How do we pick books for our New Weird line? Every book must have something more than cross-genre leanings (science fiction, fantasy and horror). Every book must do more than attempt to create a story with the use of techniques more common to mainstream literature (like surreal visions for example). It must have a truly unique spirit and the desire to create something both good and new. These are qualities you see in the works of such New Weird predecessors like Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, or M. J. Harrison. I realize that what I've detailed may still seem too general, especially since I have to convey them in a foreign language, but such difficulties are at the heart of the issues with the New Weird movement itself.
All of this success and interest has helped in other, tangential ways as well ― like creating a Czech edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for example. It has also forced other Czech publishing houses to make room for books by fresh new fantasy writers like Daniel Abraham, Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Alan Campbell, Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, David Marusek, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross. Perhaps even more importantly, we can also publish special editions of anthologies containing work by foreign newcomers who don't even have books published in the Czech Republic.
This is the only true answer to the question. For us, it isn't "Maybe!" For us, the New Weird movement exists. Maybe it doesn't exist in the United States or Great Britain, but we have our own version in Czech Republic ― we've created it to work for us.
Michael Haulica, editor-in-chief, Tritonic Publishing Group
ROMANIA
In addition to his work for Tritonic, Michael Haulica is editor-in-chief for the FICTION.RO magazine and a decorated writer who was Romania's Man of the Year in Romanian SF&F for 2005. Haulica has had over fifty short stories and novellas published in Romanian, English, Danish, Croatian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Australian magazines. Haulica has also written several award-winning books while also writing columns on genre fiction for two of the most important Romanian literary magazines.
"THE NEW WEIRD TREACHERY"
For me, New Weird is science fiction, fantasy, and horror mixed together, with a literary approach. That's why the New Weird authors transcend the genres and anger the "hardcore" fans, especially the fans of any genre who feel they and their devotion have been betrayed by these authors. In the meantime, New Weird authors seem to forge greater alliances with "mainstream readers" ― those who usually don't read genre fiction but do read these weird tales because they are extremely well-written, like any other kind of "high literature."
Therefore New Weird novels are the literary shuttles between two worlds: genre and mainstream. They form first contact expeditions, and, in some cases, the second and third contacts come soon after.
New Weird is also a literature for twenty-first-century readers written by the real twenty-first-century writers. This is true even if the history of New Weird has roots in the last hundred years in H. P. Lovecraft's works, H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Adolfo Bioy Casares's La invencion de Morel (1940), and many other writers who lived with the consciousness that the world is a very weird place.
In Romania, New Weird has taken genre literature from the "genre ghetto" and given it to a larger audience. After I published China Miéville's New Crobuzon Trilogy, the first in a book line without Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror as a label on the covers (a trend continued with M. John Harrison's Viriconium omnibus), many "mainstream readers" began to read our science fiction and fantasy books. After that, it was easier for us to publish and attract readers for Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground and K. J. Bishop's The Etched City. Readers who enjoyed this "first contact" then moved on to books by Geoff Ryman, Kelly Link or Roger Zelazny.
This New Weird movement in Romania followed another Romanian movement in the mid-nineties. Readers and critics referred to me and other writers from this period as the "cyberpunk generation." However, it wasn't really "cyberpunk," in that the cyberpunk motives, attitudes, and technology were wedded to distinctly Romanian touches in terms of historical and mythic touchstones. Now, ten years later, I call it "technopunk fantasy." For example, we have created a weird being, the motocentaur, half-human, half-Harley Davidson (or any other motorcycle brand), writing fantasy like cyberpunk. These were good times for authors like Danut Ivanescu, Don Simon, Sebastian A. Corn, and me.
At the moment, the nearest thing to a New Weird Romanian author is Costi Gurgu, who recently published a novel called Retetarium, about a fantasy world where the supreme goal in anyone's life is to be a Master of Cooking Recipe Receipts. The author lives now in Canada, and I hope he will be published soon in English. He is a unique addition to the field, in my opinion.
