I first encountered China Miéville via his stunning third novel, The Scar.
What I find amazing about this interview with Miéville about his latest novel, Kraken, in The Onion’s AV Club is that The Scar isn’t mentioned at all. Yet so many of the commenters echo my amazement with The Scar.
Words like “stunning” are cheap and too easy to toss out. But even then, around 2002 when the novel was published, I was in my late thirties and had tons and tons of books under my belt (as a reader), and you’d think I’d be sufficiently world-weary.
But I hadn’t been there, done that–to use a phrase popular around the turn of the millennium–enough to be fully prepared for Miéville’s dark, twisted, baroque worlds of Bas-Lag and New Crobuzon in The Scar and Perdido Street Station.
