this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Lemmy World Rules

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Question about Perdido Street Station (minor spoiler) (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I recently finished Perdido Street Station, and one minor thing that bothered me is how many of the other races were either a humanoid version of earth life (cactus person, bird person) or a literal combination of a human and something (head of a bug, body of a person). That just seems so fantastically unlikely that I wonder if any of the other books in that setting explain it. Like, is it a future earth and the races are results of generic modification in some prior era?

I liked the book pretty well, through it's not exactly uplifting. Thought provoking though.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I've never read anything quite like it. I picked it up in a second hand store for a couple of bucks while travelling, read it the first time and was completely confused, thn re read it a second and third time.

My takeaway is that it's an exercise in suspension of disbelief. The third time through I'd accepted that it was just...weird...and it became a grimy unsettling story about complex people with complex motivations.