|
Shalom & Salaam
Who We Are
Recent Material
We walk as they walked. Amore, more, ore, re A questioning time Devastated. Surmise
DiaryRings
- Request a design - Profile - Notes
prev -
Guestbook - next
Flynn't-napping and Ribs for pleasure
After a terrible experience with Michael Flynn's The Wreck of The River of Stars, I found myself reluctant to pick up Perdido Street Station. The Wreck[...} received excellent critical reviews, particularly for its futurism and technical exactitude. I almost never put a book down, but Wreck left me so dissatisfied by the half-way point that I nearly didn't finish it. Worse, I regret finishing it even if I was trapped on an airplane for 8 hours. The majority of the crew dies from a series of tremendously stupid mistakes. One even tries to hold high-tension cables together as they snap. The kicker though is that the ship is lost because an asteroid nicks it in five places. Instead of patching the ship, they plan to use bulwarks to seal off a small section of it. If there's a hole in your bucket, you don't build a second bucket inside the first one. I'm sure that I'm missing some critical scientific fact, but that only makes me resent the book more.
It left a very sour taste in my mind, and I was feeling pretty finicky about what book I picked up next. So maybe its the contrast, but Perdido Street Station left me completely stunned. It's a sardonic exploration of a beautifully rendered steampunk world, where fantasy cliches mesh bizarre and bold with innovative spin work. China Mieville does an excellent job of capturing the feel of a metropolis and then slamming it into a completely different context. New Crobuzon is a city built in the shadow of a vast old ribcage, a mystery that goes gratefully unexplained. And that characterizes the book beautifully. This is not a neatly trimmed bit of fluff, unlike so many popular fantasy novels. It doesn't solve itself, there is no all-encompassing explanation. Mieville has successfully envisioned and realized a world. Thankfully he brought back a book, and we're richer for it.
|
| |
D-rev.
