Bas-Lag series

## Genre Information

Urban Fantasy
Asian Myth & Legend

Steampunk

 (Series Content Ratings Click on Explicit Ratings for details.)

## About the Series

* **Genres:** Urban Fantasy, Asian Myth & Legend, Steampunk
	+ influenced by the themes and tropes of multiple genres of **science fiction**, **fantasy**, and **horror** and **steampunk**
* **Theme:**
* **Narrative style**:

## Series Description

New Crobuzon is a fictional city-state created by China Miéville and located in his fictional world of Bas-Lag. It is prominently featured in both Perdido Street Station and Iron Council, and serves as a plot device and background for The Scar.

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory. Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger. While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger -- and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon -- and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes. (WorldCat)

## Books in Series

1. Perdido Street Station (Bas-Lag Book 1) (2000)
2. The Scar (Bas-Lag Book 2) (2002)
3. Iron Council (Bas-Lag Book 3) (2004)

### Shorts, Anthologies, etc.

* "Jack" (2005) in *Looking for Jack* short story collection (see Bas-Lag Wiki)

## World Building

### Fantasy Elements

Re-mades, arcane races, Xenians, zombies, vampire, pirate wars, magicians, Re-mades, arcane races, half-bird, half-human creature, lab specimens, thaumaturgy, steampunk technology, xenian species, fantastic instances of science,

### World

Bas-Lag
is a world where both magic (referred to as "thaumaturgy") and steampunk technology exist, and is home to many intelligent races. Bas-Lag possesses a number of continents. Two landmasses, Rohagi and Bered Kai Nev, are named in the three novels, though numerous other landmasses and unique structures play important roles in the novels. ~ More: Bas-Lag - Wikipedia
New Crobuzon
is a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia.
Crobuzon
is a city-state in a strange world inhabited not only by humans but also by a wide variety of "xenians"—humanoid beings that are part insect, part bird, part cactus, etc. Humans are the dominant species, although the other species live, work and even, to varying degrees, interact socially and commercially with humans and with each other. New Crobuzon includes many ghettos where xenian species live. The origins of these species are never discussed—this is simply the way of the world. Actually, much about the background is left mysterious.
Technology
on Bas-Lag is wide and varied and evolves over the course of the books. In Perdido Street Station the primary piece of weaponry is the flintlock musket; by the time of Iron Council militia are armed with what appears to be percussion cap weaponry in the form of motorguns and pepperpot revolvers. On pg. 229 of Perdido Street Station Isaac states: "That's where they dropped the colourbomb in 1545. That's what they said put an end to the Pirate Wars, but to be honest with you, Yag, they'd been over for a year before that [...]". Interestingly, in Iron Council, the science behind colourbombs is referred to as a "lost science."
Another power source is The Torque, mentioned on pg. 225, a mysterious energy plaguing the Cacotopic Stain that might be compared to radiation. Torque leads to strange mutations, altering both living creatures and the inanimate environment: for example, during Iron Council, a railway carriage and its three occupants are transmogrified by the Torque into a blob of semi-solid matter containing three nuclei. Another implication of dropping the colourbomb is that it was done to hide the extent of the torque weapon's devastation of city of Suroch, which later revealed to be the unnamed opponent in the Pirate Wars.
In all three novels there are also several mentions of clockwork gems, metaclockwork, sentient robot-like constructs operating with difference engines, and many other inexplicable or fantastic instances of science, magic and combination of both.
In Iron Council, Miéville dedicates a lot of attention to the magic art of golemancy, explaining the logic behind the art and its difference to the calling and control of elementals.
### Protagonist

Isaac
a brilliant scientist, is asked by a bird-man Garuda to restore his power of flight.
## Book Descriptions

1. Perdido Street Station (2000)
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies.
Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released.
The city is gripped by an alien terror. The fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades. A reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of brick and wood and steel under the vaults of Perdido Street Station.
**It is too late to escape**.
2.The Scar (2002)
Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage—and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.
For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.
Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada’s agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters—terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission. . . .
3. Iron Council (2004)
It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.
In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.
In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . .
## References

1. ↑ Goodreads | New Crobuzon series
2. ↑ Bibliography: Perdido Street Station ~ ISFdb
3. ↑ Goodreads
4. ↑ Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
5. ↑ Bas-Lag Technology- Wikipedia