WILLIAM GIBSON MEETS RESIDENT EVIL:

Perdido Street Station

A book review by Mighty Doom

Doom was thinking about The Neverending Story the other day - not one of Doom's favorite movies, mind you, but one worth watching once or twice - and today recalled a quote from the bookstore owner, Mr. Koreander - something about "small rectangular objects called books." It occurred to Doom that Genki-Web has reviews of video games, good movies, bad movies, music - but no book reviews. Today, Doom takes it upon himself to rectify that particular situation, despite the fact that none of us at Genki-Web read a great deal.

This is an experiment. Most people who come to Genki-Web for comedy and general speculation on everyday life probably aren't particularly interested in book reviews, but maybe this will catch the eye of a select few. My first review concerns British writer China Mieville's recent epic Perdido Street Station, possibly the most original sci-fi novel I've read since Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Mieville tackles a very dark and disturbing corner of the genre, and it is in fact so unique that I doubt any other author will dare explore it. Its universality is not so great as, say, William Gibson, though Mieville's work does bear similarities to that author's cyberpunk fiction.

Perdido Street Station, insofar as I can compare it to any existing work, is something like a Neal Stephenson take on Resident Evil or Parasite Eve, blending steampunk and cyberpunk aspects with a disgusting and truly unsettling organic component.

The story begins with renegade scientist Isaac Dan Der Grimnebulin (a unique protagonist, in that he is fat, middle-aged and antisocial), who is commissioned to create an engine harnessing "crisis energy" by a garuda (a race of bird-men living in the Cymek, the desert surrounding the massive city of New Crobuzon) who has been rendered flightless in penance for a crime he refuses to reveal to Isaac. The construction of this crisis engine would allow Yagharek, Isaac's client, to fly again.

During the course of his experiments Isaac purchases a large caterpillar, which subsists exclusively upon a new drug called dreamshit and quickly grows in size, eventually emerging as a vicious entity known as a slake-moth, which breaks free of its cage and renders all in its path comatose. Isaac is drawn further into this fiasco when his lover, Lin (who resembles a woman with no skin and a large beetle for a head), is abducted by Mr. Motley, New Crobuzon's most prominent drug kingpin, who has been using the slake-moths to produce hallucinogens and intends to use her as leverage against Isaac, whom he believes is trying to muscle in on his drug trade.

Isaac, assuming Lin dead, gathers a few companions, including Derkhan, an underground newspaper columnist, Lemuel Pidgeon, a foppish underworld fence, and Yagharek himself, and embarks upon a crusade to rectify the disaster he's brought upon the city - namely, to locate the slake-moths' nest and destroy it. This poses a problem, as the slake-moths exist only halfway on the physical plane and are hypnotic to look at. During the course of the novel Isaac and his posse encounter cactus-people, New Crobuzon's heavily armed militia, a serial killer named Jack Half-a-Prayer, a community of sentient machines and an ethereal entity known as the Weaver, eventually leading to an inevitable confrontation with Motley himself, as well as the apparently immortal slake-moths.

I can think of few books as interesting and innovative as Perdido Street Station. Mieville is stylistically adept, and his characters are deep and sympathetic. The underlying science - crisis mathematics, programmed sentience and an invisible, destructive energy known as the Torque, to name a few of its aspects - is somehow made believable, despite its outlandish nature. Even if you don't read that often, check this out - it goes fast, and makes you think. Mieville's sequel to Perdido Street Station, entitled The Scar, was recently published and I will hopefully have a review up before too long.

DOOM'S FINAL JUDGMENT: A