The Scar doesn’t quite match its predecessor, but in falling short, it still flies high.

Sequels almost always leave the gate with a handicap. Following a success with another piece of the same luster can be near to impossible, and even self-defeating. The reasons for the falling-off between installments lie with the specific demands a sequel makes on its writer: The book (or screenplay, or script) needs to deliver the same thrill the original did, but it can’t simply duplicate its source. It needs to strike a fine balance between recapping the story that precedes it and stooping to retell the opening tale. It needs to stand alone as a work without losing the reader (or viewer) who can’t be bothered to hunt down its antecedent.

There are a few ways to accomplish this same-but-different trick successfully. The best sequels, those that surpass the originals, tend to be installments in a larger story arc. The Empire Strikes Back, for instance, or The Godfather: Part II, even the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In each of these, the beginning installments bear the weight of heavy exposition; the sequels succeed, at least in part, because they have been freed of that weight.

There are other ways to get around this, but they tend to have limited success. The one-darn-thing-after-another approach (think the Lemony Snicket books, or almost any detective series) works -- for kids and formula fiction. Science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card has revisited his greatest success, Ender’s Game, by retelling events through the eyes of a different character, a strategy which strays dangerously close to out-and-out repetition.

China Miéville, following last year’s excellent Perdido Street Station, takes yet another path in his latest, The Scar. Perdido Street Station would be a hard act to follow in any fashion. Miéville’s novel built a detailed, minutely imagined city, full of laws and customs and quirks -- a brute act of imagination. While the novel was far from perfect, with occasional slips in style and a by-the-numbers plot (you know, the kind that culminates in a plucky band of multiracial outcasts taking on a harmful governmental conspiracy), these failings were subsumed in the sheer weight of Miéville’s invention. Perdido left great latitude for follow-up, but measured in terms of sheer effort, it’s a hard act to follow.

The Scar meets this challenge sidelong. It takes place in the same environment as Miéville’s earlier book, a blend of William S. Burroughs, Mervyn Peake and William Gibson steampunk. And its storyline picks up soon after Perdido’s ending. But Miéville develops an independent story. Crises, characters and settings differ completely. The result, of course, is another doorstopper of a novel, and one with an only slightly more muted range of incident and invention.

Miéville is a dedicatedly urban novelist, and his cities are his best creations. The Scar follows Bellis Coldwine, an exile from New Crobuzon (Perdido’s city), on her flight to the city’s far-flung colonies. She ends up instead on Armada -- both the main setting for and best element of The Scar -- a floating city cobbled together from endless hulls of ships, joined by gangways and refitted to house a pirate population. While Armada makes for a less fascinating setting than New Crobuzon, Miéville renders its decay intricately -- two parts Weimar Berlin to one part Mos Eisley cantina.

While the setting for The Scar seems slightly less compelling, Miéville’s control and development of this novel’s plot compensates. He explains the internal politics of his city carefully, meshing setting and plot. The novel, while essentially presenting a quest plot, complicates and varies events that could easily be rote formula. And Miéville shows sure command of incident: The novel’s central set-pieces, a pitched sea battle out of C.S. Forester and a sojourn on an island of mosquito-people (don’t ask) move along with tension and clarity.

Miéville’s style underlines The Scar’s effects. There are lines, of course, that are howlers, and like all science fiction, Miéville depends on a good deal of suspension of disbelief. But his eye and his narration work cinematically, drawing lucid pictures of often strange and lurid detail. And the exposition that generally reduces most complex fantasy to static explanatory boredom works organically with character and setting here. This is excellent genre fiction, and a solid sequel; taken in light of its predecessor, it shows a clear growth in writerly technique. The Scar shows Miéville as a master of genre fiction; more importantly, it demonstrates what one writer can do with the sheer force of his imagination.