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What Is Perdido Street Station About?

Just started Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, New Weird fans. The bizarre city feels overwhelming - what’s the central conflict with these weird creatures?
2025-12-09 20:17:44
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8 Answers

Best Answer
DeLosReyes
DeLosReyes
Perdido Street Station is a massive and wacky fantasy novel set in the city of New Crobuzon, where steampunk technology and magical fantasy coexist with a wide variety of very alien and very strange creatures. A scientist makes a pact to graft wings back onto a strange bird-like human, and soon is dealing with a spreading psychic horror caused by a cluster of dream eating moths. I’m reading Abandoned as well. It’s a much more intimate and fragile world and is centered around the desperate struggle of one abandoned person to stay alive on a long abandoned generation starship. The protagonist slowly regains their memories of what happened to the rest of the crew and tries to keep the decaying ship from totally falling apart around them.
2026-08-03
Helena
Helena
I have just finished reading ‘Perdido Street Station’ by China Miéville and I am left feeling slightly ruined in the best possible way. As a hubristic scientist unleashes a monster upon the world which devours dreams, the inhabitants of New Crobuzon are a fully rounded character in themselves. The city is filthy, vibrant and a complete hellhole. Cactus-like human creatures roam the streets, clockwork spies scour the buildings for information and, most grotesquely, artists sculp in living flesh. The dreaded slake-moths are possibly the most horrifying creature I have ever read about. Miéville’s writing brings them to full, queasy life. If you are looking for something completely imaginative and not for the faint of heart then ‘Perdido Street Station’ is the book for you.
2025-12-10
Wyatt
Wyatt
Perdido Street Station is set in New Crobuzon, a city that’s just bursting with personality, each brick exuding individuality. The book follows the scientist Isaac Dan Deragon and his attempt to return the angelic Aviator to flight, but things quickly descend into chaos when the experiment unexpectedly releases a swarm of psychic moths that begin to eat the souls of the living. Extremely grim and very, very lively, this Lovecraftian fanfiction was written by Dickens if he had gone completely, utterly mad.

Miéville portrays New Crobuzon with all its ugly contradictions and this is the best part of the book: New Crobuzon has a heart of diseased flesh, and even the most virtuous of his characters are incontinent of sin. This is a grim, nasty, mean book. It’s a beautifully written one, and a powerful one, but it’s not a comforting read. If you like weird, dark settings and a grayish, exploratory moralism to your fiction, then this is a great read — just make sure you read it with the lights on.
2025-12-10
Wyatt
Wyatt
One of the things that hit home about 'Perdido Street Station' was its totally absorbed-in world. I read China Miéville's steampunk no-horrors-barred wild ride New Crobuzon with morbid fascination – a slum-like, somewhere-that-never-was nasty hovel of every manner of hideous, frightening, wierd creep there could possibly be, most of them alive. The plot centers round a cast led by scientist Isaac (the silent, un-obtrusively-type-type, quiet sad-sack), assisting a winged and beautifully fabulistic extraterrestrial to regain flight.

What really drew me in to Perdido Street Station though, was the combination of horror, fantasy and social comment in the novel. The slake-moths are not just creatures to be feared, they are also a symbol of how powerful creatures can be exploited by humans. The comment on class struggles and how different species and mutants are treated by humans is brilliant. Some scenes in the book are quite repulsive, but that is part of the book’s charm. This is a book for people who love complex, philosophical weird fiction with a dash of body horror.
2025-12-13
Colin
Colin
Reading “Perdido Street Station” is like reading while in a fevered delirium. New Crobuzon is a monstrous, astounding, complex place, all twisted up in a sort of Blade Runner-ish/Gothic-Lucchese-Pol Pot-ish grip of horror and wonder. And for all the legend surrounding the slake-moths, for me it was the smallest things that killed me: a dying robot’s final words, a betrayal by a lover, the sheer weight of unforeseen consequences. Miéville doesn’t tell stories. He makes worlds and then they consume you.
2025-12-14

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