I don't really care for pirates, at all. If it wasn't for Perdido Street Station I would not have picked this up. Mercifully, Miéville did not go hard on the typical pirate stereotypes. I was thankful for that, even though some piratey shenanigans were ultimately enivitable.


Miéville comes up with ideas that are just so damn cool, and he remains an incredible world-builder. A city made up of thousands of ships tethered together, sweet. Powering that city by a leviathan, god-like sea creature, awesome. Careening that thousand-ship city powered by a leviathan sea creature into a tear in the fabric of reality, super freakin' awesome.

The length of the book really let him flesh out those ideas, but it also gave room for things that didn't really work out or make much sense. I just don't buy some of the decisions the characters made in the situations they found themselves in. Most of the time I did, but sometimes I found myself unconvinced. There were a couple long cons being pulled that in no way would anyone actually try to pull just because they were way too unrealistic on paper, but that doesn't matter when operating on book logic. I also found myself noticing minor continuity errors, probably unfair to get hung up on but still, they kinda nagged at me.

The final concept Miéville signs off on with this book was quite a great one. Even though I marked this as spoilers I'll still try not to give this away. I'll just call it a "Schrödinger's Hedrigall". He takes the idea of parallel universes (a now often used and sometimes tired idea in science fiction books) and takes it one step further in a compelling way.

Even though I found enough in the book that frustrated me I am still glad I picked it up.