THE NEW WEIRD
The New Weird
Copyright © 2008 by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Cover design by Ann Monn | cover image by Mike Libby of Insect Lab
Interior design & composition by John D. Berry
The text typeface is Kingfisher, designed by Jeremy Tankard
Tachyon Publications 1459 18th Street #139 San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 285-5615
www.tachyonpublications.com
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
ISBN 13: 978-1-892391-55-1 ISBN 10: 1-892391-55-4
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition: 2007
98 76543 21
Introduction: "The New Weird: 'It's Alive?' " © 2008 by Jeff VanderMeer. | "The Luck in the Head" © 1984 by M. John Harrison. Originally appeared in Viriconium Nights (Ace: New York). | "In the Hills, the Cities" © 1984 by Clive Barker. Originally appeared in Books of Blood, Volume 1 (Sphere: London). | "Crossing into Cambodia" © 1979 by Michael Moorcock. Originally appeared in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (New English Library: London). | "The Braining of Mother Lamprey" © 1990 by Simon D. Ings. Originally appeared in Interzone 36, June 1990. | "The Neglected Garden" © 1991 by Kathe Koja. Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1991. | "A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing" © 1997 by Thomas Ligotti. Originally appeared in In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (Durtro: London). | "Jack" © 2005 by China Miéville. Originally appeared in Looking for Jake and Other Stories (Macmillan UK: London). Reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan and Random House. | "Immolation" © 2000 by Jeffrey Thomas. Originally appeared in Punktown (The Ministry of Whimsy: Tallahassee). | "The Lizard of Ooze" © 2005 by Joseph E. Lake. Originally appeared in Flytrap number 4, May 2005. | "Watson's Boy" © 2000 by Brian Evenson. Originally appeared in Contagion and Other Stories (Wordcraft: La Grande, Oregon). | "The Art of Dying" © 1997 by K. J. Bishop. Originally appeared in Aurealis #19, October 1997, as by Kirsten Bishop. | "At Reparata" © 1999 by Jeffrey Ford. Originally appeared in Event Horizon, February 15, 1999. | "Letters from Tainaron" © 2004 by Leena Krohn. Originally appeared in Tainaron: Mailfrom Another City, edited by Juha Lindroos and Kathleen Martin (Prime: Rockville, Maryland). | "The Ride of the Gabbleratchet" © 2007 by Steph Swainston. First appeared in The Modern World (Gollancz: London). Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins and Victor Gollancz. | "The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines" © 2008 by Alistair Rennie. Previously unpublished. | "New Weird Discussions: The Creation of a Term" originally appeared on The Third Alternative message boards atwww.ttapress.com/forum/index.php; discussion currently archived atwww.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/200y/0y/the-new-weird-a.html. | " 'New Weird': I Think We're the Scene" © 2004 by Michael Cisco. Originally appeared on The Modern Word website: www.themodern-word.com/themodword.cfm. | "Tracking Phantoms" © 2008 by Darja Malcolm-Clarke. Previously unpublished. | "Whose Words You Wear" © 2008 by K. J. Bishop. Previously unpublished. | "Creating New Weird to Work for Us," © 2008 by Martin Sust. Previously unpublished. | "The New Weird Treachery," © 2008 by Michael Haulica. Previously unpublished. | "There Is No New Weird," © 2008 by Hannes Riffel. Previously unpublished. | "Blurring the Lines," © 2008 by Jukka Halme. Previously unpublished. | "The Uncleaned Kettle," © 2008 by Konrad Walewski. Previously unpublished. | "Festival Lives" © 2008 by Paul Di Filippo, Cat Rambo, Sarah Monette, Daniel Abraham, Felix Gilman, Hal Duncan, and Conrad Williams. Previously unpublished.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION | The New Weird: "It's Alive?" | Jeff VanderMeer
STIMULI
The Luck in the Head |M. John Harrison
In the Hills, the Cities | Clive Barker
Crossing into Cambodia | Michael Moorcock
The Braining of Mother Lamprey | Simon D. Ings
The Neglected Garden | Kathe Koja
A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing | Thomas Ligotti
EVIDENCE
Jack | China Miéville
Immolation | Jeffrey Thomas
The Lizard of Ooze | Jay Lake
Watson's Boy | Brian Evenson
The Art of Dying | K. J. Bishop
At Reparata | Jeffrey Ford
Letters from Tainaron | Leena Krohn
The Ride of the Gabbleratchet | Steph Swainston
The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines | Alistair Rennie
SYMPOSIUM
New Weird Discussions: The Creation of a Term
"New Weird": I Think We're the Scene | Michael Cisco
Tracking Phantoms | Darja Malcolm-Clarke
Whose Words You Wear | K. J. Bishop
European Editor Perspectives on the New Weird | Martin Šust, Michael Haulica, Hannes Riffel, Jukka Halme, & Konrad Walewski
LABORATORY
Festival Lives | PREAMBLE: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
VIEW 1: Death in a Dirty Dhoti | Paul DiFilippo
VIEW 2: Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered | Cat Rambo
VIEW 3: All God's Chillun Got Wings | Sarah Monette
VIEW 4: Locust-Mind | Daniel Abraham
VIEW 5: Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes | Felix Gilman
VIEW 6: Golden Lads All Must... | Hal Duncan
VIEW 7: Forfend the Heavens' Rending | Conrad Williams
Recommended Reading
Biographical Notes
Acknowledgments
THANKS FIRST AND FOREMOST to Jacob Weisman and Jill Roberts at Tachyon Publications for making this experience so positive and energizing. Secondly, thanks to the editors and translators we met on our 2006 trip to Europe whose conversations helped stimulate our interest in doing this anthology, especially: Martin Sust, Michael Haulica, Horia Ursu, Luis Rodrigues, Jukka Halme, Sebastien Guillott, Toni Jerrman, Hannes Riffel, and Sarah Riffel. Thanks also to Cheryl Morgan, Jeffrey Ford, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Konrad Walewski, Nick Gevers, Kathryn Cramer, David Hartwell, and everyone else with whom we discussed "New Weird." Finally, thanks to all of the wonderful writers in this book, who were all very kind in allowing us to print or reprint their work.
