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    The Scar: Bas-Lag, Book 2
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    The Scar: Bas-Lag, Book 2
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    The Scar: Bas-Lag, Book 2
    Audiobook27 hours

    The Scar: Bas-Lag, Book 2

    Written by China Miéville

    Narrated by Gildart Jackson

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A mythmaker of the highest order, China Miéville has emblazoned the fantasy novel with fresh language, startling images, and stunning originality. Set in the same sprawling world of Miéville's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel, Perdido Street Station, this latest epic introduces a whole new cast of intriguing characters and dazzling creations.

    Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage-and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.

    For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.

    Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada's agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters-terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission. . . .

    China Miéville is a writer for a new era-and The Scar is a luminous, brilliantly imagined novel that is nothing short of spectacular.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 28, 2014
    ISBN9780553551303
    Unavailable
    The Scar: Bas-Lag, Book 2
    Author

    China Miéville

    China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His novel Embassytown was a first and widely praised foray into science fiction.

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    Reviews for The Scar

    4/5

    1,414 ratings67 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Set in the same world as his previous award-winning "Perdido Street Station" but this time on a vast floating city, equally populated by humans and half-humans. Summoning of awful creatures from the depths and sinister plots To Conquer The World are depicted with immense panache.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed it more than Perdido Street Station, mainly because it had a much more satisfying ending. I wish there were another novel about Bellis. I really adored this book, some of the imagery and scenes have stayed with me weeks later.
    • 4/5
      The world of Bas-Lag grows weirder and richer in this second novel. Events occurring after those of the first novel but only very loosely connected.
    • 3/5
      I wish I had liked this better, but something always distanced me from it, so I wasn't drawn in until most of the way through the book.
    • 4/5
      The world of Bas-Lag grows weirder and richer in this second novel. Events occurring after those of the first novel but only very loosely connected.
    • 4/5
      I'm giving this book the same rating that I gave Perdido Street Station, but I definitely liked this follow-up better. The Scar doesn't require any knowledge of PSS, as they're only tenuously linked, and I recommend this one to anyone who was overwhelmed by the slog through the insane detail in PSS. Miéville does a much better job being descriptive without wallowing in it here, and the story moves forward at a pretty decent pace even though it's nearly 600 pages long. I spent the last 100 pages or so reading very slowly and in short clumps, because I didn't want to be finished with it yet.
    • 5/5
      A terrific piece of highly unusual and unorthodox imaginative fiction that I look forward to reading again. Mieville invents a rich and richly detailed world that could probably produce hundreds of terrific stories.
    • 5/5
      Bellis Coldwine has fled New Crobuzon, using her skills as a translator to live on the frontier of the sea until things cool down enough for her to go back home. On the Swollen Ocean, her ship is seized by the pirate city of Armada, where she finds herself trapped as citizen in name and prisoner in reality.This gorgeous fantasy novel overflows with lush language which paints a breathtaking world full of intrigue and intricacy. Fully autonomous as well as morally and emotionally complex, the protagonist is fully human and truly credible. The language is stunning, which made this book an even greater pleasure to share with my love as a book we read aloud to one another.(NOTE: While considered the second book in the Bas-Lag series, it is not necessary to have read the first book to fully appreciate it as the novels are not dependent upon one another.)
    • 5/5
      fucking whoa... needs more stars.
    • 4/5
      The Scar is set in Bas Lag, the world of the city-state of New Crobuzon, last seen in Perdido Street Station. Bellis Coldwine, a linguist, is escaping her beloved city of New Crobuzon because of the events of Perdido Street Station (no spoilers, but you'll recognise some references if you've read it) by enlisting as a translator on a colony and prison ship. The ship carries a very disparate group of people, all looking to leave New Crobuzon for various reasons. Then they get attacked by pirates, and recruited to be colonists of an entirely different place – Armada, the floating city.The world of Bas Lag is incredibly well-realised, and we meet more species and go to far more places than we did in Perdido Street Station. I've raved about Miéville's world-building before, and I will continue to do so in the future. The descriptions of Armada make for spectacular reading – a floating city, built from ships and platforms.Bellis is an interesting protagonist – she's an established woman over forty, and I have read very few books that feature people like her. She's a pretty cold person, but she's also extremely sad at having to leave her home of New Crobuzon. I wasn't really sure whether I liked her, but she was certainly a good protagonist. The other characters of the novel were also fun – I liked Silas Fennec and Tanner Sack (in very different ways), and Shekel's thirst for learning was endearing.The plot went along at a steady pace, and was pretty engaging. I didn't see a couple of the twists and turns coming. The ending disappointed me a little bit, because so much was left up in the air.I have the same problems with this as I have with any Miéville book – it's a bit cold. I probably would have more to say about this if I hadn't read The City & the City so recently. Overall, a pretty good book.Originally posted on my blog.
    • 5/5
      This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea.

