The Scar - Softcover

The question was always: what would he do for an encore? China Mieville's third novel The Scar is set in the same world as his award-winning Perdido Street Station but is a very different book, set in a very different city. Where his New Crobuzon was an old metropolis of cruelty, oppression and glamour, the floating freebooter city Armada is a place of refuge even for those who experience it as a prison. Brilliant linguist Bellis Coldwine is on the run when she is press-ganged by pirates who turn out to be rather more; her abilities make her a valuable commodity and she finds herself intermittently useful to a project so ambitious that it takes her much of the book to comprehend fully. Mieville takes interesting chances by making Bellis his protagonist--she has an arrogant selfishness that at times makes one breathless--but her guts, determination and intermittent realism about herself gradually endear her to us. This is an intelligent book about how individuals and events influence each other and the meaning of freedom. Mieville has a sense of the sea as the place of a menace almost incomprehensibly huge; like Perdido Street Station, The Scar is full of breath-taking moments of wonder which are also moments of heart-stopping terror. --Roz Kaveney

The reaction to China Mi ville's Perdido Street Station was remarkable: few books in the SF and fantasy field achieve the acclaim of this dark masterpiece. Its seaborne successor is rich with the same vaunting imagination and cannily wrought prose. A ship sets out on a voyage from New Crobuzon towards a new colony, its hold full of criminals to be used as slaves. It passes over inshore waters ruled by a race of human-lobster centaurs, is pursued by demonic mermen, and is captured by a floating pirate city tugged across the sea by a giant beast. This fantastical voyage of exploration and discovery coruscates with Mi ville's unstoppable imagination, and the inventiveness takes the breath away.