Perdido Street Station - China Mieville

A scientist's attempt to help a birdperson take to the air again results in a quintet of horrible, mind-eating giant moths being released upon the city of New Crobuzon. While the city government flails about, teaming up with gangsters to try and kill the moths, the scientist and his odd little band make their own attempts to deal with the problem, when they aren't preoccupied with running for their lives from the government, the mobsters, the moths, a massive machine intelligence, or whatever else takes aim at them.

All the different elements come together fairly well. The mobster requesting a sculpture, the whole thing about flying, Isaac's interest in the crisis energy. I was very confused how the laboratory cleaning bot getting infected with a virus was going to factor in, but it worked.  

I was disappointed we never do get to see Isaac finish a device to allow someone to fly. Related to that, not sure how I feel about the ending. In a lot of ways. Yaghrek's fate, Lin's fate even more so. Seemed like wasted potential, the opportunity to do something with her character, thrown away. He'd established this whole thing where Lin absolutely rejects her brood mother's restrictive belief system, then later rejected the more typical mores of her people. But now she finds herself isolated in the life she's chosen, and looking back at things she rejected in a new light. Seems like it would have be interesting to see how she processed that after this whole experience.

I shouldn't have expected anything like a happy ending, but I did. I won't say Mieville doesn't earn the ending; the disastrous decisions made enough sense in the moment, it just wasn't terribly satisfying. Neither was Motley's fate, for that matter. The machine grinds people up and spits them out, and the best you can hope for is the people at the controls get marginally inconvenienced.

There's a labeled map of the city at the start of the book, but I stopped checking the relative locations of things within the first 15 pages. It's enough for me to know it's a big place with a lot of different districts, slums, neighborhoods, whatever. Some of them are more memorable than others, but that's fine. There are times some of the elements feel as though they're thrown in strictly as world-building for future books, rather than as necessary pieces of this story. That may just be Mieville' trying to give a sense of this as taking place in a world that already has plenty of history, rather than one where nothing interesting happened until this incident.

"I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars."