The Scar

Rating:
Summary: Not Nearly as Good as Perdido
Review: Perdido Street Station was incredible, so I went into this book with high hopes. Unfortunately, they were to fall.

The main character spends a great deal of time not really doing anything, which was frustrating and boring. Though Mieville continues to incorporate some cool fantasy - sci fi stuff into his world, it is not nearly as interesting as that in Perdido Street Station. The end was a real disappointment - I won't ruin it if you decide to read it - and really turned me off to this book.

Overall, The Scar did not seem as original, interesting, or dynamic as Perdido Street Station. There is not nearly as much action, and no clear antagonist. Read Perdido Street Station, but I wouldn't bother with this one.

Rating:
Summary: GrindyGhostThaumaturtastic
Review: Perdido was an excellent book in its own right, yet I was impressed by how much better The Scar was. Mieville has an excellent ability to make you want more by throwing out snippets of descriptions of people and places and civilizations inhabitaing bas-Lag that invariably made me want to learn more. One of the creepiest and most striking images from the book was Doul's description of his home city of High Chromlech, with its quiet streets full of shuffling high-caste dead, with their lips sewn together. Only a fine writer could pack so much imagination and imagery into a few short pages, and The Scar is full of this, It's part Dickensian (though less so than Perdido), part Lovecraftian, part Moorock, but transcends all those sources. As others have mentioned, the main character is a bit of a dud (the supporting characters are far more interesting), and the ending fizzles just a little, but the ride getting there justifies the trip. You'll enjoy the characters and places you visit on the way.

Rating:
Summary: Unusual and imaginative (unlike this review)
Review: Plot in a very small nutshell: Travellers, prisoners, and slaves (many of whom have been biologically modified against their wills) are on board a sea vessel bound for the New Crobuzon colony. Pirates seize the ship and take the survivors to their floating city Armada to become a part of that rather unorthodox society.
The characters and the society and culture of Armada are very detailed and well thought out. There are bizarre characters, monsters, magic, secrets, and intrigue. The language and descriptions are effective and beautiful. I have not yet read PERDIDO STREET STATION (though I plan to remedy that very soon), but that did not hamper my reading of THE SCAR in any way that I was aware of.
THE SCAR is one of the most unusual books that I have read in a long time and it is one I will read again.

Rating:
Summary: amazing...
Review: Simply incredible, the book is about science and fantasy and other stuff, but think of that as the stage. Its about lovers, about relationships, about what defines a community as well as an individual. Its about how large dreams affect litle people, about loving societies and what engenders that love and it slips into us, our hearts and minds being imprinted like baby ducks toward an ideal of one sort or another.

What struck me is characters unlikable become realistically bearable, that those who so easily can be dismissed as pitiable scum become compelling heroes. It strikes against the prejudices of the characters as well as the reader.

Rating:
Summary: For once, the cover blurbs live up to their promise
Review: So - you've been hearing all these praises about this Mieville guy. Genre-redefining. Enthralling. Mythic. You check out the cover of his books and see a litany of blurbs proclaiming him as the next Tolkien or Bradbury. An author beyond description.

You roll you eyes - remembering countless other mammoth novels littered with accolades you've slogged through - only to be underwhelmed.

Well - this time - for me, at least - the blurbs were not fluff. This is cool stuff. This is genre-redefining. This is a world you can immerse yourself in and totally believe is real. It lives, breathes, smells, thrills, terrifies, disgusts and even makes you philosophize.

I loved this book. It wasn't perfect (what's the deal with the love affair with the word "puissant?") but as a reader who has been disappointed with new SF/F lately - Meilville has renewed my faith that great things can still be found in the modern world's most exciting genre - and that alone is enought to give it five stars.

Rating:
Summary: The ending sucked
Review: Sorry, it did. Big time. After an almost 600 page leadup, with the drama and the characters and rich detail and the adventure of it all carrying me along and immersing me in this wonderfully drawn universe, it was a huge anti-climax, flat, it ruined everything. That's why I give this book 3 stars, and not 5, which it would (imho) otherwise have deserved.

