The Scar (Bas-Lag Book 2)

The text-to-speech is disabled, showing a dislike for vision impaired people. The images of this are great and creative, but the twists and turns which dont pan out take a very long time, and you end of feeling ripped off after reading for 30 pages about something that turns out to be of little consequence.

Armada is a fascinating finely dithered setting that sticks deep under your skull and begs to come out in fan fiction. Personally i was fascinated with uther doul, the lovers, and the brucolac. I wish i got the backstory on the lovers, or the brucolac. Especially the brucolac. Oh, and did I say the brucolac? Ahem. In fact, I would LOVE a prequel about him and HIGH CROMLECH and the Urok and how his a$s got to armada in the first place. Nevertheless for all the accolades Mievilles world-building gets, sometimes he gets too arrogant. A floating pirate city made of ships? Awesome! A beach filled with gears and clockwork instead of sand? Give me more! People whose blood coagulates into armor?? Shroedingers sword?? Sweet! A gargantuan whale that is summoned from the depths of an interdimensional sea? Yeaah! Beings with anuses instead of mouths, mosquito women, and cactus-people? Uhmmm slow down cowboy.....steven king territory, complete with lamp-monsters, straight ahead! A similar thing happens with vocabulary. You get four gorgeous descriptions followed by some awkward verbal gymnastics that just read like a thesaurus that make you want to scream COME ON, we know you looked that one up, ARGH! Nevertheless, the HD rendering of steampunk worlds, shroedingers sword, and the brucolac make up for things when all is done. Ah Mieville... you are so good....but if you grow some humility you could truly become the gibson of steampunk.

if you are reading his New Crobuzon series, start at the beginning, and he is a very descriptive writer,. this is an entire new world he has created. with the oldness of centuries gone by and new as flying machines and thought police, but i will not go further than that. If you like science fiction, he is very good at bringing you there, and keeping you there;. i have read three now and dig his world.

Perdido Street Station was a great book. It was a very innovated fantasy story, and quite refreshing compared to other modern fantasy stories, by the likes of Salvatore and Rowling. However, The Scar, albeit very worthwhile compared to most other books in the genre, doesnt live up to its predecessor. THe first half of the book is very good and original. Meiville surprises us with a brand new part of the baslag world, reminescent of something from Waterworld- a pirate city of boats that float secretly through the oceans. Then, he introduces several new races, such as the blood sucking Mosquito races. However, after about three-hundred pages, it becomes apparent that the story isnt as consistent as Perdido Street Station. For one, the idea that a floating city could survive secretly in the ocean and go unnoticed by a fairly developed world with effective sea-travel and airships seems unrealistic for me. I also find it strange that the very characters fleeing New Crobuzon in fear for their lives are the same that are desperately trying to escape the floating city and get back to it. Finally, Meivilles style gets annoying. Hes a great worldbuilding, but a lackluster character developer. It becomes obvious that each of his characters talk the same way and have the same outlooks and reactions to the way things are. Im glad I read The Scar and it hasnt completely turned me away from Meiville, but after PSS I find The Scar to be a bit of a let down. The characters in PSS were changed by the end, but most of the characters in The Scar are just exhausted. I recommend the book over many, but I do feel a bit cheated by it at the same time.

