What price would you pay for emancipation? The Scar, by China Mieville

 Several weeks ago, I wrote a series of posts on Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville.  The novel was set on the world of Bas-Lag, which combines magic, steampunk technology, and various "xenian" species, who mix human and animal physiologies (like the khepri, who have human bodies and insect heads).  Amazing book, filled with fascinating political and social ideas, along with a rich tapestry of a world.  There are two sequels, set in the same world.  Book 2 is The Scar.  A very interesting novel, although unsurprisingly, it cannot quite live up to the grandeur of Perdido Street Station.  Nevertheless, it is worth reading, and it raises some interesting questions that are strangely more timely in 2022 as we spend more time discussing the legacy of slavery than when the novel was published in 2002.  (Sorry, I'm behind on this one.)

Spoilers abound, both for Perdido Street Station, and The Scar.  The events of Perdido Street Station centered on the city of New Crobuzon.  A dangerous, predatory species of, um... psychic vampire moths escape into the city.  They're cooler than that sounds.  The novel is about how that happens, and how they are defeated.  Sort of.  It is far more complex, but that's the short version, because I already covered Perdido Street Station in two posts, and I'm trying to get to The Scar.  Anyway, the protagonist in Perdido Street Station is a mad scientist, Isaac Grimnebulin.  He skips town at the end of the book to avoid the cops, who then start tracking down all of his friends and acquaintances, which leads to The Scar.

One of Isaac's ex-girlfriends is Bellis Coldwine, who is our POV character in The Scar.  As the cops start closing in on her because of her former association with Isaac, she skips town.  She gets on a boat for a distant colony, and that's where we meet her.  She has sold her services as a translator for passage on a ship.  (Linguistics professor instead of mad science professor.)

The problem is that there is another passenger on that ship:  Johannes Tearfly, who is a biologist on his way to a research expedition.  His presence on the ship is noted, the ship is tracked, and pirates attack for the purpose of... recruiting him.  The pirates are part of Armada, which is a floating city of ships lashed together into a... pirate city.  They want Tearfly to help raise a beastie from the extra-dimensional deep (Cthulu's idiot brother), harness it, and head off on an expedition to the titular Scar, which is a crack in the planet left by the arrival of ancients from elsewhere.  Power can be harnessed there.  Power to... um... the wackadoos who came up with this totally bonkers plot are never really clear on what they think they can do with this power.  The laws of probability get weird.  Possibilities can be brought into factuality, or something.  To, um... do stuff.  They don't seem to have an objective beyond power.  The pair in charge are kind of loony.  As in, you wonder how anyone could look at those two and not say, hey, you're fucking nutters!  (Mieville is British.)  Then again, when they monologue, (or rather, dialogue, finishing each others' sentences, speaking to the crowd), they are far more rational and coherent than Trump, and people follow Trump, so you know, I'm giving Mieville a pass on that.

Anyway, so the whole thing is a scheme to raise Cthulu's idiot brother from the depths to power the makeshift floating city to The Scar to... get power.  And amid this, Bellis has to deal with Silas Fennec, who is a sleazebag spy from New Crobuzon trying to manipulate everyone and everything.

That's the absurdly brief description of a tome of a book, with a ton of stuff missing.  Also, Mieville is fucking awesome.  Is The Scar as good as Perdido Street Station?  No.  Armada, as a constrained location, does not allow him to paint as rich a tapestry, and frankly, there are some paint-by-numbers literary devices, such as hitting the "scar"metaphor like Rocky hitting a side of beef.  He does a lot of things right, though.  The end is a master-class in how to leave core mysteries and ambiguities without it feeling like a cheat or leaving the reader feeling dissatisfied.  There is the continued building of a fascinatingly weird world, and then... the ideas.  So let's get into that.

