Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2003, British Fantasy Award 2003. Hugo Award nominee 2003, World Fantasy Award nominee 2003, Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee 2003.
A mythmaker of the highest order, China Miéville has emblazoned the fantasy novel with fresh language, startling images, and stunning originality. Set in the same sprawling world of Miéville’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel, Perdido Street Station, this latest epic introduces a whole new cast of intriguing characters and dazzling creations.
Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage — and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.
For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.
Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada’s agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters — terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission...
China Miéville is a writer for a new era — and The Scar is a luminous, brilliantly imagined novel that is nothing short of spectacular.
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China Miéville
China Tom Miéville (born 1972) is an English fantasy fiction author, comic writer and academic. He is fond of describing his fiction as "weird fiction" (after early 20th-century pulp and horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird.
He is active in left-wing politics as a member of the International Socialist Organization (US) and formerly a member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) until resigning in 2013 over the SWP internal crisis about allegations of rape against 'Comrade Delta'. In 2013 he became a founding member of Left Unity. He stood for Regent's Park and Kensington North for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 UK General election. He published his PhD thesis on Marxism and international law as a book in 2005. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University, and in 2012–13 he was Writer-in-Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois.
