Bas-Lag Cycle: Difference between revisions

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* ''[[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.

* ''[[~~The Scar (Literature)|~~The Scar]]''

* ''[[The Scar]]''

** 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 (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]''

* ''[[Iron Council]]''

** Twenty years after the events of [[Perdido Street Station]], renegade railway workers, collectively known as The Iron Council, threaten the iron-fisted government control over the city-state of New Crobuzon. New Crobuzon is currently in a state of war with the rival city, Tesh, and events in New Crobuzon suggest that a large-scale revolt is on the verge of breaking loose.

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* [[Author Appeal]] (Miéville likes monsters, and collects the [[Dungeons and Dragons]] Monster Manuals in spite of no longer playing D&D)

* [[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 (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]''. It only comes up a few times, but it's such an unusual word that it stands out.

* [[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.

** "Concatenate" is a very useful word. Too many people say "add" when they mean "concatenate". There would be must less confusion in the world if people became familiar with it.

** There's also his frequent use of "puissant". His entire brain appears to be an Author Vocabulary Calendar, to the extent that it requires a dictionary -- a large dictionary -- to tell which words are obscure technical terms, which ones are Britishisms, and which ones he made up out of whole cloth. If there aren't a dozen five-dollar words on the page -- you're probably looking at the title page.

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* [[The Bad Guy Wins]]: Bas Lag tends to have a healthy helping of this, since Bas-Lag is a [[Crapsack World]].

** ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'' ends with {{spoiler|the trade union movement crushed, the city's largest subversive newspaper shut down, and the surviving protagonists miserable and fleeing for their lives from both the Orwellian government and a ruthless crime boss}}.

** ''[[~~The Scar (Literature)|~~The Scar]]'' ends with {{spoiler|Armada's corruption exposed, but with no possible way to clean it up. The city was almost destroyed by both a civil ''and'' regular war, and the protagonist is beaten and cowed. The [[The Chessmaster|grand orchestrator]] of all this strife is free and still in a position of power over Armada}}.

** ''[[The Scar]]'' ends with {{spoiler|Armada's corruption exposed, but with no possible way to clean it up. The city was almost destroyed by both a civil ''and'' regular war, and the protagonist is beaten and cowed. The [[The Chessmaster|grand orchestrator]] of all this strife is free and still in a position of power over Armada}}.

** ''[[~~Iron Council (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]'' ends with {{spoiler|a major uprising brutally put down, a violent revolutionary realising that he'd achieved nothing by killing the Mayor, and the largest and most hope-inspiring rebel group in the land being frozen in time}}.

** ''[[Iron Council]]'' ends with {{spoiler|a major uprising brutally put down, a violent revolutionary realising that he'd achieved nothing by killing the Mayor, and the largest and most hope-inspiring rebel group in the land being frozen in time}}.

* [[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.

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* [[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 (Literature)|~~The Scar]]'', is an entire metropolis built atop lashed-together sea vessels of all sizes and designs.

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

* [[Bio Punk]]: The ReMade: bio-thaumaturges can warp flesh, bone and biology to heal, remake a being as something new, or (far, far more often) to punish.

* [[Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism]]:

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** One of the protagonists in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'' is a veteran of New Crobuzon's not-exactly-legal underground arena circuit.

** 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.

* [[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.

* [[Blue and Orange Morality]]:

** 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.

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* [[Capital City]]: New Crobuzon is enormous enough to be considered its own ''state'', and is even at war with another city in ''Iron Council''.

* [[Chainsaw Good|Circular Saw Good]]: Secret police and Cacticae security in [[Perdido Street Station]] carry Rivebows, a large crossbow which shoots spinning chakris (basically circular saw blades). In universe, the main way to defeat Cacticae (humanoid cacti) is through severing limbs.

* [[Chekhov's Gunman]]: One character is described in an anecdote in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', the very first book, before becoming a major player in [[Iron Council ~~(Literature)~~|the last book]].

* [[Chekhov's Gunman]]: One character is described in an anecdote in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', the very first book, before becoming a major player in [[Iron Council|the last book]].

** A character also mentions that the Ambassador from {{spoiler|Tesh}} is a {{spoiler|vagabond}} by custom, and in the last book this is important as the villain and source of impending arcane doom is {{spoiler|Spiral Jacobs, the vagabond}}.

* [[City Noir]]: New Crobuzon.

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* [[Crapsack World]]: Nobody gets a happy ending. Nobody.

* [[Cryptic Background Reference]]: Taken to the level of an art form.