      Miéville is certainly more focused here than in Perdido Street Station, a streamlined set of characters wrestle with duplicity, inefficient energy policy and the ambiguity of exile. Guile finds a quaint representation, which is always of interest. I loved all the characters and was impressed with the narrative arc, which didn't attempt to have it both ways. So if Bolaño offered an addendum to a world build, this would be it. We are all the fucking better for it.
    • 4/5
      Bellis Coldwine is escaping New Crubozon, boarding a ship full of prisoners to go to a colony; she is relying on her skills as an interpreter to escape the city before she falls victim to government forces, like many of her friends have. But before the ship can reach its destination, pirates attack it and bring the captives to the floating city of Armada.Like most of Mieville’s other books, the world he crafts is amazing, as is the language he uses in its description. And it is full of intrigue: what are the mysterious, scar-covered Lovers up to? What is being constructed under armada by its half-fish/half-men—Remade—workers? What role do the Brucolac and his fellow Undead have to play? But mostly, how will Bellis find her way home, whom can she trust, and is she being used for another purpose?The thing is, I tried reading this book several times, and always got hung up on the excessive plots, subterfuge, and general density of the novel. It’s a lot to take in. It’s a masterwork, probably deserves the awards it has received, but I just don’t know if it has enough payoff to be considered a favorite of mine.
    • 5/5
      The world-building in Perdido Street Station (the first book of this series) blew me away. I was even more impressed by the world-building in The Scar - Mieville builds on the world he has already created, and adds whole new cultures and dimensions to it. In many books where the world-building is outstanding, the plotline or the characters don't shine, but that's not the case here. The story is suspenseful and interesting, and the characters are very real and believable. It is truly a challenge to create characters that an earthly reader can identify with in such an other-worldly world, but Mieville succeeds with flying colors.Here's where I would normally write a plot summary, but that's pretty complicated.... Bellis is fleeing her home city of New Crobuzon because she is tangentially involved in some of the events from Perdido Street Station and needs to go into hiding temporarily. She sets out on a ship, which is seized by pirates, who take the ship and its passengers to Armada, a massive floating city, where they are bound to stay for life. Bellis wants to go home to New Crobuzon, But that simple plot summary doesn't even begin to do justice to the intricacies of the plot or the world in which it takes place.You could read this book without having read Perdido Street Station - the two build on each other, but the storylines are only tangentially related. I think The Scar might be better than Perdido Street Station, although it's a close call... The Scar feels more coherent, and isn't nearly as nightmare-inducing.This is one of those books that I found myself reading for hours at a time (I was glad it was so long!), and thinking about obsessively when I wasn't reading it. Truly a fantastic achievement.
    • 3/5
      Bellis is a cold woman running away from New Crobuzon, begrudgingly let on a colonizing ship to act as a translator between races. But when plans go awry and her ship is boarded by pirates, she is brought to a strange city called Armada. It's a city never seen before, made of a nimbus of ships bound together until even a city's districts and factions are reflected in this place. But not everything is as it seems, and enemies and allies alike don't speak of hidden agendas. For Bellis, she only longs to get back home. But as she makes plots and plans, the question that soon rises to the surface, like foam on the ocean, is whether she is the player or played.

      Unfortunately I could only get my hands on this book before reading Perdido Street station, but hopefully that doesn't cause any discrepancy in this review.

      I liked this book quite a book, but certain things held me back from saying its a great book. First off, the world. Wow, can Mieville write a different world. With the rich description and imagination to paint the Armada, it's really quite beautiful. Not to mention, the multitude of races, the mosquito people and the cactus people. It's interesting to see how commonplace elements are incorporated into a sentient race. The only drawback that I would say from the world building is the amount of time put into it.

