Bas-Lag Cycle: Difference between revisions

 

* ''[[Perdido Street Station]]''

** A scientist named Isaac van der Grimnebulin is commissioned by the wingless Garuda, Yagharek, to find a way to enable him to fly again. In Isaac's search for an solution, he unwittingly releases a monster in the city of New Crobuzon.

** A former girlfriend of Isaac, Bellis Coldwine, flees Bas-Lag by ship shortly after the events of Perdido Street station. Not long after departure, Bellis' ship is captured by the forces of the pirate nation known as Armada. Most of the novel deals with events surrounding Armada's journey to an unstable and dangerous region of the seas known as ''The Scar''.

* ''[[Iron Council]]''

 

* [[Abnormal Ammo]]: The cactus-people (known as the cactacae) can be punctured by bullets, crossbow bolts, arrows and the like, but their complete lack of internal organs makes such weapons next-to-useless. They're also enormous, extremely strong, and covered with spines, which makes close-range weapons like blades or clubs viable, but an extremely risky and inadvisable option for most people. A sort of crossbow called a ''rivebow'' was invented to get around this problem. It fires huge whirling chakris that can sever the heads and limbs of humans and cactacae alike, but the rivebow itself is [[Awesome but Impractical|so heavy and unwieldy that usually only other cactacae carry them]].

* [[Alternative Calendar]]: The people in Bas-Lag use rather bold-faced names for the days, such as Skullday, Chainday, and Fishday.

** And this is only for the city of New Crobuzon alone. In the floating city Armada, they have completely different names for months and days of the week .

* [[Author Tract]]: ''Iron Council'' is said to be particularly [[Anvilicious|demonstrative]] of [[China Mieville|Miéville's]] socialist politics.

* [[Author Vocabulary Calendar]]: [[China Mieville]] uses the word "concatenate" and its derivatives too often in ''[[Iron Council]]''. It only comes up a few times, but it's such an unusual word that it stands out.

* [[Bee People]]: The khepri and the anophelii.

** Khepri are a [[One-Gender Race]] of red-skinned women with giant scarabs for heads. While males do exist, they are literally just large non-sapient scarab beetles that exist mainly to procreate.

* [[Biological Mashup]]: The Remade, sentenced by the New Crobuzon courts to have parts of animals, machines, or occasionally human cadavers magically incorporated into their bodies as a punishment. Occasionally someone has similar modifications done voluntarily, to acquire useful features such as functional gills.

** [[Perdido Street Station|Mr. Motley]] is an even more extreme [[Biological Mashup]], incorporating so many mismatched limbs, eyes, mouths, and miscellaneous appendages into the same freakish body that, when Lin is hired to sculpt a statue of him, she can scarcely imagine how anyone could possibly begin such a task.

* [[Bizarrchitecture]]: Armada, from ''[[The Scar]]'', is an entire metropolis built atop lashed-together sea vessels of all sizes and designs.

** The Khepri are an insect-like race with small non-sentient males and females that resemble red-skinned human women with a similar type of insect ''forming their heads''.

** There is also a race of mosquito people, the Anophelii, whose women are vampiric winged creatures that have fang-like protuberances that extend from their mouths to penetrate their victims. The extremely passive males have mouths that are described as being like anuses. [[Truth in Television|Which is actually the gist of how mosquitoes work]].

** A very literal example with the ritual fights of the scabmettlers. They drink a special herbal concoction, dip knives into the liquid and begin to cut themselves in intricate patterns. The unique physiology of scabmettlers makes the blood congeal quickly (but not immediately, as it would without the herbs) into a form of elaborate armour to enhance each individual scabmettler's style of fighting.

* [[Bloody Murder]]: The scabmettlers of are a race whose blood clots extremely quickly. Before going into battle, they cut themselves in certain ritualistic pattern, and the results blood flows harden into armor and weapons. [[Blessed with Suck]] to some extent, since they need to medicate themselves constantly or risk spontaneous clots that will turn them into statues.

** The Weavers don't have a sense of morality as we would understand it, but rather a sense of beauty. That which is aesthetically pleasing or poetically appropriate is [[Beauty Equals Goodness|"good"]] whereas that which is [[Evil Makes You Ugly|ugly]] or discordant is "bad". It doesn't help that their aesthetic sense is very different from that of humans--they seem to see the universe as a tangle of lines connecting plot points, with every object in the universe as a thread in some huge tapestry. So they adjust the threads to make it look neater, and in doing so remove the left ear of everyone within a hundred yards.

