Bas-Lag Cycle: Difference between revisions

* [[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.

** Miéville uses tons of very obscure words to describe landscapes. If you've taken a few geology classes, you'll know most of these (and that they're [[You Keep Using That Word|not always correct]]), but you've never seen as many instances of words like "graben" or "arete". Most notable in ''Iron Council''.

** There are more instances of "inveigled" (often not particularly correct uses) in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'' than you a person is likely to see in the rest of his or her life.

* [[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 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.

*** More alien are the feelings of one Garuda as she talks about being raped... she seems to bear no more ill-will to the rapist, so long as his punishment continues, and becomes quite irritated when a human considers her a victim worthy of pity; she refuses to be anthropomorphised.

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

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

** 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".

{{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.

* [[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.

** It is ruled by different castes of the dead, the highest being the thanati. They're described as liches with their mouths sewn shut.

** Because it is hard to produce coherent sounds with vocal chords and tracheas that are decayed or degraded, residents of High Cromlech speak a language known as Deadish or Quiesy. [[Starfish Language|It is a series of timed coughs and grunts with silences meaning as much as the sounds]].

* [[Oh My Gods]]: Human residents from New Crobuzon mostly all swear to the same deity, Jabber, using the stock phrases like "By Jabber..." and occasionally mixing in the lowercase "god" for flavor.

* [[One-Gender Race]] (The Khepri, effectively - who subvert the standard female-only race rules by being [[Bee People]] (well, beetle people) and not at all pretty)

** 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.

* [[Plant People]]: The cactacae.

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

* [[Reality Is Out to Lunch]]: The Cacotopic Stain, an area of desert (well, it's desert ''now'') which is completely consumed by a Torque storm, and Suroch where New Crobuzon dropped a "torque bomb" in a past war. The way they're described, they're part nuclear wasteland, part half-opened door to the abyss.

* [[Schizo-Tech]]: The novels are set in a world that is roughly late-Victorian in technological terms with steam power being the driving force of industry and neon lights and phonographs being recent inventions (though firearm technology is still largely stuck at the "flintlock" phase), but also has robots and a long-defunct weather control machine. Justified in-universe, in that it's implied that the world was more advanced centuries ago, and in fact many "new" inventions are merely rediscovered.

[[Category:New Weird]]

[[Category:Literature]]

[[Category:Literature of the 2000s]]