China Miéville is my Sci-Fi author of the moment. I only read one of his books (Perdido Street Station) so far, but his other books are on my list of books to read.

Perdido Street Station takes place in the fictional town of New Crobuzon. The town is a stinking moloch, modeled after London. The residents are humans, wingend creatures, little goblins, scientists, magacians and lots of other crazy folk.

One ofthe maincharakters unintentionally sets free a bunch of soul sucking creatures. With the help of some friends, a giant dimension hopping spider and a living garbage dump he's trying to capture those beasts.

The story needs a couple of pages before it lifts of, but his extraordinary language also made this part worth reading. I didn't like everything in the book. For example the living garbage dump, I think that's an unnecessary "charakter", the story wouldn't suffer without it.

The book doesn't have a happy ending, I usually insist in happy endings, the world is grim enough so at least books should offer some soothing, but still this is one of my favourite SciFi books so far.

Perdido Street Station has one several prices. In Germany the book and also its translator won the "Kurd Laßwitz Preis 2003" for the best foreign SciFi book.

Buy Perdido Street Station at Amazon.com or at Amazon.de

Note for the german edition: Amazon is offering a special edition of the book. The normal german edition for bookstores contains of two volumes, but the one Amazon.de is seling is a single volume hardcover edition, for only 10 EUR! The original english edition is a single volume too