Perdido Street Station.

I didn’t love China Miéville’s Hugo Award-winning novel The City & the City, but I was and still am awed by its inventive setting – a city-state that is divided in two, but where the two independent entities overlap and intertwine, like a Baarle-Nassau taken to an extreme not just of geography but of thought. The story didn’t live up to the creative setup, but the mere idea has really stuck with me in the years since I’ve read it.

His imagination is on display in his sprawling novel Perdido Street Station, which goes so much further in the direction of bizarre science fiction, set on an unnamed planet in a city that feels like it’s from somewhere after civilization has fallen and risen a few times, populated by strange and biologically improbable alien races, including humanoid insects who have to speak in sign language. The novel starts out as if there are going to be a pair of mysteries around the two central characters, but most of that is just a red herring for what’s really coming – an invasion of sorts by giant moths that feed on the dreams of sentient creatures, leaving their bodies functioning but their minds useless. The stories that occupied Isaac and Lin, the human and insect couple (yeah … put a pin in that), turn out to be related to the larger plot but get pushed way to the back burner once the moths show up, and Isaac in particular becomes the reluctant hero who leads a motley crew of outcasts to try to stop the infestation before the moths can breed and ultimate wipe out the entire city. (Not mentioned, however, is what the moths would do for sustenance once they ate everyone’s souls.)

If you get the sense that I didn’t buy any of this, well, good job, because while the prose moved along well and Miéville can certainly keep the pace of the plot quick enough when he wants to, to do so, Miéville piles detail upon detail and twist upon twist, to the point where I found my interest in the story waning from sheer plot fatigue. Isaac’s side project, which turns out to be relevant to the moth quest, is to build an engine that can harness “crisis energy,” a fictional but functionally limitless energy source. There’s a lot of handwaving and “I have to make the math work out” sort of writing here, but it ends up feeling like juvenilia: Great science fiction either explains its fictional science in terms that tie it to real science to keep it credible, or it pushes the fictional science under the hood and tells you not to worry about it. Perdido Street Station does neither.

And then there’s the whole alien races thing, not least of which is the utterly creepy human-insect love story, which Miéville really goes well out of his way to explain, both in how it happened and in how they have sex, a scene that definitely had me reaching for the Raid. Alien species are hardly novel in the world of science fiction, and they’re often quite ridiculous (David Brin, please step to the front). Miéville here seems to have deliberately created extra-weird species, just for the sake of weirdness. There isn’t any compelling reason here to have an intelligent, evolved, humanoid-insect species in the book. It just makes it all weirder and kept puncturing my suspension of disbelief.

One thing Miéville does get right here, however, is make the stakes high. Central characters are injured and killed. There are certainly points where it seems like the moths might eke out a partial if not total victory. By the end of the book, even though the good guys sort of win, the cost has been very high. More writers operating in this space need to work like that – if I know everyone is going to survive to the end of the book (or movie or TV series), then every crisis or potential tragedy you show me feels forced.

I stuck with this through all 700-plus pages in some vain hope of a big payoff to the main plot, but Miéville didn’t quite deliver that either. There were some parts of the heroes’ plan that were extremely clever, and some that didn’t translate well to the page – to the point where I had a hard time picturing any of what was going on. (The moths, by the way, exist in multiple dimensions, as do some other creatures here, making them exceptionally hard to kill.) And for as much as Miéville seems to want the city itself and Perdido Street Station to sit at the heart of the story, I never got much of a picture of the setting, either. The whole book just ended up feeling like a dumping ground for the products of the author’s prodigious imagination, but there just wasn’t enough meat to the story to make it work.

Next up: Almost through Maryn McKenna’s Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats