The New Weird (47 page)

This is in a way a development from the highly fashionable science & the arts movement which has been going on in other disciplines since the mid 90s (and of which we, bless our little cotton socks, though we're clear inheritors of that label, have taken no advantage at all). Part of the problem there is that we have taken absolutely no part in the discussions, and never insisted on having a place in things. You can't expect people to come to you in this life, and if you don't make moves of your own, you can hardly complain if things seem to change very suddenly around you in a way you weren't prepared for. I was sitting in on informal meetings on the South Bank in 1997/8: everyone else there was a scientist or someone in the plastic arts.This point extends further. Life in the West now is a crossply of fantasies. Because we understand fantasy from the inside, we're the people to write about that, too. It seems to me that as a result we should open this front of the struggle-to-name, the front that faces out from the ghetto, with a certain confidence.

I'm aware here that I'm not talking directly about the New Weird, & that I've bundled it with Brit SF. Deliberately, because I see them both as responses ― or not quite that, probably some better word ― to the same situation, which is the increasing convergence of concerns between literary mainstream fiction and f/sf. Thus back to Justina's point: they are soon going to be tackling exactly the same subjects as us. I don't think we can beat them, in the sense of taking them on directly; but I don't think we have to. I'm in favour of a melting pot ― in fact I think it already exists, partly because "slipstream" has been quietly doing just that for a whole new generation of readers who are as happy with [my collection]
Travel Arrangements
as with a David Mitchell novel ― although I'm very aware that both China and Justina have different views here. All of this concerns me more than how the new developments in f/sf represented by China, Al Reynolds, Justina, myself, et al, face
inwards
into the genre. I suspect that may become in some sense irrelevant.

So I'm less interested in filling the contents list of an inward-facing collection, than in wondering how we organise and present ourselves when we face outwards. How we capitalise on the out-there response to [China Miéville's]
The Scar
or [my own]
Light,
or the fact that the broadsheets review pages are so suddenly interested in us all. What concerns me is who, in the New Weird, etc., is capable of speaking outwards with confidence, not inwards.

"New Weird": I Think We're the Scene

LITERARY HISTORY is heavily invested in scenes and schools, portable assemblies (Surrealists, Romantics, Beats) put together by critics. Hindsight naturally makes this assembling work easier, at least in part because the mill of arguments will have ground to a halt (it's easier to snapshot a stationary object), and the vast profusion of determinative details that are so easily missed and which no one point of view, I think, can encompass, have been forgotten. Arguments about the meaning of a movement are any movement's primary content, regarded as something bigger than the sum of its parts; the questions and answers, the political map of positions, usually turn out to be more important than any resolution posited at the time, or, to put it better, those resolutions in the moment, rather than eliminating questions or arguments, join them in a general manifold. Trying to name and adequately describe the scene as it unfolds in the present is like cutting cookies out of the fog, but perhaps that irreducible vagueness should encourage people to try.

Now there is the sense of a trend, loosely identified with a heterogeneous company of writers as varied in their works as China Miéville and Jeffrey VanderMeer. For the sake of keeping ourselves in circulation, we might provisionally describe this as a tendency toward more literarily sophisticated fantasy. In bookstores,
Fantasy
means the Piers Anthony/ J. R. R. Tolkien section; the word is an abbreviation for a standard content, like a brand.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Alice in Wonderland, The Golden Ass, Gulliver's Travels
or
Naked Lunch
are not shelved there, although they are all fantasies. This has everything to do with selling books, making sure the buyer finds what he or she is looking for, and reflects no judgment with regard to the literary status of this or that work of fantasy. A certain amount of work is produced specifically for the purpose of stocking shelves in the
Fantasy
section, where the index of novelty is best kept low. The serendipitous constellation of contemporary fantasy writers that belong to or generate the "New Weird" seem generally and in varying proportions to blend the influences of genre writing and literary fantasy, and to weave in non-fantastic signals as well.

Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or a section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it loose from morality; writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Stepan Chapman, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud are doing the same by prying fantasy away from pedestrian writing, with more vibrant and daring styles, more reflective thinking, and a more widely broadcast spectrum of themes.

Every year
The New Yorker
releases its new fiction issue, profiling the important new writers, and every year they get it mostly wrong. An inessential, NPR tepidness prevails, and this is plainly not where it's at. Lucius Shepard's
A Handbook of American Prayer
is where it's at.
Handbook, Veniss Underground, The Troika, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Etched City, My Work Is Not Yet Done
are not examples of good fantasy writing or good genre writing, but they are examples of good writing. Fantasy writing is no more inherently inessential than any other variety, and no more inherently escapist, either. What makes writing escapist is not a matter of whether or not it involves magic but whether or not it involves something meaningful. Fantasy writing is if anything increasingly relevant because it involves building and representing the whole world, fantasy worlds, sci-fi worlds, hidden Gnostic horror worlds. This proliferation of worlds seems to me to be bound up with the extent to which the world has become immersed in trade-marked representation.

The New Weird, as I've said, is a topic for critics and not so much for writers. Nothing could be more unenlightening or useless than a New Weird manifesto. What strikes the observer is precisely the spontaneity with which so many different writers, pursuing such obviously disparate literary styles, should vaguely intersect in this way. Instead of a set of general aims, we have a great proliferation of correspondences on a more intimate level, like a sprawling coincidence of idiosyncratic choices. Mapping out a scheme won't yield us much insight into what's going on, although it might add something interesting of its own. The richness of this new writing recommends a depth-diving model rather than a breadth-sweeping one, such that none of its variety or perversion is planned out. The writing in question is more extensively and usefully defined by the unconscious or spontaneous choices the authors are making than by the directed ones; maybe this is most often the case. Certainly, none of the writers thus far invoked have, to my knowledge, set out to be New Weird writers, in the way that Andre Breton et al set out to be Surrealists.

