another Scar excerpt

indiachick and I were talking about how great Mieville is at building his world via the power of suggestion, and behold, here is a fantastic example. (It is useful to know here that Bas-Lag is the name of the planet.)

The avanc was a rare visitor to the seas of Bas-Lag. The intricacies of transplanar life were abstruse and uncertain. Neither Tanner Sack nor any of his colleagues knew whether the creature that breached in Bas-Lag was a partial or a total manifestation, a confusion of scale (some protozoon, some plankton from a huge brine dimension), a pseudoorganism spontaneously generated in the vents between worlds. No one knew.

--The Scar

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)