Winner of the August Derleth Award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative fantasy thriller and the first of China Miéville's novels set in the world of Bas-Lag. The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of its own bewildering world. Humans, mutants, and arcane races throng the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are 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 over a vast array of workers, artists, spies, magicians, junkies, and whores. Now a stranger has come with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand, inadvertently releasing something unthinkable. Soon, the city is gripped by an alien terror, and the fate of millions depends on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crime lords alike. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground as battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings. A reckoning is due at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. It is too late to escape.