Bellis Coldwine is fleeing New Crobuzon. She has taken passage on a ship to the colony of Nova Esperium and hopes to find refuge among the criminals and Remade and other dregs of society unfit for New Crobuzon. The events of Perdido Street Station were only the beginning of more horror for the city and Bellis is escaping something that we are left in the dark about, some punishment. Before the ship can arrive at Nova Esperium it is attacked by pirates, the ships officers slain. The captives are brought to a floating city called Armada. Armada is made up of hundreds and perhaps thousands of other captured ships that have been connected by bridges and chains and welded together in places to form a great city. Armada is more than a graveyard of ships, it has a society and culture and a flow to it just as much as any other city. Only, in Armada humans live next to Remade and vampire and kheperi and cactus men and all manner of creatures. While in other cities there may be intermixing, nowhere it is it more pronounced than Armada. Many prisoners adapt to life in Armada fairly quickly as it is often a better chance at life than what they had been offered in the past. It is through the eyes of Bellis Coldwine that we learn of the plans to raise a mythical sea creature of massive proportions, and this only hints at what is really going on in The Scar. The story is much, much deeper and with levels of imagination that I can only hint at. Whatever the reader thinks is going on in this novel only scratches the surface as Mieville continues to change our expectations and understanding as he reveals more and more of the plot. Reading Perdido Street Station I was impressed by China Mievilles imagination in creating a world that felt very real and very alien and also by how dark and creative he was in telling the story. PSS goes to some very dark places that I could never have imagined if Mieville didnt get there first. I was impressed and I admired his craft. I didnt like it, though. Its a nebulous term, I know, but what Im saying is that Perdido Street Station failed to connect with me on an emotional level or a storytelling level. I was unable to truly engage with the characters or the story. A year or two passes and I decide to pick up The Scar knowing this was likely the last chance I would give Mieville. There was no instant connection like I find with other novels, but slowly the story grows on me. The exploration of what Armada is up to and who some of these characters are is engrossing. From the scarred freakishness of The Lovers (not the title Scar), to the otherworldly deadly calm of Uther Doeul, to the Remade Tanner, to the New Crobuzon spy to plots within plots within secrets, I wanted to know what happened next and what is going on. Once again Mievilles imagination is on in full force with The Scar and this time there was a connection and engagement. The Scar does not go to such dark places as Perdido Street Station, but it is still dark and grimy and dirty and violent. It is also shockingly creative and original and fascinating. This is more of a showpiece for China Mieville and one which has given me reason to read more of his work. Still, this does not count as one of the best (or favorite) books which I have read this year in terms of my holding the book up and saying Yes! This is what reading and writing is all about!, but Mieville does a damn fine job here. -Joe Sherry

Similarly to the previous book in the series, Pardido street station, the meaningful plot of this book can probably be summarized in less than one page, and yet China Mieville’s writing makes it interesting, mostly. The audio does a very good job 99.9% of the time and is annoying only in 0.01%, at which it can be turned off.

China Mievilles PERDIDO STREET STATION was one of my five favorite books of 2001, so its only natural that THE SCAR got shunted to the top of the stack when I bought it. Its an excellent book, but my reaction to it was slightly more ambivalent than with the earlier novel. In many respects, Mievilles writing is a vast improvement over the earlier novel. Though the descriptions of horror and grotesquerie are as plentiful as in PERDIDO, the overall effect is more rarefied, possibly because the prose is somewhat more ornate and remote - less out-and-out pulpy. No one setting in the book is as compelling as PERDIDOs instantly iconic New Crobuzon, but THE SCAR delivers such a wide range of indelible sights and wonders that we dont really miss Crobuzon as much as we might at first think. The ending is far less deus-ex-machina than PERDIDO, as well - a definite plus. However, all of this goodness has an obverse side. The prose is more polished and less pulpy, yes, but also a bit colder, a bit more like an edifice. The ending is satisfying - not happy, certainly, but satisfying - but the plot leading up to it is full of little frustrations. Mieville consciously set out with THE SCAR to confound what he sees as the annoying contrivances of most heroic fantasy, such as the likeable, activist hero who inevitably saves the day (which still figured in PERDIDO, although the day was not fully saved); but some of his workarounds are not particularly endearing, such as a heroine who is not only not likeable (I can live with that - I read Ellroy, after all) but is not particularly interesting. And in Uther Doul, Mieville creates a supporting character who is more interesting than the lead, but who seems to have stepped in from another story altogether. The novels overarching theme, that of painful change and growth, is a worthy one, and handled very intelligently in terms of characterization and plot movement, but the central metaphor - embodied in the mental and physical scars that every character carries, and the global Scar of the title - feels a bit obvious and a bit overdone. Nonetheless, Im not about to fault Mieville for having genuine literary ambition in a field where most writers are seemingly content with telling anaesthetizing stories primarily intended to start or maintain a franchise. The plot here is strong, the characterization believable, the prose muscular, and the descriptions vivid. As fantasy or as literature, THE SCAR is eminently worth your time and money.

