Thursday, March 12, 2009

Bringing China Mieville to Second Life

Armada Panorama 2
Location: Armada Floating City

I'm fanatical about China Mieville's fiction, so when I encountered a post in New World Notes about this region, based upon a city of ships in Mieville's The Scar, I had to zip over and begin exploring. The city, like that of the book, is an amalgam of pirated vessels rigged together into a Dickensian nightmare of multiple levels, dangerous alleys, and an acquatic underworld inhabited by merfolk and other water-dwelling races particular to Mieville's world of Bas-Lag.
underwater
Armada very much fits the Steampunk theme so popular in SL, and my initial exploration of Armada shows that the residents are already appropriating some of Mieville's puckish humor...
Mieville Humor
I will continuing looking at the residences and businesses of Armada, as my time allows. Perhaps I'll even rent a dwelling and get into the RP. I want to support something based upon the work of one of the finest writers of speculative fiction now living.
Armada Map
Rationality definitely takes a hit in Bas Lag, a place where fog can solidify into stone, giant Spiders move in and out of multiple dimensions while reciting free verse, and hideous monsters feed upon our fear, like a bat lapping flower-nectar. Perhaps my favorite moment from the novel that gave birth to Armada is an ancient race's playing with the laws of probability (well, to be honest, they mined probability, like ore) with disastrous results that ripple into the present.
Armada Panorama 1
Teleport link to begin exploring this world. Go now, and you can help residents shape the experience. And buy all of Mieville's books. They are worth the mind-bending and night-fears they induce.

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