Rather than discussing the content of China Miéville’s (“mee-ah-vill”) Perdido Street Station, I am going to tag the book:

high fantasy

It is set in an entirely fantastic world with little similarity to our own.

epic/heroic

Although the first few chapters appear to be about scientific and artistic endeavours, it turns out to be about a protagonist and his friends saving the largest city in the world. (It is not Campbellian, however.)

new weird

It is weird fiction in that the fantasy realm is nothing like Tolkien’s and it has a lot of stuff in it just for the sake of being weird.

urban

Also unlike Tolkien, the story takes place entirely in an urban environment. According Miéville, it’s inspired primarily by Victorian London but also cities like Cairo. There’s a line in the book that implies the population of the city of New Corbuzon to be 600,000, the same as London in 1725; since there are no automobile suburbs, the city’s seemingly infinite number of neighbourhoods feels quite dense.

punk

Like cyberpunk, Perdido Street Station features the exploits of marginalized members of society with access to high technology for their world. Unlike most cyberpunk, the plot is action-adventure rather than detective noir. A common theme in cyberpunk that I missed is an upper-class character who is slumming.*

steam

Although this book is often classified as fantasy steampunk because of the frequent mention of trains and “analytical engines“, devices are always powered by chemical batteries or electricity whenever steam would be inconvenient for the characters. I found the fact that all the computers in this world were binary to be rather improbable compared to decimal or analog.

dungeon punk

Magic is commonplace, used in industry and quite limited. The fact that magical power is well understood and can be manipulated by machines is not exploited.

socialist

Miéville is a Trotskyist and Perdido Street Station features some bits of a Socialist Agenda. A subset of the citizens of New Crobuzon are randomly selected to be given a vote in each election, which should theoretically produce the same outcomes as full sufferage (with higher voter turnout!).

roleplayingesque

Miéville is a big D&D nerd and has cited The Monster Manual as one of his favourite books. Perdido Street Station is written like a novel set in an roleplaying world, with lots of potential character types and jam-packed full of monsters.

* But I hate cyberprep, which is upper-class science fiction.