623 pages
English language
Published Nov. 9, 2003 by Del Rey/Ballantine Books.
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an …
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .
Started slow and dense and then turns into a rollercoaster. Incredible world-building, can't wait to read the rest of the series.
I've read (and struggled with) some Miéville books before. City and the City I enjoyed although I thought the end was a bit too clever, Embassytown I just didn't really understand. So I took a break and then tried this one as it's consistently well reviewed.
It felt like two separate books, there's a first third that felt Miéville-y, the story wanders around introducing characters, Isaac is a slovenly fat eccentric scientist, and has a girlfriend and some associates and we follow them round. New Crobuzon is certainly depicted with a lot of imagination and it feels quite alive.
And then the second part of the book (it is split into seven? acts so I can't use that word) is an action thriller. Some chapters are entirely from the PoV of the leaders of NC, presumably just to otherwise have a gap in the narrative. Isaac we're told is still …
I've read (and struggled with) some Miéville books before. City and the City I enjoyed although I thought the end was a bit too clever, Embassytown I just didn't really understand. So I took a break and then tried this one as it's consistently well reviewed.
It felt like two separate books, there's a first third that felt Miéville-y, the story wanders around introducing characters, Isaac is a slovenly fat eccentric scientist, and has a girlfriend and some associates and we follow them round. New Crobuzon is certainly depicted with a lot of imagination and it feels quite alive.
And then the second part of the book (it is split into seven? acts so I can't use that word) is an action thriller. Some chapters are entirely from the PoV of the leaders of NC, presumably just to otherwise have a gap in the narrative. Isaac we're told is still fat and slovenly but by the end of the book he is firing handguns across rooftops (albeit badly). The character arc of his girlfriend is just weird, unless it's purely supposed to be a gotcha for the audience. And a censored version of the end of the book is "and then they left and got on a boat". It makes Neal Stephenson look like JRR Tolkein.
Maybe I'd enjoy this more if I read it again. Maybe if I'd read it before other books, for example the end of Stephenson's Diamond Age has a similar feeling (to me) of "here is a science term I have heard, and that's the clever trick we're finishing with". But I enjoyed the first two thirds of the book, and then to me it just runs out of steam.
