Main Page

From The Eleventh Volume

On the yellow leather back I read these curious words which were repeated on the title page: A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was no indication of date or place. On the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered one of the color plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis Tertius. Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy.

—from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. (Translation by James E. Irby.)

The Purpose:

The primary purpose of this wiki is to give me a place to write down all the irrelevant information on my characters that I don't want cluttering up my writing. (I find it hard to resist sometimes.) The secondary purpose is to create something somewhat interesting for the people who've read my writing. The tertiary purpose is because I can.

Current News:

The Eleventh Volume is back, and badder than ever! Well, okay, right now it is Ugly As Sin again, but I'm working on that. I've got to reskin it and such, and I'm going to try to enable URL rewriting for nice pretty short URLs this time.

Favorite Articles:

An interesting source of information on the Downworld is History of the Downworld, which summarizes the main differences in that alternate timeline caused by the failure of the USS Maine to explode in Havana harbor in 1898. Every country in the world was profoundly affected; even little Haiti, which is in our world the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, is completely different—as part of the Downworld confederation called the Allied Free States, it's an economic and military powerhouse fighting the Caribbean slave trade and the expansion of the New Spanish Empire. Or take an example more relevant to the Downworld story: the East Coast of the United States became Avaddonia in 1970, a dictatorship so all-controlling that it even developed a brand-new state religion, the Avaddonic Church. It's impossible to reach that world, of course, unless you're one of those four known humans capable of phase-shifting—who are also the only humans capable of performing the "Vulcan neck pinch".

Shakespeare fans might be interested to know the truth about the English Pucks, while those familiar with the Ramayana might be intrigued by the parallels between Hanuman and the Consequences Monkey, and of course those who prefer the graceful prose stylings of Dan Brown will surely be excited to learn about the nature of Angels and Demons. And, as always, everyone expecting to die some day would do well to learn about what they should expect from their Last Conversation.

Conlangers might be intrigued by the ancient Mathurian language family, especially the Maindérwo and Neshuwo languages. According to the 8,000 year old Mathurian Scrolls, the town where Neshuwo was spoken, Neshuyu, was run by a family of witches called neshrathyos, who played a major role in the Shúyu ke Fássesyu legend. One of the most intriguing stories in the Scrolls relates how a neshrathyo once turned the entire nation of Marshav into the monsters known as kagh-ogh-laen. Even today, some neo-Mathurians and Zhuwusians are trying to find modern-day descendants of the neshrathyos, in the hopes that they will have the same magical powers.