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PSS was the winner of the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2001 British Fantasy Award. The reason it took a sci-fi AND a fantasy award is because it does a lot of genre bending. That was one of the reasons it has become so acclaimed. It reads at times like a hard sci-fi novel, and at others like a vast epic fantasy. The plot and descriptions are very gritty, yet also ornate. Miéville has gotten a lot of ink simply on his writing style, one that is very metaphorical and has you scrambling for a dictionary once in a while.
The story is about Isaac, an underground scientist who has lost a bit of favor in the science community for being a bit over the edge, and his girlfriend Lin, a khepri (humanoid like bug creature) who is a some what know and respected artist. Isaac is approached by a would be client to restore to him flight. For this client is a garunda, a humanoid like bird creature who’s wings have been cut off. When Isaac takes the job he starts to use connections in the underground to study flight. It eventually leads to much mayhem not only for Isaac and Lin, but their friends and the whole city of New Crobuzon.
At times I felt that Miéville went a little too far with his style of writing, describing things too much. And another area, about a third of the way through the book, it kind of got stuffy and long winded. But those are minor issues. A matter of reader taste and opinion. The story is rather dark and gritty. The world building is very good, but is also very gritty (in style and in actual imagery). The characters have all kind of problems and issues, being very real and very different. The action, when it got going, and not necessarily “action” like an action movie, it made the book fly. He twisted the plotlines together quite well, and one part of the ending was quite satisfying. The second part of the ending was quite a suprise. Dark, but a surprise that left me feeling that he didn’t just cheat his way out of it.
His successful project of bending genres and meshing them together in PSS has continued with other books making Miéville a real force in the speculative fiction genre.
8/10
