Future Shock

Any choice of artistic method involves trade-offs. China Mieville is a fantasist. In his novel “Perdido Street Station,” and now in its sequel, “The Scar,” he has imagined the city-state of New Crobuzon, a not-quite Victorian London set in the world of Bas-Lag, a not-quite Earth in which 19th century science coexists with sophisticated magic, in which humans jostle not with other races but with other intelligent species: eel-people, mosquito-people, cactus-people, vampires.

The protagonist of “The Scar” is a woman, Bellis Coldwine, who has fled New Crobuzon for political reasons. She books passage on a ship for a colony as distant as Australia is from England. The colony, like Australia, is being settled by convicts, some of whom are packed in the ship’s hold. Many of the convicts have been “Remade” in government factories: for greater utility, as with a woman named Angevine, who was grafted onto a steam engine; or just for spite, as with a man, Tanner Sack, who had octopus-like tentacles surgically attached to his chest.

Bas-Lag has more water than Earth, less land. Its periphery is unmapped and full of monsters. Its ocean floor has sinkholes of unplumbed depth. New Crobuzon is a mercantile and naval power, but it is hardly comparable to the British Empire. Bellis’ ship has just left home waters when it is stormed by pirates, who take the survivors to the floating outlaw city of Armada. The convicts, granted freedom and equality, quickly transfer their loyalties. For Bellis, it’s not so simple.

New Crobuzon has persecuted her, but it’s still her home. Her desire to communicate with that city, if not to return, grows more acute when Silas Fennec, a shape-shifter and spy, confides details of a plot by Arctic eel-people, the grindylow, to invade New Crobuzon. The only chance to warn the city seems to be for Bellis, a linguist, to be part of an Armadan expedition to the island of the mosquito-people, where trading ships sometimes stop.

But this means that Bellis will have to aid her captors. Their aim is to contact a scholar among the mosquito-people who can help them raise an avanc--a mile-long beast from an ocean sinkhole--and harness it with giant chains to pull Armada. No longer dependent on currents, winds and its own feeble tugboats, Armada will be able to strike where it wishes and escape retribution.

Surely Mieville is right to fantasize; he has a gift for it and a polished style. Armada, a mile-square metropolis cobbled together over the centuries from captured ships, constantly rotting, constantly renewed, its districts ruled by everything from a bumbling democracy to a vampire, Brucolac, who imposes a “goretax,” is stunningly detailed.

And the story of “The Scar” is quite a yarn, full of naval battles, tempests, dirigible flights and feats of sorcery. It’s seen mostly through Bellis, but also through Tanner, who undergoes more surgery on Armada to become an amphibian; Shekel, a cabin boy who becomes Angevine’s lover and is taught by Bellis to read; the mysterious Silas and fearsome undersea “hunters” whose identity is revealed only at the end.

Besides entertaining us with the new and the exotic, fantasies such as “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings” can offer moral visions clearer than reality allows. They do so, in part, by obliging us to view familiar things afresh. The suffering of Mieville’s convicts, for example, may be no worse than the Australian penal regime described by Robert Hughes in “The Fatal Shore,” but because the surgery forced on Tanner and Angevine is a new kind of atrocity, it recaptures our attention.

Still, the trade-offs are inevitable. Imagining the world anew, as Mieville does, requires copious description, and fantasy novels tend to be long. Characterization is scant, even in the case of Mieville, who is interested in his characters and tries to make of the austere, often unfriendly Bellis an admirable truth-seeker. Our sense of character is grounded in our own experience, in the real world; the more a fantasy diverges from that, the simpler its characters have to be.

Mieville’s characters are more complex than, say, George Lucas’ because “The Scar,” sacrificing the mythic power of purer fantasy, diverges less than it seems to. It’s really a World War II or Cold War thriller in disguise. We feel we know Bellis and Tanner, little people manipulated by Armada’s and New Crobuzon’s sinister leaders, peeling back layers of political intrigue and betrayal. They are secondary to the action, as thriller characters always are, but rooted in a familiar and credible world.