Perdido Street Station
Mieville launched New Weird with this massive, grotesque, magnificent novel set in Bas-Lag, a city that seems to have swallowed every genre and metabolized them into something new. A slake-moth crisis, a renegade scientist, a city that breathes.
The prose is called “painfully over descriptive” and self-indulgent, readers bouncing off paragraph-long passages before anything moves. The first act is pure city-building and the plot proper takes a long time to arrive. The human cast reads thin next to the setting, upstaged by the city. The body horror is too much for some, “an orgy of perverse, harsh, dark grotesqueness” that reads as wallowing rather than serving the story. Worldbuilding arrives in large dumps rather than woven into scenes. And eight hundred and fifty pages is a real barrier that causes stalls, one dissenter calling the whole a “grossly overhyped piece of mediocrity.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
