"FReemade. A little tribe. Escapes from a man, without arms, with useless ornamental beetle wings. There is a man with rubberised pincers, a man who wears a crocdile's snout, a hugh cur with the head of a pretty woman. The dog's is a male body. By the skins they wear the jewellery of holed stones on sinews, by the complexities like wood and tea."
Iron Council, China Mieville
Updated on 7.25.24 @ 1:25 PM: Corrected two spelling errors.
"There had been deaths or course, to the foothold lost, to viruses and bacteria of the hinterland, and to the depredations of the inland preditors, animals that unfold in claws, teeth, cirri, and killed. Drogon went hunting with the Council's forces and came back with heads of strange predators, with new wounds and stories...
...The Iron Council papsed over foorprints, the stiletto holds of an echinoerd rex, the strange track of an inchman, pounded earth in clumps of four or five yards apart."
Iron Council, China Mieville
The Cacotopos also included mountains with new shapes, with snow on their tops a color snow, a color that should not be, but instead something alive and tenebrous."
Iron Council, China Mieville
1"An imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be."
"Rockmilk.-Lactus saxi. Viscous and heavy as magna, but bone cold. And dense with thaumaturgons, the charged particles. Worth several times its considerable weight in gold, or diamonds, or oil or blood.
'Ships don’t use fucking rockmilk to fire their engines,” Silas said. 'Whatever they are stockpiling for, its not just to keep their vessels trim.'”
The Scar, China Mieville
Slowley, I am aquiring structures and motive power for the future Tarmuth Layout. The storage tank teeters on clasping with its one side almost rusted out and the storage tank is grimy and full of rust from many years of nelglect.
The tank itself is built from styrene sheet and the details are either frabricated from bits of styrene or from my scrtach box. I don't know which part of construction I like best, the fabercation or the greebling after construction.
Short article by Peter Briggs on the art of greebling
Satisfaction Scale: 4 out 5.
Back in November of last year I made a post consiting of a quote from The Scar by China Mieville. The quote described the port of Tarmuth. "The town is full of industrial yards and sidings." There really wasn't al that much of a decription of the town .so I have been trying to envision the town.
Recently I watched Gatsby by Werner Brothers and caught a scene in the movie that made me think about Tarmuth. Its hustle and bustle. Its industry and bleak environment. Its rawness, its dirt, and grime. You just need to believe that the shipyards and building slipways are there somewhere.
Gatsby, Werner Brothers, 2013.
“The economy or Tarmuth is more than prostitution and piracy. The town is full of industrial yards and sidings. It lives as it has for centuries, on building of ships. The shoreline is punctuated with scores of shipyards, building slipways like weird forests of vertical girders. In some loom ghostly half-completed vessels. The work is ceaseless, load, and filthy.
The streets are crisscrossed with little private railways that take lumber or fuel or whatever from one side of Tarmuth to the other. Each different company has built its own line to link its various concerns and are jealously guarded. The town is an idiotic tangle of railways, all replicating each other’s journey.”
The Scar, China Mieville
This is not an exhaustive list of the Oceans and Seas of Bas Lag, but only a first on the geography of the BasLag "the straights, sounds,channels, bays and the bights":
Rime
Boxash
Vassilly
Tarribor
Teuchor
Muted
Swollen
Gentlemens Sea
Spiral Sea
Clock
Hidden...
The Scar, China Mieville
I started this category, labeled Special Books back in 2015. This is where I can record lists of books that are mentioned within the story. Most are fictitious in nature, but I still find them intriguing.
I found these titles listed within China Miéville’s , The Scar which the second in his Bas-Lag/ New Crobuzon series. The second volume is has thick as his previous volume (638 pages) in a large format. I would say that you would have close to 1200 pages if it had been published in regular sized book.
This is heady stuff:
Against Bendamburg: A Radical Theory of Waters
Maritime Ecologies
The Biophysics of Brine
Predation in Iron Bay Rock pools
Sardula Anatomy
Essays on Beasts
Theories of Megafauna
Trans-plane Life as a Problem for the Naturalists
Caudexes of the Wormseye Scrub
High Kettai Grammatology
...I was once a creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and vectors from the past. I can smell and see the passage of predators and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.
I am like a diver who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the glass bottom of a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can trace their passage and feel the tug of the tides, even though distorted and distinct, veiled and half hidden….
The air, stills with summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these intruders, I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity rises. My hunting instincts stir.
But I am earthbound.
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
“...I emerge into streets that wind like dark rivers through cavernous brick rock faces. The moon and her little shining daughters glimmer wanly. Cold winds ooze like molasses down from the foothills and mountains and clog the night-city with drifting rubbish. I share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors...”
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
"The great creature stood more than six feet tall, on cruel clawed feet that poked out from under a dirty cloak. The ragged cloth dangled down almost to the ground, draped loosely over every inch of flesh, obscuring details of physiognomy and musculature, all but the garuda’s head. And the great inscrutable bird face gazed down at Isaac with what looked like imperiosity. Its sharply curved beak was something between a kestrel and an owl. Sleek feathers faded subtly from ochure to dun to dappled brown. Deep black eyes stared at his own, the irises only a fine mottling at the very edge of dark. Those eyes were set in orbits which gave the garuda face a permanent sneer, a proud furrow."
page 30, Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
