Abstract
Perdido Street Station is the first book of the Bas-Lag novel series, written
by British writer China Miéville. It is regarded as one of the prominent examples of
new weird fiction, a literary genre that utilizes aspects of fantasy, horror, sciencefiction and other speculative fictional tropes.
Perdido Street Station is set in a world where magic and steampunk technology
coexists. The novel is critically acclaimed for its intricately worked out and richly
described setting. The city of New Crobuzon, an imaginary metropolis in the world of
Bas-Lag, is the center of the narrative with an immense sprawl of architectural
elements. New Crobuzon also has a distinctive geography and habitation: It borrows
picturesque elements of Victorian-era London and reshuffles them with steampunk
esthetics in all brashness. It blends baroque, British and punk to create a unique urban
landscape.
This essay investigates the ways in which Perdido Street Station represents social
segregation and divulges how governments enforce submission by creating monstrous
architectural structures. The architectural lines that determine the boundaries of a city’s
different layers and define social stratifications, are also linked to New Crobuzon’s
power relations. Such depiction is a reminder of Henri Lefebvre’s notion that urban
centers are favorable environments for the formation of authoritarian power, where the
depicted dystopian government of New Crobuzon forecloses emancipatory aspirations
through spatial control and exercises its authority with threatening urban structures.