** The Garuda would also count to an extent. Their society values personal freedom and individuality above all else and has only one law: You must respect others' right to choose. Those who break this law are all guilty of choice-theft. While most human crime can be seen as theft of a choice (the choice of owning an item, the choice of continuing to live unharmed, etc), the converse does not hold, meaning that people who would be considered highly dangerous criminals in human society are be put on an equal footing with people who wouldn't be seen as criminals at all to humans. And some human crimes don't fit at all: to the Garuda, selling drugs would probably be legal and moral, while preventing the selling of drugs would be heinous.

** The Cacotopic Stain, however, is not the worst place on Bas Lag. The worst place is fractured lands, which has giant, nigh invincible, soul sucking moths halfway down the food chain. Flora and fauna there spent generations in the presence of a kind of probability magic, which caused them to evolve into highly bizarre, improbable and ''terrifying'' forms. Oh yeah, and there's a hole in the sea that [[Cosmic Horror|monstrous beings from another universe]] came out of. On the up side, though, traveling through the fractured lands doesn't mutate you as horribly as Torque.

* [[Dungeon Punk]]: Magic, referred to as "thaumaturgy", is commonplace and used by practically every skilled profession.

** ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'' has the slake-moths - monstrous, insectoid creatures that devour minds. Not literally, what the creatures feed on is the very sentience of their prey itself, leaving their victims utterly mindless shells. How terrible are these abominations? At one point, the government of New Crobuzon attempts to strike a deal with Hell to get them to intervene and stop the threat, and ''[[Food Chain of Evil|the demons are too frightened to get involved.]]''

** The Weaver, who the New Crobuzon government turns to when the demons turn them down. It's a gigantic spider that exists ''between'' dimensions and is capable of traversing them as easily as we could walk down the street. It is also ''batshit crazy'', speaking in the "flight of ideas" style most often seen in unmedicated schizophrenics and capable of doing anything to anyone, friend or foe, merely because it seems "fitting". During the brief time that the heroes are in its presence, the Weaver cuts off the ear of everyone in the room for reasons known only to itself. It also repaired the ears of some of the people, again, for reasons unknown. The Weaver encountered in the book has an obsession with scissors, and happily accepts them as gifts, if the term 'happy' can be applied to it. Apparently it enjoys collecting things in general, as it is mentioned that before its obsession with scissors, it collected chess sets.

** And then there is the ''Torque'', described by one character as a tumour that aborted itself from the womb that produced the forces of Birth and Death. Whilst not evil per-se, it is a natural force that is almost totally uncontrollable which warps and mutates matter and biology into horrifying things. Merely trying to research it can turn you into an Eldritch Abomination. It was once used as a weapon; the results of the Torque Bomb were so awful even after a generous application of [[Magitek]] versions of nuclear weapons there's a country-sized region of the world which isn't going to be inhabitable by anything but abominations ever again.

*** To elaborate on the 'horrendous mutations' part, at one point Isaac Dan Der Grimnebulin pulls out a book of photos taken at ground zero of the inhabitants (Though it may have been implied that there could be survivors) to show to a client.

** Oh, and in the middle of a city there are The Ribs, the partially exposed skeleton of some enormous creature that has been dead for a very, very long time. Attempts to build over it resulted in seemingly structurally sound houses that just fell apart and tools that break long before they should, and attempts to excavate the whole skeleton tended to result in the workers suffering horrifying nightmares, or disappearing suspiciously. It was decided that whatever it is is best left buried and uninvestigated. Notable in that even the ''slake-moths'' felt that being around The Ribs was unsettling.

** Then in ''[[The Scar]]'', the second book in the series, there's the [[Giant Swimmer|avanc]], an entity from another universe big enough to tow the floating city, Armada<ref> Armada is only a couple square miles on the surface, but has layers and layers of decks and bridges</ref>. A single vein is as large as a 20-foot ridge. Imagine how big that must be! Better yet, imagine just how big the stuff that preys on the avanc in its home dimension could be! All that anyone knows about the avanc is that it swims and has at least one thing that could be described as a limb. (Assuming the mind-bending hypothesis about how it's really some sort of microscopic plankton at home, and it becomes unimaginably huge due to transplanar warp when it enters Bas-Lag, is false.)

