China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station was a prodigious feat of imagination – a steampunk, noirish fantasy set in the teeming metropolis of New Crobuzon, a mecca for  numerous humanoid races and a perfect setting for Mieville’s twisted take on vampires, monsters and artificial intelligence. In The Scar, he pulls back from his great creation, though its presence is still a touchstone for many characters, and takes in broad swathes of the magical world he has created. Bellis Coldwine is a former girlfriend of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the scientist at the heart of Perdido Street Station‘s story, and when The Scar opens she is fleeing the fallout of those events, as all of Isaac’s friends and associates are being rounded up by the security police. She is taking passage to the colonies, beyond their reach, a passenger aboard a cargo ship.

After some encounters with other passengers and some crew members (but none with the enslaved and tortured Remade who throng the hold below), Bellis, in her capacity as a linguist, is drawn in to diplomatic negotiations with the ocean-dwelling Cray people as a translator, and is well-placed to witness subsequent events: the ship is captured by pirates, led by the enigmatic warrior Uther Doul, and taken to what deserves to be considered as one of the great cities of fantasy writing, period: Armada.

Armada is a giant floating city formed from the lashing together of thousands upon thousands of ships and boats – an itinerant metropolis attended by warships, tugs and fishing boats, peopled both above and below water, Armada is a fantastic idea wonderfully realised: there are different districts, each with their own leaders, there are theatres, restaurants, parks, blimp-based taxis, docks, all based on and in and under the hulls of a diverse range of vessels. It’s unclear how old Armada is, but obviously many of its population were born there and expect to die there; many other residents are pressed from the numerous ships impounded by Armada’s pirates, but grow to accept their place in Armada’s soceity. Bellis cannot imagine ever accepting her fate, but nor can she see a means of escape.

For some writers, such an audacious piece of world-building could almost be in danger of overshadowing the plot, but Mieville has thrills and spills aplenty for us, with Bellis given a ringside seat for many of them by virtue of her rare linguistic skills. There’s the plans of the city, led by the disturbing duo the Lovers, to ensnare a giant sea beast to tow Armada; there’s the New Crobuzon spy Silas Fennac with whom Bellis becomes involved; there are the inhuman grindylow, a race who are pursuing Armada for reasons of their own; and overshadowing it all is the reason that the Lovers want to be able to move the city in the first place, a reason intimately connected to the Possible Sword owned by Uther Doull and the arcane notion of possibility mining.

The Scar is an audacious and thoroughly engrossing piece of fantasy – China Mieville has a stunning imaginative gift (exemplified by the deeply disturbing Island of the Mosquito People which features here), which he manages to combine with impressive characterisation, a narrative that builds up and maintains a thundering head of steam despite the introspection of Bellis, stylish prose, and great characterisation to boot. The result is a book that is fuses fantasy and science fiction elements in to a tale that I found utterly compelling and truly enjoyable. This book, and its predecessor, come highly recommended.

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