However, all in all, I don't think there's a difference between the Romanian approach and the general New Weird. We are all writers in the same world. Sometimes a Weird World. Like our novels.
Hannes Riffel, acquiring editor, Klett-Cotta
GERMANY
Hannes Riffel was born in the blackforest, Southwest Germany, in 1966 and has been running a SF/F/H bookshop for fifteen years now. He has translated, among others, Sean Stewart, Bruce Sterling, Hal Duncan, and John Clute and edited, again among others, German editions of stories and novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, JeffVanderMeer, Mark Z. Danielewski and Maureen F. McHugh. He is the editor of PANDORA magazine and lives with his wife, the translator/editor Sara Riffel, in East Berlin.
"THERE IS NO NEW WEIRD"
We do not have anything like the New Weird in Germany. Europe may be culturally dominated by the United States, but that does not mean that we are on the same level of theoretical debate. Most of the important English-language writers get translated (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Hal Duncan), but there is little reflection going on about whether they are different and in what way. One of the laudable exceptions is Ralf Reiter, whose essays in the Heyne SF Jahrbuch display a sharp eye for literary evolution, and some articles published in Franz Rottensteiner's Quarber Merkur.
This may have something to do with why, for me, the New Weird is not a certain form or school of literature, but a gut feeling. As a bookseller and genre editor I have to read so much cliche fiction, that every time I discover something special, something that goes against the grain, the butterflies in my stomach go wild. It may be a useful description that those butterflies buzz around the work of China Miéville, and that they get excited in a certain way while I read Jeff VanderMeer, Steph Swainston or Hal Duncan. But they get excited as well when I read Elizabeth Hand or Kelly Link, and I would not consider those two ladies as being part of any kind of New Weird.
To be honest, I never thought New Weird existed at all. I felt the same way about Cyberpunk: some guys and gals wrote stuff that was different, referenced from each other, broke rules in a way that at least from the outside looked similar. But in the end Cyberpunk is only useful to highlight a certain development in the history of Science Fiction. We can talk or write about the way Snow Crash took its password from Neuromancer, Accelerando from Snow Crash, and so on.
Names like New Weird and Cyberpunk are just that: names. As a bookseller I try to find out what people like and get them turned on to books of the same ilk ― which is mostly like set theory, where you have to find out what goes together. To my mind naming things just pigeonholes them, and no one wants that to happen with a story or a book they've written. As I do not earn my money writing academic papers (although I've taught at university, so I know what it's all about), I try to stay away from compartmentalizing things.
Even if New Weird does exist, from a publisher's standpoint, it isn't healthy in Germany. Miéville does not sell too well here, and the fact that he's published by a mass market house with no record of quality translations does not help either. He gets some recognition from fans, and there's some interest in possible predecessors like Gormenghast or Viriconium. But, all in all, editors like me still have to go out on a very long limb to publish people like Vande
rMeer or Duncan. Germany has a tradition of not recognizing fantastic literature as such if it is labeled high literature. Books published by major literary houses, from Garcia Marquez to Susanna Clarke, are widely praised, but not because of their opposition to realism. Right now I am ushering House of Leaves into print, and we are doing our best not to market it as horror, god forbid! This is, of course, a postmodern novel which only makes use of.you know what.
As for homegrown talent that might buy in to the New Weird tradition, there seems to be none in the German language. As much as science fiction seems to be slowly reaching the same level as in the United States of the 1960s, the writers of fantasy stick so close to Tolkien you can hear their orkish ears grind, while the darker writers still chew up Lovecraft. I may have missed someone out of the mainstream, and I do not want to be unjust; but even the better story writers ― Malte Sembten, Michael Siefener, Boris Koch ― have not yet spread their wings and left the shadow of tradition. Hopefully, someday they will. . . .
Jukka Halme, freelance editor and critic
FINLAND
Jukka Halme has been active in Finnish fandom for many years, and headed up the organization ofFinncon 2006. In addition to writing for many publications, he recently edited an anthology of primarily American and English "New Weird" writers called New Weird? Halme appears regularly in TAHTIVAELTAJA, one ofFinland's finest genre publications.
