The Scar

China Miéville is someone that I would consider to be one of my absolute favorite authors. I've only read two of his novels, but I am hooked and want very much to read more. The two that I've read are Perdido Street Station and The Scar, the first two novels in his Bas Lag series, and I've already purchased Kraken, a novel completely unrelated to Bas Lag and New Crobuzon, to read over the summer. So when I heard that this week was Cyberpunk and that there were a couple of Steampunk novels up on the reading list I thought I'd stray from the recommended titles and go with The Scar which I had been itching to read anyway. I felt it fit in with the themes of the week well enough to justify a break from form.

The Scar focuses on the lives of two individuals, Bellis Coldwine and Tanner Sack, who would have difficultly being from more opposite ends of the social spectrum. Bellis is a linguist and author, whilst Tanner is a Remade, a criminal who has been surgically altered in punishment for his crime. Tanner has had two tentacles attached to his chest, though we never discover what crime it was he committed and thus have no idea how tentacles really fit into the punishment, but he has them nonetheless. And so he is boarded onto a ship with hundreds of other Remade to be taken as slaves to the colonies to provide labor. Bellis is on the same ship, fleeing New Crobuzon for reasons also unspecified, and she takes a job as a translator for the captain in exchange for passage to the colony. And so the story is set into motion.

About midway through the journey the ship is boarded by pirates who kill most of the crew and take the rest along with the passengers and prisoners to the city of Armada. Armada is a city of ships. Literally hundreds of ships tied together, gutted, and built up to form a city with different regions, known as ridings, each ruled by their own governments. Bellis and Tanner both wind up in Garwater, arguably the most powerful of the ridings, which is helmed by a pair known simply as The Lovers. Here's where the plot really gets rolling and I'm going to in fact stop talking about the plot and discuss the world of Bas Lag instead because I don't want this to be a summary.

Bas Lag is the name of the world in which Miéville has set three of his novels, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. It's home to a huge variety of intelligent races and strange technologies. Some of the races included are: humans, khepri (the females of whom have human bodies and scarab beetles for heads), cactacae (humanoid cacti), garuda (creatures with bird heads, wings, and legs but human torso's), cray (part human, part lobster), and vodyanoi (fat and froglike with webbed feet and toes). And there are several other races besides such as scab-mettlers and the anophelii that I really can't even get into. Miéville has built an entire world without taking the Tolkien approach and focusing more on the world-building than the characters.

In Miéville's novels you get a sense of the world without having it directly explained to you and you get a rich and fun plot to enjoy with the detailed world as an aside into which you can further delve. I think that's why I like his work so much, it's hugely rich and layered and still fun all around.