Perdido Street Station

'''Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station.''' London, UK: Macmillan, 2000. New York: Ballantine, 2001. "A Del Rey Book." "First American Edition: March 2001." Reviewed by Javier Martinez, SRFA Review #254-55 (Sept.-Dec. 2001): pp. 48-49.

A complex SF/F work, significant here as a variation on Steampunk, with strong biological interests, set in a simultaneously advanced and retro high-tech world in which some magics (sic) work, and there can be a thoroughly practical need for "conducting cable […] that can take elyctrical [sic] or thaumaturgic current" (1st American Edn. 583; ch. 46).

See Part Three: Metamorphoses for coming to consciousness and "CI" ("Constructed Intelligence" [=AI]) of an "analytical engine" designed as a cleaning device (ch. 20), juxtaposed with the coming to consciousness and a kind of hyperconsciousness of a butterfly/moth-type creature (chs. 19-22). More Gothically, note takeover of a small group of humans and other sentients in Heinleinian slugs-from-Titan Puppet Master's (1951) style (chs. 37-38), juxtaposed with the take-over and «zombiefication» of a human "avatar" by a giant and rather literal mechanical god of self-constructing junk built around "a programme-card puncher, an analytical engine used to create the programmes to feed other analytical engines." The huge entity collects experience of more mobile or moveable CI's: "I am the Council. Every experience is downloaded and shared. Decisions are made in my valve mind. I pass on my wisdom to the pieces of me. My construct selves build annexes to my mental space in the sprawl of the dump as I become replete with knowledge. This man" — the «zombie» avatar — "is a limb, the anthropoid construct giant" — the impossibly-coherent junk monster the human (mostly) protagonists see before them — "is nothing but an aspect" of the Council's still larger being. "My cables and connected machines spread far into the rubbishland. Calculating engines at the other end of the tip are pieces of me. I am the repository of construct history. I am the data bank. I am the self-organized machine" (457; ch. 39).

In the film 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT (1984), HAL and SAL 9000 ask, "Will I dream?"; the Council answers for CI if not all AI with an emphatic — and crucial for saving the sentients of the story — "I do not dream […]. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars" (477; ch. 39), and not the emotional and spiritual possibilities of A. C. Clarke's HAL and SAL: "The Construct Council had sentience," the Narrator tells us, "but no feelings" (581; ch. 46).

Note also the invention of a "crisis engine," a "fucking triumph of applied crisis physico-philosophy," that taps into a very deep power relating to changing states (quoting 237 f., ch. 20); humans and other sentients remade as punishment (usually), sometimes into what we'd call cyborgs (see e.g., 173, ch. 15, 489, ch. 41, & passim); and technological reinforcement of what we might see as telepathy (319-21; ch. 27).

See ch. 48 for the City as "an elycrto-mechanical thaumaturgic" organism, one we might call cybernetic, and which is identified as capable, with technological assistance, to achieve "an alternative mode of consciousness" (605 f.), hence, in some sense, already sentient in most if not all of sentient's ambiguity and multivalence in meaning. See esp. the novel's crisis (climax, «catastrophe») in ch. 50, where the organic/ESP menace of the "slake-moths" is met by a temporary alliance of (a) humans and other fleshly sentients using "analytical calculators and the crisis engine," "communicating"-"communicator" helmets channeling mind-stuff using their own near-zombie (629); (b) "the God-machine" Construct Council (625), who wants — in its own ways of desiring — the crisis engine; and (c) "the Weaver," balancing the Construct Council with a psyche where "dreams and consciousness" are "one" (630).

3. FICTION, RDE, 22/III/11, RDE, finishing, 2Sep19