Perdido Street Station

Steampunk is not to everyone's taste and I admit that it takes a good story for the genre to...polish my brass, so to speak. But China Miéville's Perdido Street Station paints such a strange world that it's easy to forgive the somewhat lackluster plot.

The story takes place in the city of New Crobuzon, an organic metropolis of various races including humans, the insectile Khepri, the aquatic Vodyanoi, the prickly Cactacae, and the Remade -- inhabitants that have been physically modified in strange and horrible ways as punishment for various crimes. New Crobuzon is part of Bas-Lag, a murky world reminiscent of maps that have little warnings on them such as "Here be dragons".

The setting is the first impression etched into the reader's mind with Miéville describing the city in some detail at the start of the book, ending with a description of the novel's namesake and the city's setting: Perdido Street Station.

The crumbling, ancient city exists in a world reminiscent of 18th Century Europe, albeit with varied race of intelligent creatures and some more advanced 19th and 20th Century technology. Magic -- generally called Thaumaturgy -- plays an important role in pretty much everything, as well.

The plot of Perdido Street Station centers around a few creatures called slake-moths that escape captivity and menace the city. This main plot doesn't get much more complicated than that, other than a few subplots involving some supporting characters. However, the texture and characters of the world in which this takes place saves the book from being a mediocre monster chase and the subplots are satisfying.

The first person introduced in the novel is Yagharek, a desert-dwelling bird man sans wings, who's searching for someone to help him fly again. The man Yagharek hopes will help him, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, is a decidedly liberal-minded scientist whose girlfriend is a Khepri -- a creature with a human body and an insectile, beetle-like head.

There are undead symbiont folks, walking cactus creatures, froglike people skilled in bending water to their will with magic, and of course, the bogeymen of the book, the Slake-Moths that have a thirst for peoples minds. We are also treated to some creatures from other planes, such as demons and a spider deity that has an interesting sense of aesthetics that makes for some original and somewhat amusing encounters, as well as almost undecipherable dialog.

We also have some golem-like artificial intelligences that enter the story later in the book, probably the race I liked least. They seem a little awkward to me, as if just because it's a steampunk world, we need to have tin-men walking around moping about their rights.

All together, the book is a worthy read and a great example of world-building. His follow-up novel, The Scar, continues to expand on building the world by expanding outside of New Crobuzon to other areas of Bas-Lag.