The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The Miéville Anomalies

The Miéville Anomalies

The following art from China Miéville and accompanying descriptions by writer Helen Oyeyemi and “philosopher prince” Reza Negarestani first came to our attention by an exceedingly circuitous route that started with an anonymous e-mail that linked to a long article on Lambshead’s “secret past” published by an Athens newspaper. A week later, a letter with a Malaysian postmark arrived from someone named only “Incognitum,” who claimed to belong to a secret radical society devoted to change “through extreme re-contextualization and cross-pollination.” The envelope contained a key to decode the article. Two weeks after that development, the editors of this volume had an unpleasant encounter with a masked stranger who shadowed the house for two weeks before leaving a rather less encrypted message on the garage door.

Decoding the article revealed the text for “The Very Shoe” and “The Gallows-horse.” Photographs of the crudely related pictographs on the garage door with the initials “CM” scrawled beside them were sent to the agent of China Miéville, whose sole response was to provide the two images reproduced herein. Failed attempts were made to telephone both Helen Oyeyemi and the Philosopher Army or “Shield Wall” dedicated to preventing Reza Negarestani from being contaminated by the world.

Although these inquiries yielded no direct results, we subsequently received permissions to reprint from the same Malaysian address, which a Google Earth search revealed to be an empty lot in Kuala Lumpur. Thus, while we present this material as “in the spirit” of the cabinet, we cannot verify that Dr. Lambshead ever possessed such a shoe, or such a gallows-horse. As of this writing, there seem few options for obtaining further information. (It was a condition of Miéville’s participation in this compilation “and any future project that you may wish to pursue with him until either his demise or your own,” per telephone conversations with his designated “metamorphosis attaché,” that we not question him further on the subject.)