Perdido Street Station, by China Meiville **7/8

I read this immediately after reading S. Craig Zahler's The Slaves of Uzrehan'be without realizing how similar they would be stylistically. Both authors create realistic characters that are extremely well-drawn and -imagined. Furthermore, these characters respond in manners that seem natural, and yet they're usually unpredictable. This book was extremely readable, though it's filled with cool concepts that seem like they'd be hard to explain in the hands of a lesser author. In retrospect, I probably should have gone in a different direction having just finished Zahler's slightly-more-massive book (though this clocked in at more than 700 pages), but this was just the way it worked out as a result of planes and what books I had available at the time. In any case, this was a cool read, with genuine momentum, and an exciting story arc. It suffers from being a bit too tightly wrapped, with a couple of coincidences that are really unnecessary. But there are some great ideas, and it's a rich, rich world, with lots of ideas that stick after the reading has concluded. I can vividly picture characters that seem hard to have imagined in the first place, but Meiville's descriptions and the activities of the characters have fastened these images in my brain. Ultimately the story is a bit of a thriller, and that's when it becomes a bit more of a simple page-turner and less of an intellectually stimulating experience, but it remains readable and fun throughout.
(Summer 2005)


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