Very good, showing an author that succeeds at basically everything theyre aiming for, and is aiming for the right things. Hes one of the truly great worldbuildings, on the level of Vance or Le Guin. Casual little details are thrown in that make for an very compelling and believable setting. Economy, politics and daily life appear clearly, this isnt just a background with a convincing set of dynasties but one that feels inhabited by a whole order of classes. Mieville is the other type of urban fantasy writer--rather than take the existing world and put a slice of the fantastic over it he weaves a fictional city in great detail. Moreover, in the Scar this city is Armada, multiple levels of pirate ships on the water, the whole structure slowly drifting across the globe. Multiple species, a giant mythological beast to pull it, yet the structures of internal trade and partisan politics are comprehensible. This book has as well wonderful moral complexity, a rich cast with a range of attitudes and desires. As a revealing incident, at one point major plot emerges from the vampire overlord of part of Armada launching an attempted coup of the city, aligned with Eldritch sea monsters. Hes an antagonist, but rendered sympathetically, along with much of the cast. The one faction in this novel shown as monstrous is also the one with the most banal focus, the city aiming at strategic transit and commerce. A very effective and unique work. Similar to and better than: Jack Vances Blue World Similar to and worse than: David Mitchells Cloud Atlas. Not particularly similar, mind you, but the ocean-centered segments are broadly comparable.

It was clear when reading China Miévilles mesmerizing Perdido Street Station that its setting, the dreamlike metropolis New Crobuzon and the world of Bas-Lag, possessed a nearly inexhaustible potential for future stories. In The Scar, Miéville proves the hype right by fulfilling that promise. The Scar, which takes a much more direct approach to structuring its plot than Perdido, is related to but not a sequel to that book; it stands alone as a story and can just as sufficiently serve as an introduction to Miévilles extraordinary worldcraft. There can now be no doubt that theres no one in contemporary fantasy writing quite like Miéville (the good but overrated Neil Gaiman pales most in comparison), and we should all be delighted that a talent like his has come along at the turn of the century to inject life into a genre stuck for so long in a creative cul-de-sac. The Scar takes us far from the teeming streets and slums of New Crobuzon, out into the rolling waves of the Swollen Ocean to the citys east. Bellis Coldwine is fleeing New Crobuzon for a distant colony. A linguist, she wangles passage as an interpreter on the Terpsichoria, a cargo vessel whose manifest happens to include, grimly, a shipment of Remades--those physically altered, criminal unfortunates--to work as slave labor in the colony. On its way east, the Terpsichoria stops by an amazing undersea city inhabited by the quasi-human cray species. New Crobuzon has an agreement with the cray that allows three massive rigs to operate in their waters, but one of the rigs is inexplicably gone, and the cray plead ignorance. The mystery deepens with the appearance of Silas Fennic, a shadowy individual who holds some unrevealed official post in the New Crobuzon government. He takes command of the Terpsichoria, which begins to head back to New Crobuzon to the outrage of its paying passengers. But shortly into their voyage home, the seafarers are set upon by a gang of ruthless pirates, who kill the Terpsichorias officers and shanghai the passengers and prisoners. They are taken to Armada, an immense oceangoing pirate city comprised of thousands of ships lashed together and built up to resemble nothing so much as a floating New Crobuzon! Armada has its different districts, its slums, its cultural centers, its economy. One vast difference is that it treats all its inhabitants as equals, even the loathed Remades. Naturally this sets very well with them, particularly Tanner Sack, a prisoner aboard the Terpsichoria who comes to love his new life in Armada, and even finds his horrible Remade appendages--a pair of tentacles grafted onto his torso--starting to heal and work for him. In fact, Tanner is so happy he has himself Remade even further to become a fully amphibious being. But Armadas ersatz freedom only exists within its watery borders; its really a prison city. And Bellis is determined to resist the allure that it seems to hold over some of her former shipmates, all of whom have been offered jobs and a place in Armadas society. Her discovery that the missing third rig is now in Armadas possession deepens her concern; what the hell is up with this place anyway, particularly its leaders, strange scarred beings known only as the Lovers? (The Lovers are but one of many referents to the books title, by the way. A theme of severing and healing runs subtextually throughout, in regards to both the emotional and physical trauma suffered by the cast, and the fractured and tragic history of Bas-Lag itself.) Through Silas, Bellis learns of a terrible invasion heading towards the unsuspecting New Crobuzon. Though it seems as if escape from Armada is indeed impossible, could there still be a way to get word to the enormous city, that grows more distant every day? There is also the little matter of the Lovers bold plan to harness some terrifying power from the ocean depths, a project in which Bellis finds herself playing a key role. Any more detailed a synopsis would run the risk of spoilers, which would simply be a crime given just how exciting this novel becomes as its numerous revelations and surprises unfold. Is Silas an ally or a villian? Will the undercurrent of rebellion against the Lovers mysterious plans break out into open revolt? And just where is Armada going? Though the plot of The Scar follows a much more linear progression than that of Perdido Street Station (which should make those folks who found Perdido too meandering happy), it shares that novels feeling of inexorability, its sense that events are plunging pell-mell out of control, and any attempt at resolution only seems to deepen the crisis. Miéville keeps tight control of his storys pace. His dark imagination hasnt mellowed either. Disturbing, macabre creatures like the vampiric ab-dead and the bloodsucking anophilii share the multifarious stage with the familiar cast of humans, insect-headed khepri, and plantlike cactacae. (How I would love to see Wayne Douglas Barlowe illustrate Miévilles world!) It may be true that there are parts of the novel that go into exotic overkill, but I think most readers wont have a problem with it, especially when the book starts delivering its payoffs. The final third of The Scar features one of the most intense battles this side of George R. R. Martin, and yet Miévilles characters and their personal interactions have just as much intensity, only of a subtler sort. The Scar is on a par with Perdido Street Station, and in its best moments it surpasses that novel. In its weakest, it seems too burdened with talk, and it is true that the mythic backstory of Bas-Lag is an awful lot to keep up with. But in the end thats a testament to China Miévilles energetic creativity and freshness. I would only suggest that perhaps, in his next novel, he turn away from Bas-Lag and New Crobuzon, so that the concept and setting dont fall into the sort of dreary routine that almost inevitably befalls long series. I want to stay hungry for China Miévilles books, and I always want to come away feeling just as well-fed as I have from this one.