Maybe you'll feel differently. This is only my feeling, although I notice a few other reviewers have also mentioned being disappointed with the ending.

Apart from that, here are the good and bad points

pros
o excellent worldbuilding. Bas-Lag is described in such detail as to seem as real as our world. And Armada is just cool!
o fascinating characters. Too often in books characters are 1 dimensional cardboard cutouts. Not so here.
o some wonderfully bizarre images and concepts
o good exciting pace
o making a very unsympathetic character the main protagonist, no cliche'd hero (or antihero for that matter)

cons
o the ending (need i say it again...?)
o the Grindylow seem to be wayyyy too powerful, if even three of them can do what they do in the book, they have nothing to fear from New Crobuzon (which makes a whole big element of the plot irrelevant or absurd)
o The downside of limiting worldbuilding to a single planet. Bas-Lag is too crowded with too many things. Were this a medieval fantasy I could understand, but it's steam-age fantasy: they have steamships, they have rail, they have dirigibles. These mysterious forbidden places on the boarders of the known don't make sense, they would have been explored long ago.
o Gratuitous use of the f-word. If it was only the coarse sailer types who speak like that, sure, definitely. But - especially later in the book - it is everyone, no matter how refined or educated. So rather than enhancing the colourful nature of certain characters, it just became an ugly peppering of the narrative. Try reading the dialogue without the numerous f**k(ing), it reads more quickly, and better.
o with so many giant sea monsters referred to the marine ecology is absurd (you can't have so many top preditors in any foodchain). Okay granted it is fantasy (thaumaturgy, vampires, re-made, etc ...), and it is just my interest in marine biology that makes me think in this way, but in other regards Mieville seems to be trying to write about this in a more realistic manner.

Will I read any of Mieville's other books? Perhaps. I love the way he paints his surreal universe. But the failure of nerve that constitutes the ending of this book does not endear me to his manner of writing a story


Rating:
Summary: no sympathy for characters; obscure plot
Review: the author's ability to describe still remains incredible; but the characters are people that, in the real world, you wouldn't hang around them anyway for even an hour. the main protagonist is a sour individual who gave me a stomachache after a few pages. i found perdido street station much more enjoyable. when i finished the book i was left wondering.."what now?"

Rating:
Summary: Another colossal slice of strangeness...
Review: The Scar is another massive work of contemporary urban baroque fantasy by the extraorinarily talented if rather undisciplined China Mieville.

Set in the same world as Perdido Street Station, the protagonist, Bella Coldwine, is captured whilst fleeing the great city of New Crobuzon by sea, and made an unwilling citizen of the legendary floating pirate city of Armada. This extraordinary place is made up of the remains of captured ships lashed together into a fantastically varied marine metropolis, each district built around a particular large vessel, which seems to lend its character to the government and culture of the district. And what variations they are! From democracies through dictatorships to an area that voluntarily pays for its security in blood to its vampire master, the variety of political systems is both crucial to the plot and provides rich and complex lessons for our own societies.

The whole ungainly melange is given some sense of unity through the ultimate leadership of the enigmatic 'Lovers' - whose strange hold on the city is combined with a publically visible sado-masochistic scaring. The mysterious plans of the Lovers for Armada involving the harnessing of a mythical transdimensional Leviathan form the basis for the plot, along with Bellis' own attempts to escape the flottila. In this she becomes involved with the machinations of underground politics and espionage and inevitably strays way beyond her depth.

As in Perdido Street Station, the sheer inventivenes of Mieville is crazed and marvellous: an island of mosquito people whose mindless thirst for human nourishment sometimes outweighs their rationality; humans 'remade' to work underwater; terrifying leech-like beings from other dimensions who can 'swim' through air... and above all the great ramshackle mass of Armada itself, a city even more edgy and dangerous than New Crobuzon.

Mieville's writing is rich and luscious, and the breadth of his invention is matched by the depth of his intelligence. As previous reviewers have pointed out, this book is saturated in metaphors of scars, and the characters are diverse, dangerous and flawed with wonderfully evocative names that echo the melodrama of Dickens and the eccentricity of Mervyn Peake.

