In which the eight-page moth sex scene was A Little Much for me

For the BSpec book club we decided on China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, a book which several different people have recommended to me at different times, although I couldn’t remember anything about what they’d said about it. But I’ve liked the other Mieville books I’d read, so I figured I’d go with it.

 

Given my recent difficulties with reading fiction in the pandemic I probably should have stopped and double-checked literally anything about the book; I wasn’t really prepared to try to get through something that is seven hundred pages long no matter how good it is. Writing that makes me feel terrible; for most of my life I have not counted 700 pages as a particularly cumbersome amount of reading, and if you’d told me that I’d live to be subjected to several months of quarantining during a global plague I probably would have figured that would be a perfect time to knock out all the really big books. But alas, I am busy doing absurd amounts of socialist secretarial work that I am nowhere near qualified to do, so the spare time and focus I would have assumed is nowhere to be found.

 

Apart from there being way too much of it for me to deal with right now, Perdido Street Station is pretty good, especially if you like depressing, disturbing stuff that takes place in squalid cities and involves a lot of different types of monsters. Fortunately, I do. The main antagonist sort of monsters in this one are called slake-moths; they are essentially big fuckoff moths that eat people’s minds, leaving them permanently sleeping shells. They are quite scary and disturbing. Other antagonists include the city’s authoritarian government and terrifyingly militarized secret police, an egotistical drug lord with a lot of creepy body modifications, and some university douchebags doing research for the aforementioned authoritarian government. There are a bunch of characters that aren’t quite antagonists or protagonists, like the giant spider whose only motivation is to make the world-web prettier (and nobody knows what the fuck that means), and the computer virus that became self-aware and has built itself up into a sentient garbage heap with a cult following. All in all, it’s a satisfyingly weird cast.

 

Our protagonists I don’t like nearly as much, honestly, although they’re alright. Isaac is our proper protag; he’s an irascible scientist and he’s reasonably entertaining as a viewpoint character. His cohorts in plotline include an art critic and subversive newspaper columnist called Derkhan, who I probably would have preferred to be the main character; an artist from an alien race with a woman’s body and a scarab beetle head; a desert bird-man sort of alien who’s had his wings cut off for the unspecified-til-near-the-end crime of “choice-theft”; an ancient Roomba who has achieved sentience; and some assorted petty criminals. 

 

I had a little difficulty getting into the story in part because of the style, which can at best be described as “earthy,” because “earthy” is a thing that some people appreciate and others don’t. As one of the people who generally doesn’t, it was difficult for me not to think the book would have been vastly improved if it had been edited down by about 15% with a specific focus on not spending so many words indulging in scatalogical and sexualized language, which at a certain (admittedly, for me, very low) threshold starts to look to me like the writer is attempting to perform being a serious adult who doesn’t shy away from serious adult topics!! more than it actually reads to me like how adults communicate, or at least non-insufferable ones. I realize this is partly on me as a reader who simply isn’t interested in that sort of thing, which is not a universal trait--these things certainly exist, and it is fair game to write about them--but at s e v e n h u n d r e d p a g e s I was unable to prevent myself from looking for stuff to cut.

 

The other thing that sort of threw me out of the story is that the gender politics are… not very imaginative? Like there are a million alien races that are all semi-humanoid and semi-not, but they all seem to have secondary sex characteristics that map onto human ones, without regard for the fact that human secondary sex characteristics are actually highly unusual among other already existing species. I had expected better than “the females of every alien species have bigger boobs than the males,” including the race that is GIANT CACTI, from someone as weird and respected as China Mieville, but I guess this is the sort of thing that everybody just ignores. And please do not get me started on the big plot twist with the bird aliens at the end; stuck onto this book it definitely had me giving it major side-eye, and I have a pretty high tolerance for uncomfortable authorial-thought-experiments involving sexual violence in overwrought fiction books.

 

If I were perhaps reading this book in a better mood I might have been able to have more appreciation for the depiction of New Crobuzon, which is the sort of “city as character” type of place that I tend to love in fantasy books, and the more fucked up the city, the better. This one is quite fucked up; it’s got some shades of Ankh-Morpork but less goofy and more horrific, and about the same level of gross but in more detail. The nominally democratic (although with a very limited franchise) but obviously authoritarian government was quite convincing, and touched on a number of currently relevant political issues, like strikebreaking, the utility to the state of horrific mass punishment, the corrupting effect of government defense contracts on research, police brutality, state surveillance, xenophobia, urban planning, and public transit. Perdido Street Station, the giant absurd train station that dominates the skyline, oddly doesn’t really feature too heavily in the story until near the end, which feels a little unbalanced. 

 

I just keep coming back to feeling like I should have enjoyed this book more than I did. I love overwrought giant tomes of fantasy novels! I love weird creatures and meandering plots and squalid cities! I love stuff that combines elements from a bunch of different genres! Only for some reason in this case I loved the sentient Roomba, and the rest I couldn’t stop nitpicking. I think I need to just go read some theory or something, because my fiction brain is completely shot. 

Alphabets, but clever

Because I was reading some big long books and I have to go read more big long books, I decided to knock out a short book so that I could get my Goodreads number up a bit. The shortest unread book I had on hand was Edward Gorey’s Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert and The Deadly Blotter. These are two short stories--26 words, in fact, told by one word each going through the whole alphabet. The first story, "The Just Dessert," is a little opaque about what’s actually going on, but appears to be about a bunch of people bickering a lot, and a small statue on a tall pillar that mysterious things happen to. The second story, "The Deadly Blotter," is a much more straightforward murder mystery--the “C” page just says “Corpse”--and it names a lot of the tropes and plot points of regular murder mysteries, with the possible exception of “K,” “Knitting,” although I suppose that depends on what kind of murder mysteries you read.

 

Anyway, it was short and fun and adorable, probably not Gorey’s best work but still pretty delightful and full of whimsical drawings. The basic concept of the Thoughtful Alphabet also seems like a fun party game for writery types, like Exquisite Corpse.