Entertaining the Alien

29. The Scar, China Mieville

Yup, add Mieville to the list of authors I read with grinding envy. Not only does he have this funky sort of vaguely post-modern writing style (he occasionally writes a scene in present tense, finds reasons to switch from third person to first--and it all works), but he throws genres together with reckless abandon and manages to come out of it unscathed and with a fairly coherent world to hang his story on. I dunno, he's like the punk-rocker of the literary speculative fiction crowd.

The Scar is part dystopian fantasy, part piratical high seas adventure, part steampunk travelogue, part horror... I could go on. He sets his story on a floating city called Armada, built on captured ships and boats of various types and in various states of disrepair and decay. The Armadans are made up of several races and two general types: the pirates, and those who've been press-ganged by the pirates and forced to live in Armada. We follow several of the press-ganged as they adjust to their new lives. What they do and how they get along, I'll leave for y'all to go find out for yourselves--it's worth it.

I'm definitely going to go track down Mieville's first book, Perdido Street Station, and I've already got my hands on the third, Iron Council.