Imagine a world that’s run on magic and steam. Fill it with a collection of races so different from each other that they might as well be alien species. Then picture a pirate fleet that takes every ship it captures and adds it to the collection of ships already bolted together into a miles-wide floating island.
What you end up with is a city-on-the-sea, one made entirely of steamboats and tall-ships and blockade-runners and pleasure yachts, all of which have been gutted and turned into libraries and markets and workshops and sports arenas, or just scraped down to the waterline and covered in soil to make farms. And around each corner is a woman with a scarab for a head, or a human with pistons instead of legs, or a cactus-man, or a priestess who used to serve as the figurehead for her ship, or any number of other people who were taken prisoner when their ship was pirated and are now trying to make a life for themselves as a citizen of the floating city.
And that’s only the setting. The story quickly moves on to a quest to find a hidden civilization, in order to recruit the one scientist who can track down and capture an impossible underwater creature big enough to pull the floating city to the literal end of the world: a fissure in the ocean (and the planet, and reality) known only as the Scar.
China Mieville introduced the world of Bas Lag in his book Perdido Street Station (which you really should read), and this book brings back a lot of familiar elements, like Khepri, and Remade, and Cactacae. In The Scar he introduces some new things, like the Scabmettlers: humanoids whose blood instantly hardens into armor, so battle-prep involves ritualized cutting. There’s also the fRemade; the convicts who have been Remade by the criminal justice system (as painfully as possible) into monsters with animal limbs and mechanical parts and anatomy turned inside-out, have been freed by the pirates. Some of them are able to pay for Remaking by rogue mages so that, while they’ll never be quite human again, their grafted-on limbs at least make some sense.
Mieville still loves to drop the reader into a completely alien world, giving a few tidbits of information about the surroundings, and then leaving the rest up to the imagination. What with pirates and “liberated” (captured) sailors and travelers from many different continents, the world of Bas Lag has gotten much larger, so we get tantalizing details about all kinds of different races and governments, and Mieville could write a book about each one.
The story sprawls across several different points of view, showing the history of some of the pirates, the plans for an escape attempt by a few of the characters, and the never-completely-defined goal to find and conquer The Scar itself . There’s just so much going on that you’d think the story would be a mess, but Mieville totally makes it work, dovetailing all the different plots and characters together inside this beautiful, ugly, fantastical setting.
The theme of scars runs through the whole book: the scars that people embrace, and ones that the different characters have to endure. This is an especially dark book, with all kinds of horrible things happening. A small group of people is attacked at one point in a scene that will be in my nightmares for years, and then there’s an event that may or may not have happened (will happen?) that’s an over-the-top horrifying disaster with an element of Lovecraftian creepiness that is so hard to do well, and it gives me a chill every time I re-read it.
So far China Mievelle has only written three books set in the world of Bas Lag, and the most recent was released way back in 2004. It’s also been almost two years since his last novel (Railsea) and I keep hoping he’s just been saving his energy for a return to New Crobuzon. Or Armada. Or some other part of Bas Lag hidden inside all of the information he doesn’t tell you.