrial metropolis powered by steam and coal, its atmosphere recalling nineteenth-century Victorian London. Miéville populates this extraordinary world with sentient cleaning machines, ruthless militias, brothels catering to every imaginable chimeric fantasy and the half-exhumed skeletons of long-extinct, unidentified creatures. Humans coexist uneasily with a multitude of non-human species, collectively known as xenians. Among them are the vodyanoi, amphibious beings inhabiting the city’s waterways, and the cactus-like cactacae, who have established their own enclave within an enormous greenhouse.

Isaac himself maintains a passionate relationship with Lin, an insect-like khepri artist. Their union, frowned upon by both human and khepri society, is marked by genuine tenderness and a shared determination to overcome the anatomical and cultural obstacles to physical intimacy. Beyond these familiar forms of biological difference, Miéville introduces beings that inhabit or traverse other dimensions, including the demonic inhabitants of Hell and the extraordinary spider-like Weavers, whose existence transcends conventional spatial boundaries. Although references to folds in space suggest a scientific explanation for such phenomena, Miéville rarely resorts to conventional scientific terminology. Instead, thaumaturgy, or magic, operates as an established discipline within New Crobuzon’s understanding of the natural world.

Much of the novel unfolds in the city’s liminal spaces: concealed alleyways, railway tracks, backstreets, subterranean tunnels, labyrinthine rubbish heaps, sewers, submerged streets and buildings whose hidden interiors bear little relation to their external appearance. Isaac enlists the help of Lemuel Pigeon, a thief and specialist in navigating the city’s illicit geography, to guide him through this labyrinth of marginal and forbidden places. Miéville’s characters occupy similarly uncertain positions within society, living on its fringes through choice, circumstance or exclusion. Their identities are fluid, their loyalties unstable and their movements continually cross the boundaries separating the respectable from the criminal, the human from the non-human and the familiar from the monstrous.

This spatial in-betweenness is mirrored by the hybridity of New Crobuzon’s inhabitants, recalling a tradition of feminist science fiction stretching from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) to Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989) and Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutian Trilogy (1991–1997). Hybridity shapes Isaac and Lin’s relationship, but it also permeates the city’s social and political institutions. New Crobuzon’s justice system punishes criminals through biological and mechanical alterations, producing an underclass of Remade whose bodies have been forcibly transformed into grotesque combinations of flesh and machinery.

The same principle extends beyond biology into technology and the underlying structure of reality. Interdimensional beings such as the Weavers and the inhabitants of Hell defy conventional distinctions between material and immaterial existence. Isaac eventually seeks assistance from one of the city’s most extraordinary hybrids, the Construct Council, a self-aware technological megastructure assembled from discarded engines, machinery and other debris. Emerging from the refuse of industrial civilisation, the Construct Council embodies the fusion of machine intelligence and material accumulation, extending Miéville’s exploration of hybridity beyond the organic world.

Throughout Perdido Street Station, hybridity is therefore more than an aesthetic of the grotesque. It becomes the organising principle of a world in which distinctions between species, bodies, technologies and even dimensions are continually contested. By making the marginal and the monstrous central to his fictional universe, Miéville transforms the familiar conventions of science fiction and fantasy into a sustained exploration of identity, difference and the instability of boundaries.