"BLURRING THE LINES"
In my 2006 anthology titled Uuskummaa? (New Weird?) published by Kirjava, I wrote the following definition of New Weird in the introduction:
New Weird is a form of speculative fiction that tries to blur the borders between various genres (science fiction, fantasy, horror, mainstream, etc.) while aiming for a more literate style of writing.. It is an idea of fresh fantasy, sharing common ideas about mixing together various genres, politics, freedom from the cliches, and with an overwhelming tendency to play with the form. It
wants to create something new, both linguistically and literally. It is not a movement per se, since when a movement takes shape it establishes itself, stops moving and thus changes into something academic ― and New Weird stands for Change. It needs constant interaction between the Reader and the Writer as well as bold, new ideas.
How would my answer change today? Not by much. I like the idea of a loose literary "movement" that isn't too formulaic and set in stone. Therefore, no manifesto, even though it might be fun to have one, but more like general guidelines. I like New Weird as a tool with which to bind together great stories that share originality and are spontaneously different from anything else before written.
I'm not sure when the idea of this whole new fantasy that is more literary inclined, more daring and/or genre-free, came about, but I do remember that in early 2001 the genre fan and writer Gabe Chouinard wrote something about a revolution that was about to happen in the field of SF and fantasy. He called it the Next Wave and I realised I had been feeling the same rumblings for a while as well. It took me a few years to gather my thoughts, but in the end I was thinking that there isn't necessarily a single next Wave hitting the field, but waves. So many interesting old and new writers were doing en masse what probably many had been doing all the time alone, thus forming something that could be construed as a movement, like New Weird. A flood of great works came out during that time: Perdido Street Station, Light, City of Saints and Madmen, The Etched City, The Physiognomy, Stranger Things Happen, etc. And this "movement" is ongoing, if I think of New Weird as something that combines new, weird, innovative, ground-breaking, and border-breaking, well-written fantastic fiction ― for example, Steph Swainston, Hal Duncan, Theodora Goss, Jay Lake, Nick Mamatas, Holly Phillips, M. Rickert, Sonya Taaffe, and Whoever-Else. Are they writing New Weird? Hell if I know, but I'd like to think so. Do new writers still break barriers? Do they write about important things, with style and verve and gusto? I would be seriously disappointed if not.
Are these writers creating, based on a common set of predecessors? To some extent, yes.
Personally, I like to think that Mervyn Peake is The Predecessor. Gormenghast, that brilliant baroque fantasy, combines the Weird from Weird Tales with absolute mastery of the language. One could argue about the importance of the original Weird Tales ― authors like Lovecraft and the lot, or David Lindsay and Lord Dunsany ― but to me the first among equals is Peake. He combines everything I see as New Weird in Gormenghast, especially with the first two parts. In a better world, Peake would be just as strong a fantasy-father in terms of sales as Tolkien.
As for the impact of New Weird, no one can say for certain, but I hope it has had an impact in the sense that it has brought more visibility to the writers labelled as such, preferably in a positive way. I think it has also had some level of influence on, for example, book design, with weirder and more original art replacing standard science fiction/ fantasy images. I may be totally wrong here, but also I have this feeling that there hasn't been truly a proper appreciation for more literary fantasy before, other than with the exceptional works of the field. Would it be wrong to say that New Weird has changed the profile of fantasy? Could New Weird be used as a vehicle for marketing this Really Good Fantasy? Should one dismiss New Weird as a subgenre and just use it as a marketing tool for this Really Good Stuff?
In Finland, the impact has been moderate in terms of author popularity. Looking back for the past few years, nearly everything in genre fiction that could be described as New Weird has come from the small presses, including my own part of the "revolution": Jeff VanderMeer, Jonathan Carroll, Stepan Chapman, M. John Harrison, you're small press here, baby! (This seems to parallel the trend in the United States, in terms of the most innovative work coming from independent publishers like Small Beer, Subterranean, Ministry of Whimsy, Prime, through venues such as Leviathan, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Electric Velocipede and Fantasy, just to name a few.)
