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Perdido Street Station Essay

Decent Essays

In Perdido Street Station, Miéville introduces the dystopian alternative world of Bas-Lag, and it’s accreted city of New Crobuzon. Archaic yet technologically advanced; the city is simultaneously ruinous and polluted, threaded by repressive administrative agents. The city’s borders are constructed in even layers constantly deteriorating as a cycle of breakdown- and thus as a Marxist, Miéville suggests New Crobuzon as an abstract city of the working-class proletariats. The city’s filth is accentuated in the first descriptions, “its light surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood” and “dirty towers glow... it is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding”, which cooperatively widens the city’s perspective into one of material filth and squalor, outwardly transgressing, A violent atmosphere underlined with corruption is manifestly evident through Miéville’s gloomy and foreboding imagery: “Crematoria vented into the airborne …show more content…

Miéville also hints at the wasteful lifestyles of contemporary society in his description of “Smokestacks punctured the membrane… and disgorged tons of poisonous smog… as if out of spite” thus encouraging readers to speculate on their own doings.
Miéville extends and adapts the metaphor of the traditionally biological model of hybridity throughout his novel, Perdido Street Station, into one of cultural concern, literalising the metaphor in its chimeric people. Miéville utilises dystopic characteristics in blurring the definition of humanity to subtly yet effectively persuade his readers to speculate the remaining stigma that enshrined interracial associations in the late 20th century. Readers are confronted with insect-human hybrids and inhumane-human creatures in the city of New Crobuzon, signalling the common struggle shared by the author, of concluding one’s

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