* [[Face Full of Alien Wingwong]]: How the khepri reproduce...

* [[Faceless Goons]]: The Militia, who vaciliate between [[Elite Mooks|Elite]] and Regular [[Mooks]], depending on the needs of the scene.

** "Colourbombs" in the same setting are implied to be less ''wrong'' but even more destructive; Mieville's influences being what they are, this latter might bear some relation to [[H.P. Lovecraft|"The Colour out of Space"]]. Colourbombs were used to cover up whatever the Torque did to Suroch. Basically, it was better to blanket nuke the area than try to explain the effects of torque to the populace of New Crobuzon.

** The city-killer (aka Hecatomb) in [[Iron Council]] is beyond even colourbombs for sheer alien annihilation. It ''erases cities''. And casts ripples of destruction ''backwards in time''.

** The Anophelii are somewhat similar in this regard, but more time is given to the females - who are after all monsters.

** The female Anophelii are not purely monstrous, but due to the shape of their mouths they are unable to talk with the male Anophelii, leaving them as beasts with severely limited intelligence. Once fed, they are able to respond enthusiastically and positively to sentient creatures. Of course, they did spread over and rule most of the world during a dark time referred to as the Malarial Queendom, so they had their bad moments too, to say the least...

** The Cray are essentially lobster-bodied centaurs (lobtaurs?). They speak a language of clicks.

** The [[Fish People|Grindylow]] are much less friendly mermen shaped like anglerfish with [[More Teeth Than the Osmond Family]] and a brand of thaumaturgy (magic) that is completely alien to most humans.

* [[Our Vampires Are Different]]: The ab-dead. And to a certain extend, the anophelii.

** The ab-dead live in secrecy throughout Bas-Lag except in Armada and High Cromlech. In Armada, the Brucolac and a cadre of his closest allies are the resident ab-dead and run the Dry Falls riding. Dry Falls is an area and political standing within the governing structure of Armada; residents of Dry Falls enjoy more political weight, subsidized entertainment and lighter disciplinary actions than other ridings, but pay for this with the gore-tax, a routine collection of blood from Dry Falls residents. In High Cromlech, the city of the dead, the ab-dead live in the open, but make up the lowest class, even below that of the living. The dead of High Cromlech protect the living from the predations of the ab-dead, and therefore, ab-dead are reduced to begging for handouts from the living and are considered to be junkies.

* [[Your Vampires Suck|Our Vampires Suck]]: Vampires are described as having a reputation as "junkies" among the other undead, and are considered to be the lowest of the low in High Cromlech, the city of the dead.

** In ''The Scar'': Bellis fails in almost every endeavor she sets out to accomplish, which includes {{spoiler|preventing the avanc from being summoned, saving New Crobuzon from an attack (which actually [[Unwitting Pawn|didn't exist]]), and preventing a civil war from breaking out between the citizens of Armada.}} She does manage to {{spoiler|get back to New Crobuzon}} by the end, and she has shuffled off a lot of her unconscious, self-interested naivety in the process. As a plus, she's pretty much the only character who interacts with the [[More Teeth Than the Osmond Family|Grindylow]] and doesn't end up brutally murdered. This is the happiest ending of the three novels.

** In ''Iron Council'': It all goes to hell. Counting all the horrible betrayals, [[Senseless Sacrifice|Senseless Sacrifices]], and [[Face Heel Turn|Face Heel Turns]] in the novel would take up more room than a spoiler tag could conceivably hold. Suffice it to say that by the end of the novel, {{spoiler|the Iron Council does not ''technically'' die in their [[Bolivian Army Ending]]...but they don't win either}}. Some readers felt that Mieville intentionally destroyed as much as possible to bring closure to the setting.

* [[Secret Police]]: The Militia of New Crobuzon.

* [[Starfish Language]]: The Dead communicate with coughs, grunts and silence, khepri use sprayed pheremones to talk, handlingers have strange slithering psychic orgies and constructs speak to each other with math. The construct council actually needs an avatar to communicate properly with the protagonists.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fantasy Literature]]

[[Category:New Weird]]

[[Category:Literature]]