The New Weird: "It's Alive?"
JEFF VANDERMEER
ORIGINS
THE "NEW WEIRD" EXISTED long before 2003, when M. John Harrison started a message board thread with the words: "The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?" For this reason, and this reason only, it continues to exist now, even after a number of critics, reviewers, and writers have distanced themselves from the term.
By 2003, readers and writers had become aware of a change in perception and a change in approach within genre. Crystallized by the popularity of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, this change had to do with finally acknowledging a shift in The Weird.
Weird fiction ― typified by magazines like Weird Tales and writers like H. P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith back in the glory days of the pulps ― eventually morphed into modern-day traditional Horror. "Weird" refers to the sometimes supernatural or fantastical element of unease in many of these stories ― an element that could take a blunt, literal form or more subtle and symbolic form and which was, as in the best of Lovecraft's work, combined with a visionary sensibility. These types of stories also often rose above their pulp or self-taught origins through the strength of the writer's imagination. (There are definite parallels to be drawn between certain kinds of pulp fiction and so-called "Outsider Art.")
Two impulses or influences distinguish the New Weird from the "Old" Weird, and make the term more c
oncrete than terms like "slipstream" and "interstitial," which have no distinct lineage. The New
Wave of the 1960s was the first stimulus leading to the New Weird. Featuring authors such as M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, and J. G. Ballard, the New Wave deliriously mixed genres, high and low art, and engaged in formal experimentation, often typified by a distinctly political point of view. New Wave writers also often blurred the line between science fiction and fantasy, writing a kind of updated "scifantasy," first popularized by Jack Vance in his Dying Earth novels. This movement (backed by two of its own influences, Mervyn Peake and the Decadents of the late 1800s) provided what might be thought of as the brain of New Weird.
The second stimulus came from the unsettling grotesquery of such seminal 1980s work as Clive Barker's Books of Blood. In this kind of fiction, body transformations and dislocations create a visceral, contemporary take on the kind of visionary horror best exemplified by the work of Lovecraft ― while moving past Lovecraft's coyness in recounting events in which the monster or horror can never fully be revealed or explained. In many of Barker's best tales, the starting point is the acceptance of a monster or a transformation and the story is what comes after. Transgressive horror, then, repurposed to focus on the monsters and grotesquery but not the "scare," forms the beating heart of the New Weird.
In a sense, the simultaneous understanding of and rejection of Old Weird, hardwired to the stimuli of the New Wave and New Horror, gave many of the writers identified as New Weird the signs and symbols needed to both forge ahead into the unknown and create their own unique re-combinations of familiar elements.
THE SHIFT
Nameless for a time, a type of New Weird or proto-New Weird entered the literary world in the gap between the end of the miniature horror renaissance engendered by Barker and his peers and the publication of Perdido Street Station in 2000.
In the 1990s, "New Weird" began to manifest itself in the form of cult writers like Jeffrey Thomas and his cross-genre urban Punktown stories. It continued to find a voice in the work of Thomas Ligotti, who straddled a space between the traditional and the avant garde. It coalesced in the David Lynchean approach of Michael Cisco to Eastern European mysticism in works like The Divinity Student. It entered real-world settings through unsettling novels by Kathe Koja, such as The Cipher and Skin, with their horrific interrogations of the body and mind. It entered into disturbing dialogue about sex and gender in Richard Calder's novels, with their mix of phantasmagoria and pseudo-cyberpunk. It could also be found in Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy, my own Ambergris stories (Dradin, In Love, etc.), and the early short work of K. J. Bishop and Alastair Reynolds, among others.
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.
FLASH POINT
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.
THE DEBATE
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 see
med 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.
The New Weird Page 1
