(Updated with more evidence below)

Ok, that reads like a headline from The Onion… but I just came upon a passage in The Scar that seems to suggest that Miéville’s world is flat.

Here it is, from page 166 of the Del Rey mass market paperback edition:

The seasons were only points of view—matters of perspective. When it was winter in New Crobuzon, it was summer in Bered Kai Nev (so they said), though they shared the days and nights that grew long and short in antiphase. Dawn was dawn all over the world. In the eastern continent, summer days were short.

Lots of plausible deniability built into that paragraph (“so they said”) but put it together with the imagery of “transplanar life” accessible via the enormous pressure under miles of water and I think you get a picture of Bas-Lag as literally on a different plane…

This idea gives rise to some pretty wild-and-crazy physics. I started trying to sketch how this might work (we get our seasons from the tilt on the axis of rotation of the Earth, but the mechanism has to be quite different if you want different parts of a flat surface to be heated differently at the same time) but I gave it up due to two realisations:

  1. Miéville isn’t a nuts-and-bolts hard-sf sort of guy, there might be all sorts of ways of making Bas-Lag work… or there might not actually be any; more importantly,
  2. Nothing I can come up with will be as weird as things people apparently already believe.1

Update: Hah! Confirmation! Page 349:

“The Ghosthead came here from the universe’s eastern rim. They passed the rock globes that circulate in the sky—another, more evanescent kind of world than ours on the infinite plateau—and came here, to a land so mild it must have seemed like balm: an endless, gentle midmorning.[“]

Notes:

  1. Check out the diagrams explaining the seasons. And try to decide whether these guys are for real… [↪]