Why pronunciations and definitions, if not to elicit counter claims? Sometimes it seems as though the winners in these matters prevail more as a consequence of sheer exhaustion, which can mean a depletion of the store of endurance but just as readily of the store of interest, so that the received definition of any given wave is the final score in a game called on account of rain and indefinitely, maybe permanently, postponed thereafter. The New Weird has come into being, such as it is and whatever it should be, on its own and not by dint of any decision or program, so the attribution of decisions and schemes to it ought to be seen as prescriptions rather than as descriptions. This is only a problem if the prescription is mistaken for a description, that is to say, X, precisely because he believes the New Weird is such and such, doesn't say this is what it "should be," he says rather "this is what it is."

It's not as though literature preserves a province unto itself, and that genre stands in compartments below the level of general literature. All works of literature will express characteristics of genre. In his prologue to
The Invention of Morel,
by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges touches on the tendency to disparage the adventure story, the mystery story, and contrasts them to the "formless" modern psychological novel. The formless psychological novel is a genre which, more so at the time in which Borges was writing and somewhat less so now, ascended to preeminence on the smoldering remains of other genres. It may be that, in order to exist, genres may engage in a weird disembodied war that cannot be entirely explained in market or in aesthetic terms. More likely, this war is a blind for something more frankly political.

The distinction between genre literature and general literature is bogus, at least in any non-colloquial sense of these terms. What is "general literature"? If we begin to define it, even assuming this definition can be uncontroversial, we are already outlining tendencies or rules which are indistinguishable in kind from those that are used to define genre literature. The distinction between genre and general is an evaluation from the outset, and not an innocent differentiation. The New Weird might be better defined as a refusal to accept this evaluation of imaginative literature, whatever form it may take. So it is not for reasons of influence alone that such authors as Borges, Calvino, Angela Carter are invoked by many of those in the imaginative camp, but also because these authors are obviously both fantastic and literary. Each after their own fashion, as you would expect.

Tracking Phantoms

WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT the New Weird, it's almost as though they are talking about a ghost. Some have seen it, some are open to the possibility. Others are non-believers. All manner of discussions have cropped up around the question of whether or not something called New Weird actually exists. Does the name describe an emergent subgenre? Is it (merely) a coincidental proliferation of a kind of speculative fiction? Or is it a mass hallucination created by a constituency hungry for yet another way to categorize fiction? Regardless of the answers to these questions, the effect New Weird has had on the genre fiction community is undeniable.

However, I should say that on one level, to me personally, it doesn't much matter whether the New Weird is "real" or not ― the New Weird as an idea led me to a set of texts I might not have otherwise pursued. I wouldn't be the same reader, writer, or scholar if I hadn't read New Weird fiction. I daresay the genre fiction field wouldn't be the same, either, if the New Weird movement or "moment" hadn't happened. For me, it changed the kinds of questions I ask about literature and the kinds of things I want from literature; it served as a partial guide to what I wanted to do in my
own
fiction; and it changed what I thought I could get from a book.

I first came to the New Weird as a graduate student at Indiana University studying post-World War II science fiction. It happened by chance: I returned from a vacation to find that the SF Studies Reading Group I was part of had selected a text called
Perdido Street Station
for its next read. I didn't know anything about the New Weird then, but I was so drawn into the milieu of
Perdido,
and the way it seemed to mix the aesthetics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, while also admiring its use of language and style, that I was bowled over when I heard there was a "movement" of texts with somehow similar qualities. As I read more of this movement, I was captivated on every level at which I relate to books ― as a critic, writer, and long-time speculative fiction reader.

These texts made me read like a kid again, voraciously, with glee. It was hard to resist the sheer fun of their myriad fantastical/pseudo-scientific contraptions, settings, and worldviews ― the Fisherwives and Yardbulls in Paul Di Filippo's "A Year in the Linear City," which bear away the bodies of the recently dead; the parallel world called the Shift in Steph Swainston's
The Year of Our War;
the race of mushroom dwellers in Jeff VanderMeer's
City of Saints and Madmen;
Miéville's interdimensional Weaver in
Perdido
and the Possible Sword of
The Scar.

All of those elements we could say defamiliarize the way we see our own world, and ask us to re-envision what we know about, or rather, how we conceptualize, the metaphysical makeup of our own world. They did it in a way that seemed somehow new even though their aesthetic struck me as vaguely familiar ― it evoked H. P. Lovecraft's grotesque cosmology and the bizarre worldview produced through his sanity-shattering elder gods.

But the grotesquerie of the New Weird wasn't the extreme cosmic horror of Lovecraft, or even of supernatural horror, but one of
degree
― grotesquerie of exaggeration. New Weird had the sense of unease that is found in Horror, but that unease wasn't resolved in a moment of terror. Instead, that grotesquerie was part of the secondary worlds' aesthetic as a whole. It could be seen in elements like the Festival of the Freshwater Squid and in the Living Saint of
City of Saints,
for instance; in the mangled bodies of the Remade and the physical squalor and moral degradation of New Crobuzon in Miéville's Bas-Lag texts; the presence of Insects, with their mindless consumption of living beings, the Tines' "creative mutilation," and the Vermiform worm-girl in
The Year of Our War;
and the living animal amalgamations and rampant deformity of stillborn children borne of an entire city gone awry in
The Etched