      I love a beautifully descriptive world as much as the next sci-fi fan, but Mieville really bogs down the book with endless description. Almost every single sentence is loaded with adjectives and descriptive phrases. It's dense. It's a really dense book that is hard to skim or understand the jest of a paragraph. It takes time to savor each paragraph. And when things drag, it gets a little boring. The first hundred pages or so had so much descriptive detail that I really wanted to keep flipping as fast as I could - but you can't do that when the important facts are hidden behind adjectives galore. It's still a beautiful world though, just a denser book than I generally prefer.

      It's actually really interesting how Mieville treats the characters. It's almost as if he doesn't care if you like them or not. The main character Bellis is so unemotional and analytical it's sometimes hard to sympathize. In fact, it's hard to sympathize or love any character. But I guess I did love Bellis in the end, because as hard as she tries to be unemotional (besides going home), she does end up caring for people. In her stoic ways, at least. She is definitely an anti-hero. The interaction between the characters are genuine, but short. Dialogue is minimal. I guess that's understandable because Bellis hardly speaks. But that also means the story drags on a little longer. I was a little annoyed at how quickly important secondary characters switched in and out of the story, as if the story only had room for two characters at a time. (ex: Johannes, Silas, Doul, etc.) It's made the story feel discombobulated at times, unfocused even.

      The story grew upon itself. That was a good thing at first because you realize that there are layers of deception upon more lies - and that's fascinating because I wanted to know the truth, I wanted to figure it out. But towards the end, it just started getting frustrating. It was like beating a dead horse. No, you can't trust anyone. Yes, you are being used. No, this is not the end goal. Yes, there is a hidden agenda. They were all beautifully written, more or less engaging, and very different. But at some point, it just feels like it's dragging on. And I was disappointed at the reveal of the Scar. Not impressive enough, bah.

      I actually loved the ending when I read it. And then I thought about it a little and then was just sad. I loved it because of how realistic it is. Not everyone can be a player, a mover and a shaker. Not everyone knows all the pieces of the puzzle. And though Bellis was like a marionette, she was still able to say yes I did that with myself and reason behind it all. Even though all of her relations and friendships fell apart, she still received her desire at the end, but not through her own strength or cunning. It was just so realistic; I love it when a book can end without falling into cliches. And then I thought about it and ah, it is a bit of a bittersweet ending, perhaps even a tragedy. Perhaps.

      This is not a book that leaves you with warm and fuzzy feeling about humanity, or with triumphant huzzahs. It's not a whirlwind of laughter and joy to sadness and worry. It's not that kind of book. As for emotions, it's as emotional as the main character: hardly. You'll turn the pages with anticipation and maybe a bit of fear and worry, but this is not a happy book. It's real, it's dark and gritty, it's a world that forces you to see things without those rose-colored lenses.

      Three stars because it was a good read with strange, new world. Unfortunately the story got bogged down by excess detail and perhaps one too many plot twists. I was tempted to give it 3.5 stars because of the ending, but there are just too many problems for it to really hit that 3.5.
      Recommended for people who like a lot of world building and are not afraid of dense books. It's quite interesting.

