Runagate Rampant: Perdido Street Station: Annotations

Editor: G. Black

ANNOTATIONS FOR PERDIDO STREET STATION

This page contains spoilers that can ruin your reading experience. Read Perdido Street Station first, otherwise carry on at your own risk.

All page numbers refer to the British hardcover edition (Macmillan, 2000.)

China Miéville on the Xenian races: "Khepri was the ancient Egyptian god of the rising sun, and of transformations. He was represented by a man with a scarab for a head. My attitude to this sort of stuff is entirely piratical and philistine. I plunder myths or whatever but without any respect for their symbolic heritage. So the Khepri in my world are categorically not symbolic of transformation or anything like that." The Garuda is a gigantic, benevolent bird-man from Buddhist culture; and the vodyanoi are fish or frogs with human faces from Russian folklore. All these were stripped to some extent of their cultural meaning and adapted into alien races for Perdido Street Station.
[p.225] "Why do you not use the Torque?" The Torque is an obvious, albeit wilder, equivalent to our universe's atomic energy.
[p.229] "That's where they dropped the colourbomb in 1545. That's what they said put an end to the Pirate Wars, but to be honest with you, Yag, they'd been over for a year before that [...]" Back in 1945 in the real world, two atomic bombs were dropped over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States Air Force. Similarly, and although the Japanese were yet to present their formal surrender, the outcome of World War II was very much decided by that time.

[p.396] "...SAVAGE AND IMPENETRABLE [...] BLACK AND RUSSET..." The Weaver's chant comes from Max Ernst's descriptions of the forests he painted. See annotation for King Rat, p. 125.

If you have any notes that you might like to add to this list, kindly e-mail them to the editor. Many thanks.

This page was last modified on Wednesday, 20-Aug-2008 13:49:37 EDT.