When I first read China Mievilles Perdido Street Station, I proclaimed it a five-star novel, the landmark arrival of a new genius. Within weeks, though, my assessment came down a bit as I looked back on what I had read. These days, its a 3.5. Oh, its wonderful, make no mistake, but it has flaws many are too willing to overlook. In Perdido Street Station, Mieville creates an amazingly rich, detailed and compelling world built on Victorian horror, steampunk stylings, Lovecraftian terror, and fantasy. Highly engaging ... however, the books awful deus ex machina, Mievilles propensity to use big words for their own sake, and a lot of pages wasted on atmosphere building after the atmosphere had already been built tempered what was otherwise a breath of fresh air for fantasy. But when you have talent like this, such flaws are minor roadblocks to great work. And so we have The Scar, the fantastic follow-up to Perdido Street Station. Were taken to a floating city, an urban landscape made from the shells and carcases of stolen boats and vessels, and are pulled along as the strange leadership of the city seek out powers almost too great to comprehend. Along the way we meet a vast array of engaging and interesting characters, and experience otherworldy sights and sounds that will remain etched in your brain for days to come. With The Scar, Mieville addresses most of the problems I saw with the previous book, and in turn crafts a much better reading experience. A great story that keeps the pages turning, a fuller look into his amazing world, characters that are richer and painted with more depth, and far less overly descriptive filler. Mievilles prose remains a joy to read, full of texture and description. While The Scar meanders from time to time, the story was much tighter than Perdido Street Station, remaining largely focused and coming off as better for it. I loved the constant turns of the narrative, was very taken by the further glimpses into this world, and found the prose to be largely (though not always) quite lovely indeed. The ending may be slightly anti-climactic, but it also rings true - not to mention that it doesnt hinge on a clumsy deus ex machina. The Scar is a finely-honed work that pretty much seals the deal: Mieville is darn near a visionary. This guy is the real deal. Get it, read it, and love it.