      I'll also probably make an edit after I read the first book.
    • 5/5
      I liked this quite a lot. I believe the author calls this weird fiction, and I can see where he's coming from. To me, it is fantasy, but admittedly, it is one of a kind fantasy. The many different races unlike any other make this world unique (try imagining a centaur, but instead of a horse, the animal part is a lobster...). The pirate city is unlike anything I've ever read about as well, and I love how the author has worked out what it is like to live in it. And I love how despite of all the strangeness going on, the major motivations at least are nothing strange: money and power. A strange thing to love, perhaps, but it completely fits in this world that isn't pulling any punches. It is intriguing and amazing, but it is definitely not a fairytale. There is some definite ugliness going on, and even the main character is hardly lovable. In a way, I almost wonder why I liked this so much, but the truth is, I did. Bellis may have been prickly and difficult at times, but I could sympathize with her. She does the best she can with what she has. I can't say I fully understand the motivations of some of the others: Uther Doul and the female Lover. They are intriguing, though. That's probably the main attraction of the book, it's intriguing. The city, the characters, the races, the world. I haven't read Perdido Street Station, but this book is enough of a standalone that it wasn't a problem. Some friends of mine found that book depressing, but since I like this book so much, I will definitely give it a go in the future...
    • 1/5
      I tried sticking with it, but I just couldn't get interested in the characters. Even though Bellis is, refreshingly, a female main character, she doesn't really seem to do anything, and I could not "get" her character sufficiently to really enjoy the plot, and the admittedly very lyrical descriptions did not so much endear the world to me as pause the alFinishedy very slow plot.
    • 4/5
      China Mieville has a bit of an ego as an author. He writes extravagant plots, uses a 1 dollar word when there is a perfectly good 5 cent word available. But, luckily for China Mieville - he is a damn good author. Other authors could not get away with a book like this ... the extravagant plot is all needed ( I did a mental edit... and couldn't really come up with a part that wasn't necessary). The characters are cold but are humanely flawed. This world is strange- but doesn't need explaining. This book is dark. Very very dark. There is not a spot of humour or light in it all, just various shades of gray, some parts a lighter gray than others. It is not happy book. But it is intriguing and interesting, and as a reader, I wanted to know more. Because of the darkness of this book - I found myself having to push myself to finish it - reading it in bits and pieces. As for the book itself, the writing is poetic. Mieville has a way with words that I haven't found in a modern author. The characters are well written and are interesting. The plot is fantastic, but always grounded. This is a scary world. The only true flaw... and I'm not sure its a flaw... is the ending. It takes an unexpected turn and leaves a reader with a "That's All?" sort of feeling.So, read it, but know its an odd, difficult read.
    • 3/5
      It's a pretty neat book, but not as good as Perdido Street Station. The protagonist is kind of boring - which is strongly highlighted by the fact that she's surrounded by much more interesting characters (none of whom we get to spend enough time with).
    • 5/5
      Really good - even better than Perdido Street Station. Disturbing, tense and unpredictable.
    • 5/5
      This is the first of Mieville's works I've read and I liked it very much. I had a hard time warming up to Bellis as a character, perhaps because the things going on around her were so intriguing and her reaction to them was so unexpected. (Clearly, I would have assimilated quickly and easily into Armada, and been one of those pushovers Bellis loathed. ;) ) As the story progressed, however, I came to appreciate her unexpected attitudes and reactions as an aspect of good storytelling. Also, every time I thought I knew what the story was about, something bigger was introduced. I confess that while I found the conclusion mostly satisfying, I would very much like to find out what happened to the Lover. Uther Doul was also something of a mystery to me. He is the story's golden child: he is beautiful, he fights with skill beyond measure, his voice is melodious, he has a secret history, and is intelligent beyond measure. Such a combination of traits is grating in a protagonist, but in a secondary character it is mostly baffling. I'd like to know more about him.
    • 4/5
      String theory and pirates. Steampunk dirigibles and mosquito women vampires...and fish men. Weird fer sure ... a beautifully written dystopian tale. Whales and magic...
    • 4/5
      A note to Gildart Jackson;

      when a character is described as speaking in a low, intense voice, don't read her part in hysterical voice.

