The New Weird (2 page)

Magazines like Andy Cox's
The Third Alternative
, my wife Ann's
The Silver Web
, and, to a lesser extent, David Pringle's
Interzone
and Chris Reed/Manda Thomson's
Back Brain Recluse
― along with anthologies like my
Leviathan
series ― provided support for this kind of work, which generally did not interest commercial publishers. Ironically, despite most New Weird fiction of the 1990s being skewed heavily toward the grotesque end of the New Wave/New Horror spectrum, many horror publications and reviewers dismissed the more confrontational or surreal examples of the form. It represented a definite threat to the Lovecraft clones and
Twilight Zone
doppelgangers that dominated the horror field by the mid-1990s.

The publication of Miéville's
Perdido Street Station
in 2000 represented what might be termed the first commercially acceptable version of the New Weird, one that both coarsened and broadened the New Weird approach through techniques more common to writers like Charles Dickens, while adding a progressive political slant. Miéville also displayed a fascination with permutations of the body, much like Barker, and incorporated, albeit in a more direct way, ideas like odd plagues (M. John Harrison) and something akin to a Multiverse (Michael Moorcock).

Miéville's fiction wasn't inherently superior to what had come before, but it was epic, and it wedded a "surrender to the weird" ― literally, the writer's surrender to the material, without ironic distance ― to rough-hewn but effective plots featuring earnest, proactive characters. This approach made
Perdido Street Station
much more accessible to readers than such formative influences on Miéville as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels or M. John Harrison's Viriconium cycle.

The truth of this accessibility also resides at the sentence and paragraph level, which in Miéville's case house brilliant, often startling images and situations, but do not always display the same control as those past masters.
*
Yet, by using broader brushstrokes, Miéville created much more space for his readers, a trade-off that helped create his success. (Ultimately, Miéville would also serve as an entry point to work that was more ambitious on the paragraph level. In a neat time traveling trick, one of his own touchstones, M. John Harrison, would benefit greatly from that success.)

Quite simply, Miéville had created just the right balance between pulp writing, visionary, surreal images, and literary influences to attract a wider audience ― and serve as the lightning rod for what would become known as New Weird.

But Miéville wasn't alone. By the time Harrison posited his question "What is New Weird?" it had become clear that a number of other writers had developed at the same time as Miéville, using similar stimuli. My
City of Saints & Madmen
, K. J. Bishop's
The Etched City
, and Paul Di Filippo's
A Year in the Linear City
, among others, appeared in the period from 2001 to 2003, with Steph Swainston's
The Year of Our War
published in 2004. It seemed that something had Risen Spontaneous ― even though in almost every case, the work itself had been written in the 1990s and either needed time to gestate or had been rejected by publishers ― and thus there was a need to explain or name the beast.

The resulting conversation on the
Third Alternative
public message boards consisted of many thousands of words, used in the struggle to name, define, analyze, spin, explore, and quantify the term "New Weird." The debate involved more than fifty writers, reviewers, and critics, all with their own questions, agendas, and concerns.

By the end of the discussion, part of which is reprinted in this anthology, it wasn't clear if New Weird as a term existed or not. However, over the next few years, with varying levels of enthusiasm, Miéville (and various acolytes and followers) promulgated versions of the term, emphasizing the "surrender to the weird," but also a very specific political component. Miéville thought of New Weird as "post-Seattle" fiction, referring to the effects of globalization and grassroots efforts to undermine institutions like the World Bank.
*
This use of the term "New Weird" was in keeping with Miéville's idealism and Marxist leanings in the world outside of fiction, but, in my opinion, preternaturally narrowed the parameters of the term. This brand of New Weird seemed far too limiting, unlike the type envisioned by Steph Swainston in the original message board discussion; her New Weird seemed almost like a form of literary Deism, a primal and epiphanal experience.

The passion behind Miéville's efforts made sure that the term would live on ― even after he began to disown it, claiming it had become a marketing category and was therefore of no further interest to him. Despite Miéville's lack of interest, by 2005 the term "New Weird" was being used with some regularity by readers, writers, and critics.

That the term, as explored primarily by M. John Harrison and Steph Swainston, and then taken up by Miéville, has since been rejected or severely questioned not only by the initial Triumvirate but by several others speaks to the fact that most New Weird writers, like most New Wave writers, are various in their approaches over time. They are not repeating themselves for the most part.
*
Cross-pollination ― of genres, of boundaries ― occurs as part of an effort to avoid easy classification ― not for its own sake, or even consciously in most cases, but in an attempt to allow readers and writers to enter into a dialogue that is genuine, unique, and not based on received ideas or terms.

I myself reacted violently to the idea of New Weird in 2003 ― in part because it seemed that some writers wanted to claim it, falsely, as a uniquely English phenomenon; in part because I continue to champion artistic discussion and publication of "genre" and "literary" work within one context and continuum; and in part because it did seem limiting inasmuch as the term was most useful applied to specific works rather than specific writers (almost impossible to "enforce," given how labeling works).

In retrospect, however, my rejection of the term seems premature ― because as used in the message board discussion, "New Weird" was just a term on which to hang an exploration and investigation of what looked like a sudden explosion of associated texts. While much of the discussion may have been surface, much of it was also incisive, rich, and deep. With less concern about holding onto "territory" and control, from everyone, those discussions might have led to something more substantive.