* [[Death World]]: [[Bas-Lag Cycle ~~(Literature)~~|Bas-Lag]] is pretty inhospitable on the whole, but it also contains at least two kinds of its own [[Death World|Death Worlds]]. The first kind have high levels of a cancerous force known as Torque, while the second is a huge wound in the world where eldritch beings crossed over from another plane.

* [[Death World]]: [[Bas-Lag Cycle|Bas-Lag]] is pretty inhospitable on the whole, but it also contains at least two kinds of its own [[Death World|Death Worlds]]. The first kind have high levels of a cancerous force known as Torque, while the second is a huge wound in the world where eldritch beings crossed over from another plane.

** The largest natural Torque-affected area is known as the Cacotopic Stain where getting eaten by giant caterpillar men is the least of your worries. Death itself probably isn't very high up on the list of bad things that can happen to you. Just to make this clear- a large number of people are collectively turned into a giant ''[[Body Horror|amoeba]]'', just by coming near to the Stain.

*** There is also a man-made Torqued area which was once the city of Suroch. During a war the city of New Crobuzon dropped a [[Fantastic Nuke|Torque bomb]] on it, and the result was so horrifying that they proceeded to drop even more of a different kind of [[Fantastic Nuke]] known as colourbombs on the city... in order to ''cover up the damage''. There are things there described as "herds of what might have once been human", and mothers threaten to send unruly children to Suroch, "where the monsters are".

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{{quote| '''Isaac''': "Turn the page, Yag. This next one, no one has the slightest idea of what it used to be. But I think those gears are descended from train engines. The... uh... ''best'' is yet to come. You haven't seen the cockroach-tree, or the herds of what [[Was Once a Man|once may have been human.]]}}

** 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 (Literature)|~~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.)

** 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.

* [[Fantastic Nuke]]:

** ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'' makes mention of Suroch, an area of the world that's been... ''twisted'' after New Crobuzon dropped a "torque-bomb" on it. Torque... twists things. That's what it means in physics, and that's definitely what one would call the results. [[Gory Discretion Shot|The descriptions of Suroch try to avoid saying anything explicit]]. Apparently it was part nuke, part key to the gates of Hell.

** "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 [[HP 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.

** "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 (Literature)|~~Iron Council]] is beyond even colourbombs for sheer alien annihilation. It ''erases cities''. And casts ripples of destruction ''backwards in time''.

** 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''.

* [[Fantastic Racism]]: ''Nobody'' likes vampires. Not even the other undead ([[Insistent Terminology|who would actually be rather upset about you referring to vampires as proper undead]]). About the best they can hope for is pitying tolerance or respectful fear, and it's more likely to be the former.

* [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]]: New Crobuzon is basically London, although the author has stated that other cities were also influences, notably Cairo.

* [[Fantasy Kitchen Sink]]: Wind-polyps, men-of-war, Handlingers, a country "where the laws are stakes in a game of roulette", ships pulled by seawyrms...actually, that last one might be a [[Shout-Out]] to Jack Vance.

* [[Giant Spider]]: The Weaver, which appears in both ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'' and ''[[~~Iron Council (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]''

* [[Giant Spider]]: The Weaver, which appears in both ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'' and ''[[Iron Council]]''

* [[Golem]]: Bas-Lag has a magical discipline called "golemcrafting", wherein magicians channel power into anything that isn't living. Most of the Golems created are fairly standard (blade, flesh, metal, clay, wood), However the main character of Iron Council creates increasingly more fantastic golems some of the more memorable ones being: poison, light, dark, and [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|TIME]].

* [[Good Powers, Bad People]]: There are professional magic users, Thaumaturges, some of whom have impressive healing powers as well as the ability to perform transplants/surgery without risk of harming a patient. Unfortunately, this is a [[Crapsack World]], and many thaumaturges with such powers are vile sadists. Instead of using their powers to heal, they play a role in the legal system, Remaking criminals as punishment for their crimes (i.e. painfully turning them into [[Body Horror|horribly disfigured biological or technological mash-ups]]).

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* [[Icon of Rebellion]]

** Jack Half-a-Prayer from ''[[Perdido Street Station]]''.

** The Perpetual Train in ''[[~~Iron Council (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]''.

** The Perpetual Train in ''[[Iron Council]]''.

*** Benjamin Flex from the same book.

*** Spiral Jacobs, the vagabond, roams around the city of [[Wretched Hive|New Crobuzon]] and spends his days vandalizing the city with drawings of spirals. This occurs during a time of political unrest, and the masses of New Crobuzon adopt it as a symbol of the rebellion, wearing it on their clothing and making the marks themselves. Subverted in that {{spoiler|Jacobs is actually the ambassador of an enemy city and the spirals are part of an extremely powerful and intricate magic that would completely destroy the New Crobuzon, sending ripples of destruction backwards through time.}}

* [[La Résistance]]: There's one in every book, it seems. The Rungate Rampant in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', The Brucolac and his cadre in ''[[~~The Scar (Literature)|~~The Scar]]'', and although The Rungate Rampant still exists in ''[[~~Iron Council (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]'', the actual Iron Council fits the role better.

