The Scar
BSFA and Locus winner, widely held the best Bas-Lag book: proof the New Weird could do swashbuckling sweep without surrendering an ounce of strangeness.
Book Entry · Fantasy
Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville · 2000 · Bas-Lag, book 1
What is Perdido Street Station about?
New Crobuzon: a city-state of smokestacks and militia spies under the ribs of some colossal dead thing, where khepri artists sculpt with body-secretions, the Remade serve sentences written into their flesh, and the scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin takes two commissions he should have refused — restoring flight to a de-winged garuda, and feeding an unidentified caterpillar. The latter hatches into the slake-moths: predators that drink sentience and leave bodies breathing, against which the city's options narrow to a bargain with the Weaver (a spider-god aesthete who speaks in stream-of-consciousness) and Hell's ambassador, who declines. Renting, swarming, magnificent — the city itself is the masterpiece.
Why it matters
Arthur C. Clarke Award winner and the manifesto-novel of the New Weird: the book that broke the post-Tolkien template's monopoly and made the city-grotesque mode central to twenty-first-century fantasy.
Where does it sit in the series?
Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council: Miéville's New Weird world of New Crobuzon, the floating city of Armada and revolution on rails.
In the Guide from Bas-Lag:
- Perdido Street Station (2000)
- The Scar (2002)
Read next
Our Lady of Darkness
World Fantasy Award winner (1978) and the capstone of Leiber's invention of urban supernatural horror, begun with 'Smoke Ghost' in 1941.
Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.