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Overview
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.
Synopsis
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—andThe Scaris a luminous, brilliantly imagined novel that is nothing short of spectacular.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award by the age of 30, China Miéville has also been a World Fantasy Award and Bram Stoker finalist. The Scar, arguably his most ambitious novel yet, takes us on a bizarre voyage on a vast ship teeming with grotesquely re-engineered prisoners. Among them, biding her time for a peaceful landing, is the brilliant Bellis Coldwine, a linguist whose access to secrets protects her. But on the Swollen Oceans, pirates overrun this vessel of mutants, and Bellis, now doubly captive, confronts a death sentence that others call life…Publishers Weekly
Forecast: Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award. A major publicity push including a six-city author tour should help win new readers in the U.S. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Even better than the author's Perdido Street Station (Del Rey, 2001), The Scar is also set in the alternate world of Bas-Lag, where linguist Bellis Coldwine is fleeing the city of New Crobuzon. On her journey, pirates capture her ship, and she and the slaves onboard are taken to the floating city of Armada, ruled by the twisted Lovers. The Lovers have a plan that will change the lives of more than the inhabitants of Armada forever, and the quest to find the mysterious reality-shifting place called the Scar begins. The world of Bas-Lag is dark and dangerous and its odd and macabre inhabitants are fully formed, however alien they seem. But even if the noir story and characters were merely ordinary, Mieville's writing would set this book apart. If poetry can have internal rhymes, the prose has an internal structure that uses sound and syllable repetitions, resulting in brilliant and biting word combinations that produce a style more analogous to music than to writing. The author's technique is something akin to Lewis Carroll's use of portmanteau. Sophisticated readers will be engrossed not only by the story but also by the very words used to detail the plot, and they will never think of the fantasy genre, or fantasy authors, in quite the same way again.-Jane Halsall, McHenry Public Library District, IL Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Another beefy fantasy set in the same world as Mieville's landmark Perdido Street Station (2001), where recent upheavals in the city New Crobuzon have caused linguist Bellis Coldwine to fear for her life; she hopes to find sanctuary and anonymity in the colony Nova Esperium, a long ocean voyage distant. But before reaching the colony, her ship's intercepted by pirates from Armada, a huge floating city composed of the hulls of captured vessels. Armada's population, human and nonhuman, is governed by the Lovers, a sadomasochistic pair with momentous but arcane plans, and their assistant, Uther Doul, an unmatchable warrior with artifacts from the ancient, vanished, nonhuman Ghosthead Empire. Also aboard, and opposing the Lovers' plans, is the Brucolac, leader of a vampire cadre, and sinister New Crobuzon superspy Silas Fennec. In addition to the ships, Armada has captured a New Crobuzon drilling rig to extract oil and rockmilk, source of vast thaumaturgic power. The Lovers seek a book written in a language only Bellis can interpret: the book contains the knowledge they need to help them harness an avanc, a vast, half-unreal denizen of the abyssal oceans, strong enough to tow Armada across half the face of the world. But to what purpose? Uther Doul and the Brucolac know, but disagree. And amid the swirling plots, machinations, and secret agendas, Armada's being stalked by a group of shadowy, ocean-dwelling, utterly merciless beings. Again, panoramic and stunningly inventive, but awash with half-baked experimental passages, irritatingly manipulative, overstuffed, and hastily constructed: as frustrating as it is astonishing. Author tourBook Details
Published
June 1, 2004
Publisher
Del Rey Books
Pages
608
Format
Mass Market Paperback
ISBN
9780345460011