There's much talk these days of urban sprawl, of cities expanding in ever-increasing concentric circles, resulting in deforestation, the destruction of local ecosystems, increased automobile usage, pollution and encroachment on the habitats of other species. China Miéville's second novel, Perdido Street Station, is set in a huge, sprawling city called New Crobuzon. Perdido Street Station is itself a gargantuan, sprawling tale. This kind of sprawl, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. If well planned and conceived, novelistic sprawl can be beneficial for the environment of the imagination.

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of the world·Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night·For more than a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militia have ruled here over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, junkies and whores.

Now a stranger has arrived with a pocket full of gold and an impossible demand·And inadvertently, clumsily, something unthinkable is released.

As the city becomes gripped by an alien terror, the fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades and outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crimelords alike·The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground·Battles rage in the shadows of uncanny architecture·And a reckoning is due at the city's heart, under the vast chaotic vaults of Perdido Street Station.