So what's wrong with it?

The ending. The same thing that marred Perdido Street Station. It is almost as if Mieville charges headlong through his plot with invention scattering in his path and then... he just stops. This could be conceived of as subverting traditional fantasty plot structures, but I think he just can't think of satisfactory ways to resolve a narrative yet. Still, a brave and magnificent book.

Rating:
Summary: Lovely writing, vivid world, wildly original, but depressing
Review: THE SCAR is even more original and twice as artful as Mieville's previous PERDIDO STREET STATION. If you like great writing, get it. If you like wondrous, original, vivid imaginary worlds, get it. I haven't seen such a marvelous imaginary world in years.

However, if you like characters who set out to make a positive difference in their world and succeed, don't get this book. Mieville likes to write about good guys who aren't really good and who lose even when they win. If he had to do a Churchill biography he'd write about everything except World War II. If he had to do a Presidential biography he'd choose Clinton over Lincoln or Washington every time.

I think he prefers to close his eyes to heroes.

But the world he creates in THE SCAR is gorgeous. It's wonderful. A floating city, a whale as a steed, two different kinds of underwater civilizations, battles with magic and ironclads and airships, an isle of mosquito people, catcus pirates, a magic based on probability theory and oil drilling as a means of magical power--there's just so much stuff in this book. If you want a world you haven't seen before, one wonderfully written, full of life, completely different and completely believable--this is for you.

It's got drama, too, plenty of it, even if Mieville likes to put lots of depressing bits in alongside the successes. There's heroism and war and titan-scale engineering and mysterious magic.

Did I mention that this book is packed full of stuff? And that the world is wonderfully original?

THE SCAR is set in the same universe as PERDIDO STREET STATION, but it goes leagues beyond that in quality. It's the tale, more or less, of a woman who gets hijacked to a fantastic city whose rulers are embarked on an even more fantastic quest, a quest she gets caught up in and that puts half the rest of the world at war with the city -- not to mention the battles within the city itself...

If you want a book that'll leave you smiling, go find some other book. Mieville's too in love with misfortune. His main characters are pretty ordinary people, and even if he lets the good guys more or less win, he leaves you feeling that the characters you were reading about have been left used and broken and mostly defeated. He can't stand to imagine triumph as a good thing. But if you want a world that will absolutely blow your mind and plenty of scenes to leave you breathless, get THE SCAR.

Rating:
Summary: The Scar
Review: The Scar is sort of Steam Age dark fantasy in genre. It's the story of a floating conglomeration of ships called Armada, its fate, and the fates of several characters of varying loyalties. The steam technology and generally nautical/oceanic setting add originality. I highly recommend it.

Worldbuilding is the real strength here, I think. At times, the world may have even been too lush, too full of detail (I never figured out what a hotchi looked like), but at the same time the sheer fertility of the author's imagination awed me. As a reader who generally steers clear of pure fantasy, I found the world generally convincing and "real". There were a few moments where I thought "oh, come on, that's too silly/weird/out there", but the moments of "Oh, COOL!" outnumbered them by a lot.

I found the book well and vividly written, although the "f-word" got used a few more times in dialogue than I thought necessary... it doesn't offend me, but it started to seem like a bit of a crutch. That's a minor point compared to the many instances of gorgeous description. Horrific scenes in particular seem to be a Mieville strength. The first appearance of the mosquito women is especially creepy.

Characters in some way seem to be less the stars than the world as a whole here, but I found them generally well done. I very much like that Mieville doesn't have expendables. Even the imprisoned sailors whom the Armadans are trying to indoctrinate, and the many people killed during a savage battle, get moments of narrative sympathy. Somehow, the characters I liked the best came to bad ends -- but Fennec the spy/diplomat/? comes to one of the more gruesomely vivid bad ends I've read.

The plot is exciting, fast-moving and hangs together well, but I was just a little disappointed by the end. The book doesn't go out with a whimper, but it's not a bang either.

Still, I found this impressive and I will be seeking out the author's other works.