One of the most interesting ideas in Perdido Street Station was how the city of New Crobuzon dealt with its condemned criminals.  They were "Remade."  The punishment factories used thaumaturgic surgery to turn them into something ironically other, different, and either "useful," or just intended for pain and suffering.  On Bellis's ship, in the hold, is a group of Remade, on their way to a colony as indentured servants/slaves, having been physically altered, sometimes in "useful" ways, sometimes just in horrifying ways, but it isn't just a passenger boat.  It's a slave ship.  Bellis is running from the cops, trying to escape to a colony because the cops are tracking down anyone who was associated with Isaac Grimnebulin, thanks to the events of Perdido Street Station, but New Crobuzon also sends Remade to their colonies.

And when the pirates show up, they kill the captain and first officer.  The crew... "re-education."  Passengers have various interviews 'n stuff, to see whether or not they can be allowed to join Armada.  The Remade?  They are welcomed to Armada.  Freed.  Citizens with full rights.  Emancipated.  Your direct interaction here is through Tanner Sack, who was Remade to have, um... tentacles.  Ungainly at best, on land, but with Armada?  He finds a thaumaturgic surgeon, and asks to have more, shall we say, work done.  Gills, nictitating membranes, and some other alterations so that he really can just work as a diver for Armada, to whom he is loyal.  They freed him.  Gave him a home.  Welcomed him.  There are plenty of Remade in Armada, because this is, to a significant extent, how Armada grows.  Through piracy, and when that comes to New Crobuzon, that means freeing Remade.

There's a price.  The emancipated Remade are basically the most loyal citizens of Armada, but there are others press-ganged into joining Armada, like Bellis.  While she needed to get out of New Crobuzon to let the heat die down, she had every intention of returning eventually, and she had no desire to spend her life with Armada.  To her, Armada was a prison sentence.  To her, and many others.

Silas Fennec, for example.  He's the New Crobuzon spy, who spends his time trying to manipulate everyone and everything to get back to New Crobuzon, damn the consequences.  (Which are pretty bad.)

The question for Bellis-- who unlike Silas, isn't a sociopath-- is the price.  Consider Tanner.  Consider the Remade.  Those freed from New Crobuzon, about whose politics Bellis has no illusions.  She knows that New Crobuzon is corrupt and vile.  But it's her home.  She wants to go back, eventually.  Yet she does not want to condemn the Remade to the fate to which New Crobuzon would put them.  The price of their emancipation is the press-ganging of the rest on the ships captured by Armada, and the life sentence they must live on that weird-ass floating city of ships lashed together.

Which, as it turns out, is ruled by some fucking wackos who are into some weirdo cutting shit, and trying to figure out how to turn Cthulu's developmentally disabled brother into an Uber driver for their floating city.

What do you tip an extra-dimensional sea beastie?  What's the etiquette there?

A moment of history.  Slavery.  Slavery and piracy.  When we use the word, slavery, your thoughts go to the triangle trade, plantations, and associated institutions.  Slavery, of course, is far older, and far more ubiquitous in human history.  Something has happened, though, to prevent you from thinking about this.  Consider, for example, the pirates of the Barbary Coast.  They were not European, and they were pirates.  They attacked ships, they press-ganged, and enslaved.  When you think of "slavery," you never think about the Barbary pirates, and in fact, when you think of pirates, it is not merely the Western hemisphere that directs your attention away from the Barbary Coast, but the Disneyfication, and bizarre romanticization and fictionalization of this brutal and vile practice.

Pirates were not good guys.  They were not even kind of OK.  Shipping across the sea was dangerous, and pirates were people who added murder to that, so that they could steal, turning an already dangerous practice into something horrifically lethal.

Fuck Disney.  Always fuck Disney.

But you know what else?  Piracy is old.  And slavery is old and ubiquitous.  And when we consider the history of the Barbary Coast, we see a prominent example of pirates capturing ships for the purposes of enslaving people.

Oh, but we're not supposed to talk about non-white, non-Europeans engaged in those kinds of acts, are we?  Funny how we're supposed to study a more complete version of history, and then omit this stuff, right?

Anyway, the point is that if you look at the actual history of piracy, they weren't the emancipators.  They were the enslavers.  Mieville flipped this.

