The Scar by China Miéville (3.5 stars)

Yep, more Miéville, but I'm reading something else after this one. The Scar is a return to the Bas-Lag world from Perdido Street Station: re-made, cactacae, vodyanoi etc. but set outside of New Crobuzon, mostly in a floating pirate city reminiscent of 'Waterworld' called Armada. Unfortunately it is nowhere near as good as PSS.

Armada annoyed me from the outset. How does a bunch of boats lashed together in the open ocean survive a big storm, let alone centuries worth of storms? Why don't they smash into each other and sink? Miéville tries to address this, but the explanation is lame:

Channeled into canals between the vessels, Armada's waters jerked and pitched violently but could not form waves.

The world-building is there, and there's at least one very well-played casual reveal, but compared to PSS or Embassytown, it's nothing, and relies heavily on explanations from PSS. You can read this novel independently, but if you did you would probably wonder why he doesn't describe the fascinating races in more detail, it's because he did it in PSS. I actually think avoiding recapping was the right call.

Miéville does introduce some new races, the most interesting of which is the mosquito men and women. The descriptions of the mosquito women were amazing:

Gazing hungrily, the mosquito-woman stretches her mouth open, spewing slaver, lips peeled back from toothless gums. She retches, and with a shocking motion a jag snaps from her mouth. A spit-wet proboscis, jutting a foot from her lips. It extrudes from her in an organic movement, something like vomiting, but unmistakably and unsettlingly sexual.

A book set in the time when the world was plagued by these mosquitos would have been an amazing read, as would one based on Silas Fennec's spying on the grindylow, or one about the zombie city of High Cromlech. Instead we got just a taste of all of these and followed an improbable floating city to the edge of the known world, just for it to turn around and come back. It feels like Miéville realised he'd already hit 800 pages and didn't have the stomach to write the actual climax so he just turned the city around. Or did he? Maybe that's just one possibility and there is a different one where it doesn't suck. That might be clever but ruining the story to make a point about possibility mining is a huge cop out.

I've noticed a pattern in the Miéville novels I've read so far: he doesn't seem to like filling out the characters of his narrators. In this novel it is Bellis Coldwine. With that name I can only assume Miéville was attempting to head off criticism of her blandness by pointing out: 'yes, she is deliberately cold and whiny'. She is important in the plot at one point as a translator, but after that just bumps along, being basically useless but inexplicably often at the centre of the action, which is of course convenient for narration.

My final complaint is that the grindylow were way too powerful. There's no way New Crobuzon could be a threat to them, which undermines a major plot point.

Not a terrible book, but he has written much better.

3.5 stars.