      This book is classic Meaville, I enjoyed it, but there narration left me cold.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting work of rather dark fantasy that manages to impressively transcend the fact that it is the story of – in the protagonist's own words – a "violent, pointless voyage." It's the second book by the author dealing with the world that contains New Crobuzon, and I haven't read the first one, Perdida Street Station. If I had read that first book, I might have been a little less puzzled by some things, but really the plot of this second book stands alone.The world of this story is wildly imaginative. There are many strange species of beings and a sometimes bewildering mix of semi-steam punk and magical technologies. Mieville could have made almost anything possible with this mix, but chooses not to. The limits of the magic aren't explained, but they are stated. The crowning glory of Mieville's invention in this book is its setting: Armada, a floating pirate city made up of a patchwork of old boats linked together into an almost organic whole. It's an intriguing concept, imagined in spectacular detail. If this were science fiction, I'd have to say that it couldn't actually work, but this is fantasy and - hell, who cares?Mieville's writing is powerful and gritty. He does his characters' psychology well. The language is cruder than what I prefer to read, but I'm beyond being shocked or offended by it. It matches the world he's invented. This is not a nice place, and as long as you don't expect nice things to happen, you'll be fine. The main protagonist, Bellis, spends a lot of the story not being very effective and not even having a clear goal. This made it a little hard to get into the story at first. Normally it would be considered a flaw, but this is a story about people manipulating and using each other and Bellis is often on the receiving end of that despite her efforts to the contrary. The surprises have to do with unraveling the power structure of Armada and the purposes of its various denizens. Lots of intrigue, lots of double-crosses. And violence. Still, I spent a lot of the book waiting for the central conflict to emerge from the murk. It did eventually, though excruciatingly slowly.All the major characters are well-drawn although the back-stories of the two central ones, Bellis and Tanner, take too long to be revealed. We never do know what Tanner's crime was that got him punished by New Crobuzon. (Maybe these two characters were introduced in the first book and we're supposed to know?) It doesn't matter to the story, but it disturbed me that Tanner never once thought about it and nobody ever asked. I was a little annoyed by the over-use of a few words – "cosseted" being the worst offender. (I don't think the more familiar synonym, "pampered" was ever used.) Mieville also has a habit of launching into what seems a description of significant time passing, only to jump back to specific events at the beginning of that time without so much as a "but" to cover the dislocation. In spite of these minor concerns, and the fact that I prefer a more feel-good story, I did enjoy reading this and recommend it to anyone who likes a dark tale.
    • 3/5
      This was a slow read for me, and I didn't find it as compelling as some of China Miéville's other works. It dragged on a lot through the middle. And I became impatient with the protagonist's disdain for everyone and everything else. I liked Perdido Street Station a lot, so I'm disappointed that this one wasn't as much to my tastes.
    • 2/5
      Miéville writes beautiful descriptions. Everything else about this book was a slog to get through, from the monologues he has characters give in the midst of battles to the repetitious similes. Another annoying tick: characters had (incredibly obvious) realizations and then spent pages thinking about how much their mind was blown. Yes yes, we get it, your whole universe is rocked on its axis by the very idea that, say, a spy might have collected plans for an invasion. Let's get on with the story, shall we? Oh no, we have to spend at least three more pages reading descriptions of how this totally shocks you? All righty then.

      There were some bits here I really liked, like Tanner's conflicted feelings about the ocean deeps, or the idea behind the scabmettlers. The ideas behind Miéville's societies are good, but he doesn't follow them up well--I still don't know how a single character ate, or where they got their clothes, or anything like that. There wasn't much foundation to the world building, just a lot of flash and wordy purpley description.

      I got annoyed that not a single female character succeeded at anything. There are exactly four female characters with any page time: Bellis, who is literally only useful as a conduit for male characters' actions. She translates what men (and the Lover) say to other men. She takes a book from the man who found it and gives it to the men who want it. She's manipulated by Silas Fennec to get information from Uther Doul and vice versa. Fennec gives her a letter which Tanner actually has the adventure of delivering. On and on--there literally is not a single instance in this entire book in which Bellis does a single thing of her own accord. She's delightfully cold, misanthropic and lonely, so I assumed I'd love her, but her incompetence and unending supply of naivete really annoyed me. There's Shekel's girlfriend, who doesn't do anything except provide Shekel an opportunity to get over his prejudice against the Remade and Tanner a chance to show off his engineering skills. Carrianne is Bellis's friend from the library, who has about three lines, no plot purpose and mostly serves to introduce the idea of the goretax. And there's the Lover, who has I think two monologues and that's it. To add insult to injury, after the fact we realize Uther Doul convinced her that they need to get the power of the Rift, which was her driving force through the entire book, so even her motivation isn't her own. In the end, she's deposed rather randomly and vanishes off the boat. Every other character is male and every single goddamn thing that happens in this entire goddamn book is driven by dudes. It is dumb and it started really straining my ability to believe the world.

