Description
Armada is made up of hundreds of ships, airships and other sea vessels all interconnected, existing as a movable pirate state on the oceans of Bas-Lag. The ships, the oldest having been part of Armada for more than a thousand years, are mostly built-upon, factories and residences built up on their decks (and in some cases, within their gutted hulls). The city's population is at least a hundred thousand, and is made up of humans, cactacae, khepri, ab-dead, Remade, scabmettlers and many other races. People considered criminals (or otherwise being of lower classes) in their former home states of Bas-Lag are recast as equals upon joining Armada, and often go on to hold positions of power.
Armada thrives on piracy, and through this method adds wealth to itself. Piracy of the seas also leads to acquisitions of knowledge in countless languages (all books are stolen for the Grand Gears Library), and the growth of Armada's population, for any ship intercepted by Armada's forces is assimilated into the city and its crew and passengers are press-ganged into citizenship for life. The language of Armada is Salt, a constructed language deliberately made easy to learn, and consisting of vocabulary from the languages of the many races who inhabit the city.
Read more about this topic: Armada (Bas-Lag)
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.”
—Freda Adler (b. 1934)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“An intentional object is given by a word or a phrase which gives a description under which.”
—Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (b. 1919)