A Primer of Miévillean

Space

Worldweave (IC, PSS) – n.

A ‘concatenation of threads in impossible spiral symmetry’ that binds together ‘unmundane dimensions’ with the mundane.

The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry [...] each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings' motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief's laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces. (PSS, 400)

Sketch of three vortices interlaced to form a braid. Notebook 55, papers of Lord Kelvin, unpublished drawing. Courtesy of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Planurgy (K) – n.

Trans-dimensional origami.

Planurgy (K) – n.

Trans-dimensional origami.

‘What you’re really trying to do with planurgy is get things into other space, you know?’

Planurgy (K) – n.

Trans-dimensional origami.

‘What you’re really trying to do with planurgy is get things into other space, you know?’

‘The bulky thing collapsed on itself in fold-lines, different aspects of unbroken planes slipping behind each other as if seen from several directions at once.’

An illustration from Jouffret's Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (1903)

Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier)(1910) Oil on canvas

Flexure animation

Immer (E) – n.

‘The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where we live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on.’

Manchmal (E) – n.

From the German adverb meaning ‘sometimes’, here, repurposed to describe lived space.

An unspeakable horror seized me. There was a darkness; then a dizzy, sickening sensation of sight that was not like seeing; I saw a Line that was no Line; Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked aloud in agony, “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland (1884)

I felt a kind of unholy emotion [...] What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster - vaster than cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealized, an unrealizable infinity of space.

Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Hueffer, The Inheritors (1901)

He dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth [...] I mention this talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.

H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928)

There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars.

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

At the Mountains of MadnessIllustrations from ‘Astounding Stories’, Feb 1936

At the Mountains of MadnessIllustration by DeivantArt user Steve Burgsteve-burg.deviantart.com

Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of MadnessIllustration by John Coulthart (1990)

Orciny (C +C) – n.

A mythical interstitial city that exists only in words, particularly in cacographic marginal scribbling.

breach (C +C) n. + v.

1.The crime committed by a citizen of either Besz or Ul Quoma who transgresses directly into the other territory.

v. To commit the crime of 1), to transgress from Besz into Ul Qoma or vice versa.

Breach (C +C) n.

1.The authority that polices such crimes. 2.The interstitial and abstracted location

occupied by this authority.

Cross-hatch (C +C) – n.

Areas where Besz and Ul Quoma occupy the same space simultaneously and two distinct idioms of architecture abutt each other. Citizens of either City will be required to ‘unsee’ or ‘unnotice’ each other in such areas.

n.

‘By Embassytown I mean the city. Even the new Ariekei have started to call the city by that name.’