By China Mieville<\/em><\/p>\n My new favorite book.\u00c2\u00a0 Seriously — this book is both wonderfully written and incredibly exciting;\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn’t put it down for a week.\u00c2\u00a0 (Yes, a book can<\/em> be wonderfully written but incredibly boring — anything by Charles Dickens comes to mind.)<\/p>\n I guess you’d call China Mieville’s novels “steampunk-ish,” because they’re not exactly steampunk, as I understand — Perdido Street Station <\/em>doesn’t take place in Victorian England, for one thing — though it’s very much like it.\u00c2\u00a0 Think steampunk mixed with a small bit of magic and elementalism, with many types of creatures other than mankind.<\/p>\n The story centers (somewhat) around Isaac, an overweight scientist, and his half-human, half-insect lover (yes, lover<\/em>), a “khepri” called Lin.\u00c2\u00a0 (Though, they<\/em> wouldn’t say they’re half-human, half-insect — they claim humans are “khepris with the heads of gibbons.”)<\/p>\n Isaac is approached by a creature known as a Garuda — think half-man, half-bird — who has had his wings ripped off by his people as a form of punishment.\u00c2\u00a0 Isaac does not know for what, and doesn’t pry — the Garuda has sought him out, due to Isaac’s small bit of noteriety in the field of biomechanics.<\/p>\n …and that’s just where the bloody story begins.<\/em> The world of Perdido Street Station <\/em>is absolutely huge<\/strong>, even though the entire story takes place within just one city!\u00c2\u00a0 I found myself constantly referring to the map at the beginning, just to try and figure out in what section of the city a part of the story was taking place in.\u00c2\u00a0 (It’s not necessary — I just like looking at maps.)<\/p>\n The book is just absolutely filled with amazing characters, places, and descriptions — Mieville is able to describe this dirty, decrepid city amazingly.\u00c2\u00a0 You can almost smell the raw sewage, garbage, and shit lining the streets.\u00c2\u00a0 (The world of Perdido Street Station <\/em>isn’t quite falling apart, but the people who live there have both forgotten many different scientific subjects, all while learning new ones.)<\/p>\n I’ve already got his other book Iron Council<\/em> waiting to be read on my bookshelf, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it as much as this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Perdido Street Station By China Mieville My new favorite book.\u00c2\u00a0 Seriously — this book is both wonderfully written and incredibly exciting;\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn’t put it down for a week.\u00c2\u00a0 (Yes, a book can be wonderfully written but incredibly boring — anything by Charles Dickens comes to mind.) I guess you’d call China Mieville’s novels “steampunk-ish,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ZUZG-1l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4709,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions\/4709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}