I think this is intentional.  Mieville is way too smart to do something like this without understanding what he is doing.  There are authors for whom I would say, "you idiot!"  There are authors on whom I would call bullshit here.  Mieville?  No.  I think he is doing this intentionally.  A few comments.  First, he is British rather than American, so his view of piracy may be less tied to our whole, "Pirates of the Caribbean" thing.  Yeah, American cultural hegemony, and all that, but this guy fucking reads.  Dig through the Bas-Lag stuff, and it is filled with historical references.  See, for example, the word, "khepri."  In Bas-Lag, they are the xenians with human bodies and insect heads.  The word is an Egyptian reference.  He is not doing any of this carelessly.  He is reading history, and composing the world carefully.  Yeah, I'm giving Mieville credit for an intentional flip here.

He made the pirates the emancipators rather than the slavers.  That is a reversal from history.  And it creates a fascinating moral question at the center of the novel.  What is the price of emancipation?  We can look at the Barbary Coast pirates, and they were just the villains.  Period.  Yeah, yeah, the world has shades of grey, but no, fuck them.  They weren't just pirates, they were slavers.  Fuck them.

But what about when the pirates emancipate in the process, in this fictional world?  You get a fascinating moral premise, with three questions.

First, what price is acceptable for the emancipation of the slaves/Remade?  Your own exile and press-ganging?  That's a steep price, but the horror of what the Remade must endure is quite severe.  Bellis is a cold-blooded, controlled kind of person.  You spend the novel in her head, and she's the kind of person who doesn't lose her shit, and just stares you down.  But she's also basically, mostly, kind of decent, or at least, not indecent.  The knocked-up nun with whom she shares a cabin on the ship at the beginning of the novel?  She mostly just wants that knocked-up nun to shut up.  The nun isn't a bad person, she's just annoying, and Bellis doesn't deal well with such people.  But she's also not a shit.  So, when considering the moral question of her own press-ganging and the situation of the Remade, she sees the scales as balanced in favor of the Remade.  She knows what they endured, and can't let them fall back into the hands of New Crobuzon, even if that means she's stuck on Armada.

But where's the line?  She's hanging out on a city, of a sort, with a job in a library, and honestly, until the crazy plot is revealed, it could be a hell of a lot worse, particularly since she was running away from New Crobuzon anyway.  So where's the line?  The United States fought the Civil War to abolish slavery.  The death toll was staggering.  I'll argue on the side of the Union.  Where's the line?  Isn't that an interesting question with which we are posed?

Silas wouldn't accept his own press-ganging, but he was a psychopath who got what he deserved.

Question the second.  Bellis was never actually given a choice in the price she paid.  Where does that fit into the calculus?  That question becomes more important as the cost increases.

And finally, the leaders of Armada don't actually give two shits about emancipation.  They're pirates, and really, the pair who are really running things, and trying to raise an eldritch idiot, don't even care so much about the piracy.  "It used to be about the piracy, man!"  Their practice of emancipation is almost incidental.  That doesn't in any way diminish Tanner's nor any other Remades' relief, but what are the consequences?  To do the right thing for the wrong reason?  (Along with a lot of wrong things...)  There's a whole Babylon 5 thing about that.  Sometimes it works out just fine.  Sometimes, not so much.  In The Scar, Tanner is the one who has to take down the pair in charge of Armada.  Or maybe gets manipulated into it.  Remember that ambiguity I mentioned?  Regardless, Armada's leaders are nuts, and Tanner takes 'em down.  They never cared about emancipation.  They cared about power, and the destruction left in the wake of their quest reached a point that could no longer be sustained.

They still freed Tanner and a lot of other Remade.

So many interesting questions and ideas, all coming from the fact that Mieville flipped the role of the pirates in slavery.

Is this a perfect book?  No.  As good as Perdido Street Station?  No.  It is really cool, though.  I'll step away from Bas-Lag for a bit before I read the third book, but these are some fascinating novels, and as the political world engages in a "dialog" about slavery and its legacy, these are some interesting questions to contemplate.  So contemplate away.  And read China Mieville.  This guy is good.

The first song I taught myself on guitar was not actually Stairway.  It was this.  Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, "Find The Cost Of Freedom."