Lintel

"To suggest rather than to state, to make a crossroads of each word in the street of sentences. Something new will always come to light if texts are dissected ad infinitum, and in this all written works - and not just those of genius, as some have claimed in error - resemble the works of nature."

Alfred Jarry - Adventures in Pataphysics

Cacotopos

At the limit or edge is the unknowable. The diagram for this is a circle or (if you don't care for the myth of pure geometry) an island like an amoeba whose skin ripples and fluctuates. This border's elasticity is the reach for the unknowable.

But in the fictional cartography of China Mieveille's writings the unknowable is often interior to mapped geography. The cacotopic stain, an unstable delusive zone that defies comprehension, blotches out a portion of the world like the focus of a wormhole and can only be traversed around by the characters, lest they disappear from the storyline. The map is riddled with lacunae, but they are not gaps of knowledge, they are holes in the real.

This gives the hyper-real a new totem, as a dense, tightly controlled and ideal geometrical unit. Reality, on the other hand, is still quite porous.

Furious Fireberry

Pyrococcus furiosus


Life emerges from Vulcan's workshop, and not simply the war machines of Mars. If there is an essential re-imagining of technology that needs to take place we may have to change the scale of our investigative vision, because the cults of interpretation are simultaneously active on the same coordinates. So in the heat of the earth do we locate the constructs of doom or the emergence of improbable life? Do we see the smoke from afar and invent a god, or do we see the microscopic propagation beneath our human sight and articulate a science?