* [[La Résistance]]: There's one in every book, it seems. The Rungate Rampant in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', The Brucolac and his cadre in ''[[The Scar]]'', and although The Rungate Rampant still exists in ''[[Iron Council]]'', the actual Iron Council fits the role better.

* [[Laser-Guided Karma]]: Deconstructed by the Remade. For example, a woman who smothers her baby has her baby's arms attached to her face so that she'll never forget what she did.

* [[Machine Worship]]: The Construct Council in [[China Mieville]]'s ''[[Perdido Street Station]]''. A massive AI in a scrapyard with worshipers. However it still has to communicate through a dead body hooked up to it. {{spoiler|As they leave Isaac notes that for the spokesperson to work, they must have ''been alive'' when they were hooked up.}} Also in the gap between this and the sequels ''[[~~The Scar (Literature)|~~The Scar]]'' and ''[[~~Iron Council (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]'', there is a [[Robot War|purging of all constructs]] from the city for fear of what they could become.

* [[Machine Worship]]: The Construct Council in [[China Mieville]]'s ''[[Perdido Street Station]]''. A massive AI in a scrapyard with worshipers. However it still has to communicate through a dead body hooked up to it. {{spoiler|As they leave Isaac notes that for the spokesperson to work, they must have ''been alive'' when they were hooked up.}} Also in the gap between this and the sequels ''[[The Scar]]'' and ''[[Iron Council]]'', there is a [[Robot War|purging of all constructs]] from the city for fear of what they could become.

* [[The Magocracy]]: There are passing references to a nation called "The Witchocracy" in ''[[~~Iron Council (Literature)|~~Iron Council]]'', but it's not explored in great detail.

* [[The Magocracy]]: There are passing references to a nation called "The Witchocracy" in ''[[Iron Council]]'', but it's not explored in great detail.

* [[Mermaid Problem]]: Neatly tied up when it comes to the Khepri. Weird bug head, sexy lady body. [[Fetish Fuel|For some reason]].

* [[The Necrocracy]]: High Cromlech

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* [[Post-Modern Magik]] - too many examples to list.

* [[Pyrrhic Victory]]: Frequently throughout the novels. {{spoiler|In fact, its the ending to every single novel. While the stories frequently have [[Downer Ending|demoralizing endings]], there is usually some spot of success.}}

** In ''Perdido Street Station'': {{spoiler|Isaac has saved New Crobuzon, defeated the Slake Moths, proved his crisis engine will work (and more importantly, kept it out of the hands of the [[Corrupt Government]] & the [[Mecha Mooks]]), and hardest of all, ''survived''. On the other hand, Lin is lobotomized, Yagharek is revealed as a rapist, Isaac refuses to help Yagharek, and the Constructs are headed for destruction. Not to mention Isaac and Derkhan have to flee New Crobuzon with the lobotomized Lin in tow, as the government is understandably not interested in giving them credit for having saved the city and has left them at the top of the Most Wanted list.}}

** In ''Perdido Street Station'': {{spoiler|Isaac has saved New Crobuzon, defeated the Slake Moths, proved his crisis engine will work (and more importantly, kept it out of the hands of the [[Corrupt Government]] & the [[Mecha-Mooks]]), and hardest of all, ''survived''. On the other hand, Lin is lobotomized, Yagharek is revealed as a rapist, Isaac refuses to help Yagharek, and the Constructs are headed for destruction. Not to mention Isaac and Derkhan have to flee New Crobuzon with the lobotomized Lin in tow, as the government is understandably not interested in giving them credit for having saved the city and has left them at the top of the Most Wanted list.}}

** 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.

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* [[Word Salad]]: The Weaver.

* [[Wretched Hive]]: New Crobuzon blows almost everything else out of water in terms of sheer ugliness. It's ruled by vicious capitalists who ignore crime against ordinary citizens, but send death squads to deal with dissenters, essentially ensuring that the city stays a brutal lawless mess forever. Criminals, even ones guilty of small-time theft, are punished by mutilating their bodies in horrible and ironic (in reference to the crime) ways.

* [[Zeppelins ~~From~~ Another World]]

* [[Zeppelins from Another World]]