Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [324]
Half-a-Prayer pauses, but not for very long. With another languorous stroke, he repeats his invitation.
It is generous, but I must decline.
He offers me the half-world. He offers to share his bastard liminal life, his interstitial city. His obscure crusades and anarchic vengeance. His scorn for doors.
Escaped Remade, fReemade. Nothing. He does not fit in. He has wrested New Crobuzon into a new city, and he strives to save it from itself.
He sees another broken-down half-thing, another exhausted relic that he might convert to fight his unthinkable fight, another for whom existence in any world is impossible, a paradox, a bird that cannot fly. And he offers me a way out, into his uncommunity, his margin, his mongrel city. The violent and honourable place from where he rages.
He is generous, but I decline. That is not my city. Not my fight.
I must leave his half-breed world alone, his demimonde of weird resistance. I live in a simpler place.
He is mistaken.
I am not the earthbound garuda any more. That one is dead. This is a new life. I am not a half-thing, a failed neither-nor.
I have torn the misleading quills from my skin and made it smooth, and below that avian affectation, I am the same as my citizen fellows. I can live foresquare in one world.
I indicate him thanks and farewell and turn away, stepping off into the dim lamplight to the east, towards the university campus and Ludmead Station, through my world of bricks and mortar and tar, bazaars and markets, sulphur-lit streets. It is night and I must hurry to my bed, to find my bed, to find a bed in this my city where I can live my foresquare life.
I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.
Also by China Miéville
KING RAT
THE SCAR
“AMBITIOUS, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN,
ENORMOUSLY IMAGINATIVE, ENGROSSING . . .
A complex fable that blends several genres—fantasy, horror, gothic, science fiction, and social protest with believable, interesting, and utterly weird, fantastic creature-characters . . . I could feel my imagination stretched and tweaked by the haunting narrative—redolent of dreams, nightmares, intuitive whisperings, visions, and tastes of the unconscious. . . . With its inventive plot, fascinating characters, evocative language, and underlying themes of coexistence among very different beings, economics and politics, crime and punishment, computer consciousness, science and art, Perdido Street Station is in the end both complex and satisfying. And China Miéville is an author to read both for fun and for quite serious amusement.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Revolutionary in the sheer bravura range of its invention . . . This is the point in the review where prefabricated accolades like ‘this novel heralds a promising new voice on the fantasy horizon’ are usually offered up. To hell with that. Miéville isn’t on the horizon, he’s roared to the center of the map, kicked ass, taken names, and jumped straight to the top of the heap.”
—The New York Review of Science Fiction
“With his new novel, the gargantuan, intricate, and thoroughly grounded Perdido Street Station, China Miéville moves effortlessly into the first division of those who use the tools and weapons of the fantastic to define and create the fiction of the coming century.”
—NEIL GAIMAN
“BRILLIANTLY ORIGINAL . . .
It’s been a long time since I’ve lost myself in a book as I did in Perdido Street Station. . . . High fantasy jammed up against gritty realism, a tender love story (albeit with an insect-woman) elbow-to-elbow at the bar with gothic horror, odd stews of medieval and modern technology, tremendous social scope and fascination with the individual; not quite science fiction, not quite fantasy, with fillips of horror, high adventure, intrigue. . . . [It] does not have something