The Weaver

A New Crobuzon weaver referred to as "The Weaver"; a fictional character appearing in several of China Miéville's novels.

Origin

Weavers, in terms of real-world creatures, are akin to arachnids, as they have eight "legs" and pedipalps. In the context of "Perdido Street Station", a texturologist (weaver scientist) opined that past weavers mutated from ordinary spiders as a result of a "torquish or thaumaturgical fluke" and rapidly developed into a 7-to-9 foot, transplanar versions of their original form. The location and timeline for this evolution is not known.

Appearance

The Weaver's physical anatomy is dominated by a towering abdomen roughly 7 feet in length, tear-shaped, with a surface of luscent black chitin, and equipped with dimensional spinnerets that allow it to manipulate the fabric of its esoteric "worldweave"; the abdomen contains the bulk of its physical weight. A segmented black cephalothorax (prosoma) extends from near the top of its abdomen and serves as the anchoring point for its array of "legs" - which is where the anatomy begins to differ from ordinary arachnids. The Weaver relies on its four, ankle-thick, point-tipped, posterior legs for movement but its anterior legs are stunted and short; instead of tapering to points the chitin curls into terrifying black exoskeletal blades that it holds outwards to both sides and are described as looking like giant horns. The Weaver's pedipalps take the shape of tiny human hands surfaced with the same obsidian-like chitin that covers the rest of its body. Also unlike normal spiders (and many insects), The Weaver appears as having a head partitioned off from the thorax and can thus move independently.

Its specialized features aside, the Weaver's appearance may have been inspired by spiders from the genus Latrodectus (black widow-type spiders).

Character

The Weaver can be regarded as the most bizarre and eccentric of China Miéville's monsters, and subject to the greatest variance of opinion from the other characters - regarding it as anything from an insidious murderer to an artistic god. Its natural eccentricity allows it to keep aloft the storylines of the antagonist and protagonist, helping and hurting both parties before stepping out of Bas-Lag's conventional reality to watch the consequences play out.

Its interest in altering the direction of the surrounding environment is driven by a desire to create aesthetic patterns in its inhabited dimension (the worldweave), patterns that seem to arise as consequences of events that take place in the story, as water ripples from a splash. The Weaver's every action is used to this end: speaking in songs and dancing as it moves.

The resulting behavior is shown to be beyond the comprehension of any other character, its motives and methods too complex to understand, making it both lethally dangerous and innocently helpful.

Capabilities

By virtue of its dimension-manipulating spinnerets, The Weaver is able to move itself across the boundaries of non-physical planes; from the viewer's perspective this process looks as though The Weaver had stepped behind a fold of air. The ramifications of its control over physical space gives it an equal degree of control over the material within that space, changing the matter of an object into an absurdly different type. In one case, The Weaver transforms a militiaman's firearm completely into glass.

In addition, The Weaver regularly demonstrates its ferocious quickness, capable of thinking and moving at speeds too fast for human-equivalent intelligence to perceive.

ee also

*Races of Bas-Lag