A half-assed review of The Scar by China Miéville

The Scar by China Miéville is the second work (of 3) in his Bas-Lag world of novels. Following Bellis Coldwine, a potential fugitive from the secret police of New Crobuzon, and Tanner Sack, a slave remade into a man with tenticles sprouting from his chest, among other limited PoVs, the story goes from one end of the strange world of Bas-Lag to the literal edge where anything is possible. While that sounds like hyperbole, that is literally the plot of the book.

Miéville creates a weird, wild world where strange creatures and environments all coexist. His worldbuilding is stellar and truly strange in the best of ways and builds on the great work he did in Perdido Street Station with the addition of even more cool creature concepts and sci-fiesque magic systems. Overall, his worldbuilding is his greatest strength and a huge part of why I enjoyed this book. I will stop there so readers can enjoy it for themselves.

On the other hand, his character work fell a bit flat, with the main character being rather one dimensional and a chore to empathize with. While not all books need lovable casts, I found myself caring very little for the vast majority of characters. Deceit and how people use other people, whether they know it or not, is the main theme of the character interactions. While this reflects a certain aspect of human nature pretty well, the plot leaves more questions than answers as to what all the deceit and lying was for. Not every story needs a nice bow on top, but by the end of the story it seemed like many nonsensical actions were explained away with "deceit for deceit's sake".

Overall, the worldbuilding was stellar while the characters and plot were less so. China Miéville remains one of the greatest weird fiction authors out there and if anyone needs a change of pace from dwarves, elves and conventional magic systems there are few better places to start.