Perdido Street Station - China Mieville.
Only my second or so voyage into the urban fantasy/sci-fi genre and boy does Mieville go heavy on the city-building. Damn. I can't say I really got a sense of where things were in relation to others (though admitedly I didn't try that hard, didn't look at the map provided once), but it was hugely successful in creating a mood of the city. New Crobuzon is a hodge-podge, hot, smelly, breaking down city and the descriptions piled on top of each other go a long way to create the mood. Then there's the story, which is also pretty cool. There's a fat scientist as the lead, which is something that doesn't happen often. The sci-fi elements are great, crisis engines that are fueled on things going wrong and a small cleaning robot that may be more than it seems. And the fantasy elements are wonderful, especially all the different creatures that inhabit the city like the cactus men and the Weaver, a god-like spider that travels through multiple dimensions at once and speaks in one long monologue. And there's even a glimpse of Hell.
And I haven't even gotten to the whole idea of the book. There's a moth, see, and it's big and it eats people's subconscious. That's a great concept and it works well, though some of the portions where we see the world from their point of view could have been more... strange than they were. For such a radical creature their sections should be crazier, I'd think. Anyways. It's a huge book and I wasn't really ever tired of it. There are some truly scary scenes, especially those that describe human evils rather than the monster ones. If there's one idea in this book that stands out it's that of the Remade. You know those places where you get your hand chopped off for stealing something? The Remade are humans that are punished by having their arms replaced by robot arms or praying mantis arms or their heads are twisted around 180 degrees and even more horrific things. There's a story about a woman who kills her baby and what her Remaking is will stay with me for quite some time.
Mieville's world-building status cannot be denied. He's a master at it and the story and emotions are present and well done. As this is the first of three books set in New Corbuzon I'm sure I'll be checking out the others shortly.
A-.