EFFECTS IN THE "REAL" WORLD

The other reality about the term "New Weird" has little to do with either moments or movements and more to do with the marketplace: Miéville's success, through his own efforts and those of his followers, became linked to the term New Weird. A practical result of this affiliation is that it became easier for this kind of fiction to find significant publication. It wasn't just "find me the next Miéville" ― firstly impossible and secondly corrosive ― but "find me more New Weird fiction." As an editor at a large North American publishing house told me two years ago, "New Weird" has been a "useful shorthand" not only when justifying acquiring a particular novel, but also when marketing departments talk to booksellers.
*
Confusion about the specifics of the term created a larger protective umbrella for writers from a publishing standpoint. Many books far stranger than Miéville's have been prominently published as a result.

I know that without New Weird, it would have been harder for me to find publication by commercial and foreign language publishers. This is probably doubly true for writers like K. J. Bishop, who had not already had books out by 2001. In a trickle-down effect, I also believe this atmosphere has helped decidedly non-New Weird writers like Hal Duncan, whose own brand of weirdness is much more palatable in the wake of the "New Weird explosion."
*

The other truth is that even though heroic fantasy and other forms of genre fiction still sell much better than most New Weird books, New Weird writers partially dominated the critical and awards landscape for almost half a decade.
*

In a similar way, New Weird has become shorthand for readers, who don't care about the vagaries of taxonomy so much as "I know it when I read it." For this reason, writers such as Kelly Link, Justina Robson, and Charles Stross have all been, at one time or another, identified as New Weird. These reader associations occur because when encountering something unique most of us grab the label that seems the closest match so we can easily describe our enthusiasm to others. (The result of both carefree readers and some careless academics has been to make it seem as if New Weird is as indefinable and slippery a term as "interstitial.")

The effect of New Weird outside of England, North America, and Australia has been various but often dynamic. New Weird has, in some countries, already mutated and adapted as an ever-shifting "moment" ― as well as a potent label for publishers. In some places "New Weird" has become uniquely independent of what anyone associated with the original discussion in 2003 now thinks of the term and its usefulness. For example, in Finland you can say without equivocation that Kelly Link is New Weird.

In addition, as alluded to earlier in this introduction, many of the writers associated with New Weird and collected in this volume are already transforming into something else entirely, while new writers like Alistair Rennie (whose story is original to this anthology), have assimilated the New Weird influence, combined it with yet other stimuli, and created their own wonderfully bizarre and transgressive recombination.

This speaks to the nature of art: as soon as something becomes popular or familiar, the true revolution moves elsewhere. Sometimes the writers involved in the original radicalism move on, too, and sometimes they allow themselves to be left behind.

A WORKING DEFINITION OF NEW WEIRD

Following the aftermath of all of this discussion, research, and reading, the opportunity to create a working definition of twenty-first-century New Weird now presents itself:

New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects ― in combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers or their proxies (including also such forebears as Mervyn Peake and the French/English Decadents). New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary power on a "surrender to the weird" that isn't, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The "surrender" (or "belief") of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text.

This definition presents two significant ways in which the New Weird can be distinguished from Slipstream or Interstitial fiction. First, while Slipstream and Interstitial fiction often claim New Wave influence, they rarely if ever cite a Horror influence, with its particular emphasis on the intense use of grotesquery focused around transformation, decay, or mutilation of the human body. Second, postmodern techniques that undermine the surface reality of the text (or point out its artificiality) are not part of the New Weird aesthetic, but they are part of the Slipstream and Interstitial toolbox.

We hope that this anthology will provide a rough guide to the moment or movement known as "New Weird" ― acknowledging that the pivotal "moment" is behind us, but that this moment had already lasted much longer than generally believed, had definite precursors, and continues to spread an Effect, even as it dissipates or becomes something else. (And who knows? Another pivotal "moment" may be ahead of us.)

In this anthology, you will find a "Stimuli" section that includes both New Wave and New Horror examples, along with work by fence-straddlers like Simon Ings and Thomas Ligotti. You will also find an "Evidence" section that pulls New Weird examples from pulp and the literary mainstream, from dark fantasy and from foreign language sources. To highlight just a few of these selections, China Miéville's "Jack," stripped-down and gracefully gruff and ironic, revisits the New Crobuzon of his novels, in much the same way as Jeffrey Ford revisits a proto-Well-Built City setting in "At Reparata." Other highlights include the Brian Evenson's Beckett-Kafka-esque take on Gormenghast in "Watson's Boy," the unabashed decadence of K. J. Bishop's "The Art of Dying," and the frenzied post-New Weird grotesquery of Alistair Rennie's "The Gutter Meets the Light That Never Shines," a story original to this anthology that showcases the effect of combining New Wave and New Horror elements with pop culture and comics influences.

The "Symposium" section preserves the beginning of the message board thread about New Weird begun by M. John Harrison in 2003,
*
along with Michael Cisco's essay from the year after, and three pieces written specially for this volume: scholar and writer Darja Malcolm-Clarke's "Tracking Phantoms," an exploration of her changing views on New Weird; writer K. J. Bishop's "Whose Words You Wear," her thoughts on the effects of labeling; and "European Editor Perspectives on the New Weird," which charts the influence and permutations of the term across several different countries. Finally, in "Laboratory" we asked several writers existing outside of or on the fringe of New Weird
*
to create a round-robin story that showcases, in fictional form, their own manifestation of the term. This section was never meant to be a complete story ― more a series of vignettes ― but the results are cohesive and fascinating.