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The Scar is one of my favorite novels to have come out in a long time. As a novel it holds its own in plot and pacing while still introducing plenty of the insane concepts, or twists on more established concepts, that make the setting so interesting. I thought the description of the necropolis city was fascinating; a place where the living are a social underclass that save up to be made into the undead, and vampires are beggars on the streets. I think Perdido Street Station and especially Iron Council are guilty of putting style over substance in a way that The Scar avoids. What I mean by that is PSS and Council drag awfully and get confused in some places. I could barely finish Iron Council; the last third of the book just seemed interminable. Bas-Lag is just a fascinating setting. At first I would have liked a map in each of the books, but now I think I'm honestly better-off without. That's not something I would say for most fantasy. Mieville does a great job of invoking the idea of impending doom or imagined greatness just "off-screen" which I think is part of his excellence in horror writing and unusual settings. He seems good at making the reader assume there must be even cooler (or scarier) stuff going on in the background without taking his view off the foreground. So I have this theory for what's going on with Bas-Lag, but I'd bet others have come up with the same thing: Does anyone else remember in the Scar, the Ghosthead Empire is mentioned as being extraterrestrial in origin? The Scar itself is supposed to be the physical evidence of the impact of their arrival, but the aliens seem to have been extradimensional or possessing technology that breaks into other dimension. It seems to me that the "torque" he describes is a force that twists things through other dimensions or alternate realities or something. That would explain the bizarre behavior of the potential sword that is identified as their technology. The current state of Bas-Lag is due to the immense torque event that caused the Scar. All the sorts of weird cactus-people and bug-women and slake moths and whatnot are the descendants of the reproductively viable survivors of what must have been an even more bizarre and horrifying menagerie immediately after the torque event. This would seem to be born out by the New Crobuzon military's alarmed reaction to the first and final torque bomb they used. Has anyone else arrived at this conclusion? I'd be surprised if the answer was no.
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Dec 15, 2009 02:47
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 14:37 |
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