Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Map
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part 2
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part 3
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part 4
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part 5
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part 6
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Part 7
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Part 8
Chapter 52
Other Books by China Miéville
Praise for Perdido Street Station
Copyright
to Emma
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With love and thanks to my mother, Claudia, and my sister, Jemima, for their help and support. Huge thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and advice, especially Scott Bicheno, Max Schaefer, Simon Kavanagh and Oliver Cheetham.
Deep love and gratitude to Emma Bircham, again and always.
Thanks to all at Macmillan, most especially to my editor Peter Lavery for his incredible support. And infinite gratitude to Mic Cheetham, who has helped me more than I can say.
I don’t have space to thank all the writers who’ve influenced me, but I want to mention two whose work is a constant source of inspiration and astonishment. Therefore to M. John Harrison, and to the memory of Mervyn Peake, my humble and heartfelt gratitude. I could never have written this book without them.
“I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.”
Philip K. Dick, We Can Build You
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark.
We rock. We pitch in a deep current.
Behind me the man tugs uneasily at his rudder and the barge corrects. Light lurches as the lantern swings. The man is afraid of me. I lean out from the prow of the small vessel across the darkly moving water.
Over the engine’s oily rumble and the caresses of the river small sounds, house sounds, are building. Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain.
They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick.
The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water.
How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller?
It is too late to flee.
The man murmurs to me, tells me where we are. I do