      As for the plot...well, it's very episodic and poorly paced, and the main characters are completely useless within it. I had a really hard time maintaining interest in this.
    • 5/5
      I was completely seduced by this world and the character of Bellis. This book had a sensitivity and love as well as a play of symbology missing from other Mieville books I have read. He's utterly redeemed himself with this one, one of the best books I've read I a while. My only complaint would be that some of the prose is over written and his editor should ban him from using the words cosset, jabber, judder...there are others, obviously author favourites which break the spell of narrative and act as placeholders for more precise diction which is never given.
    • 5/5
      Totally blew my mind. Amazing.
      This is what fantasy novels need to do--just forget about Tolkien already and move on.
    • 5/5
      China Miéville is a master of combining fantasy, science-fiction and social critique. Again, the characters are very vivid, with many layers in their personalities.
    • 5/5
      I'm glad I was already familiar with China Miéville's work before I read The Scar. I don't think I would have appreciated it as much if I hadn't known, to some extent, what to expect. The Scar is set in the same universe as Perdido Street Station, and has links with it, although it is not set in the same city. The prose is similar, very rich and dense, and the world-building is just as intense. It can be a little hard to get into: I remember with the first book that I found myself wondering what the main plot was going to be because what was there didn't seem big enough. I was less dubious about The Scar, and wasn't exactly surprised by the way the plot unfolded and unfolded and got bigger and bigger.

      Which isn't to say I knew where it was going, because while there were some things I expected and some things other people mentioned helped connect some dots, the end was still a shock to me. A good kind of shock, the "oh, that's what's going on, now everything suddenly makes sense" kind of shock, but still a shock. It's hard to articulate what I felt about it because when I got to the end, I sat down to try and talk in a discussion thread about it and couldn't summon up the words. I loved it, really, the way everything comes together, and the way everyone takes their place in the scheme of things and all the characters' purposes make sense.

      Overall, I loved the descriptions of the city. Miéville is really damn good at building up pictures like that, making you see it vividly, making you know how it works. I think I remarked in my review of Perdido Street Station that the city itself seems like a character, and the plot more like a vehicle to explore it -- or if I didn't, I should've. I felt this less in The Scar, but Armada is still a sort of character of its own.

      Speaking of characters, The Scar has a lot of interesting ones. I'm really pleased that some Remade, who were more on the outskirts of Perdido Street Station, were closer to the heart of this book. Tanner Sack is an awesome character, I think -- not too complicated in his thinking, but good and loyal. His slow transformation to become more of a sea-creature is really, really interesting to read about, and he was one of the few characters I wasn't ambivalent about. Shekel was another, of course. I ended up liking the Brucolac more than I expected to, given that he's a vampire and quite scary. Uther Doul is another fascinating character, and it's amazing how much of a part he plays in the end. I didn't like Silas at any point, so I was quite unsurprised by what he was doing, but Doul was more of a surprise. There's a lot of manipulating going on in this book, and it amazes me how intricate it gets while still making sense.

      Bellis herself, I didn't feel much about either way. She's rather unremarkable, really, except in being at the right (or wrong) place at the right time.

      The Lovers were one of my favourite things about the book. The story surrounding them, about the scars, is intense and intriguing, and I was very drawn to the concept. Not so much to the characters, but definitely to the concept. I was actually sad when they parted because they were such a strong symbol.

      I feel like I haven't even managed to touch on the things that fascinate me about this book. It's rich and dense, the characters are for the most part interesting and powerful. The ending is a wonderful culmination of all the threads, all the little details, and I love it. The world-building is wonderful. One of the things I like best about it is that there isn't even any attempt to explain their science and make it like our science. It just is, but it's not magic, it's still science.

      There are some amazing quotes, too. The ones that stuck out to me most are both related to Tanner:

      -"A scar is not an injury, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After an injury, a scar is what makes you whole."

      -"In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.
      I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.
      I can't say goodbye."

      I think those are amazing and lovely, too.

      In conclusion, I think The Scar is well worth reading. If you can't get into it because of all the denseness, persevere. I definitely found it worth it. I liked The Scar better than Perdido Street Station, but that might also have been because I was more prepared for it.
    • 2/5
      I was gripped by Perdido Street Station right to the end, when it managed to suck like a Hoover. Miéville is an interesting enough world-builder that he gets another chance, but my God, what a doorstop. At least it's in one volume.

      Bellis Coldwine is a fascinating character but I'm - ah, I don't know quite what - this insistence on her complete lack of agency unsettles me. Miéville is a bit creepy writing women characters. It's like he creates a bunch of intriguing characters and then paints all the women with a little extra abjection.