The Scar

"China Miéville is a really interesting writer. He hasn’t done anything for a long time. But in the late 00s, early 2010s, there was this wave of fiction – science fiction, or fantasy /science fiction, somewhere in the middle really – and it was called ‘The New Weird’. It was a kind of sub-genre of fantasy, but it hit the mainstream. And China Miéville led the charge on it. First came Perdido Street Station , which is the book that predates The Scar . There’s a third, The Iron Council ; three very, very large books all set within the same world. He created this world called Bas Lag, within which exists a massive city called New Crobuzon, which is like a mad fantastical London. It’s an enormous amalgamation of different races of people. He’s got such a fecund imagination, it’s almost like he’s got about a hundred books’ worth of ideas crammed into these novels. The first book concerns this mind-eating moth called a slake moth. The protagonist discovers them by accident, because their excrement is psychoactive. If you eat it, you have an incredible trip; but what he doesn’t realize is the moths are consuming people’s minds, their consciousness. And it was funny, because Perdido Street Station has been around for fifteen, maybe twenty years – it’s a very well read, very successful, beloved book. And a little while ago, just as the pandemic was really kicking off, I had this idea about an alien creature who consumed minds… Then I started reading Perdido , and I was like, “That’s my idea! He’s done my idea!”. So it was quite frustrating in that respect! But it was a really good book. The Scar is the sequel to Perdido and it’s only very tangentially related, so really it is a standalone. It follows the lover of the protagonist from Book One as she flees New Crobuzon and ends up on a huge flotilla of ships that have been bound together. It’s become a city, and the city is trying to harness the power of an enormous whale-like creature called an Avanc. The Avanc is going to tow them to a place called the Scar, which is a huge rip in the reality of the fabric of the world. The legends have it that you can harness energy there. It’s the energy of possibility – it’s almost like potential energy – and the closer they get to the Scar, the weirder the stuff that starts to happen. One thing I really love about China Miéville’s writing is the hybrid peoples he creates. It’s like he’s deliberately avoided using elves and dwarves and goblins; instead he’s said, “You know what, I’m going to go right back to the drawing board. I’m just going to make up loads of different races of people.” So he’s got the Khepri, beetle people, with sarcophagus-beetle heads… one of the main characters in the first book is one of these, and they have sensory organs within the beetle carapace on their heads that are almost like a sexual organ. It’s a bit weird – this beetle woman has sex, and he’s touching her with beetle bits on her head – Miéville loves doing that sort of weird stuff. There are cactus people, and people who live in the river in the city, and there’s a bird person as well. And not only do you have these different types of creatures, these different sentient beings, but also this impacts the way they interact socially and politically with one another. So the cactus people are naturally very big and strong, and they’re very left-leaning and they unionize a lot. Some of it’s a bit caricature, but it’s very well done. He’s a tremendously gifted writer. I think if I could choose to write like anybody, it would probably be him."