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.
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.