However, in terms of an explosion of "New Weirdish" Finnish writing, a lot of the Finnish adult fantasy could well be described as New Weird:
Leena Krohn, Johanna Sinisalo, Pasi I. Jaaskelainen, Anne Leinonen and so on. There is a definite commonality of authors willing to break those shackling borderlines, and use the abundant possibilities of our own language in as varied and as rich a way as possible while seeking out new ideas, new taboos, and new territory. The same can be also said about writers for children and young adults, like Jukka Laajarinne and Sari Peltoniemi among others, who are constantly breaking the mould and creating something new and ― well, again ― weird.
Interestingly, a local literary movement rather like NewWeird is being used as a label for works that aren't "really" SF and fantasy, but realism-fantasy ("reaalifantasia"). This doesn't translate well at all, as realism-fantasy definitely isn't about being Real Fantasy, but more about (and I'm paraphrasing here): "genre-free writing, that flows between mimesis and fantasy; only the ratio of how much mimesis or fantasy there is, varies." A bit like New Weird, I think, since they add: "Realism-fantasy operates strongly in the everyday reality, but is not afraid to use all those methods that are unfamiliar to Finnish realistic writers, such as magic realism, science fiction, fantasy, psychological thrillers, detective stories etc."
Finnish fiction in general tends to have a very strong flavour of its own, with deep-rooted distrust for things fantastical, unless they derive from the local mythology and folklore. Johanna Sinisalo's Finlandia Award-winning novel Troll: A Love Story dabbles there, New Weirdishly, between various genres and styles, but staying still very much Finnish.
New Weird as I see it out there is similar but different from our domestic form. Our New Weird is possibly a bit more toned down, more rooted into our Finnishness.
Konrad Walewski, acquiring editor, translator, scholar, and anthologist
POLAND
Konrad Walewski is a Polish scholar, specializing in Anglophone imaginative literature, literary critic, translator, anthologist, and, most recently, the editor-in-chief of the Polish
edition of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION. He received an M.A. in English Studies from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. For the last five years he taught various courses on American literature at the American Studies Center, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland. He has translated into Polish, novels and short stories by such authors as Pat Cadigan, John Crowley, Kelly Link, and many others. Since 2005 he has been editing annually the anthology of foreign imaginative fiction entitled KROKI w NIEZNANE (STEPS INTO THE UNKNOWN). It is the continuation of the cult anthology series under this name edited by the Polish translator and editor Lech Jqczmyk and published back in the 1970s, which at that time was perhaps the only book-form presentation of Western science fiction in communist Poland.
"THE UNCLEANED KETTLE"
It seems that, contrary to prevalent beliefs and fervent declarations, both critics and readers are fond of literary labels as a specific kind of currency; among its numerous functions a label allows us to perceive certain processes occurring within literature as a comfortable series of books to be read. I think that, paradoxically, it is more natural to label those artistic phenomena that achieve a substantial intensity, integrity and scale than to pretend that they are merely a whim or hoax aimed at guaranteeing recognition and sales of a handful of novels by a group of authors.
This said, I identify New Weird as a literary strategy, a way of thinking about writing and understanding imaginative fiction, and, above all, a way of practicing it, which has turned out to be innovative not at the level of narrative technique ― there is not so much textual experimentation in it ― but rather at the level of setting and characters. Constructing baroquely lush cityscapes and eclectic, astounding locations, filling them up with multicultural and multiethnic societies of humans, monsters, and all kinds of their hybrid forms, creating complex characters and subjecting them to the dilemmas of the world they live in ― these are all characteristics of the New Weird practice. Not only did New Weird books transgress the generic limitations of science fiction, fantasy and horror, but, more significantly, emphasized the ongoing departure from the abused and exhausted Tolkienian heroic fantasy mode. What is more, its unprecedentedly dynamic and alchemically brave genre amalgamation resulted in literary synergies of high originality and attractiveness such as those in the books by China Miéville, Steph Swainston, Jeff VanderMeer, or Jeffrey Ford. The need to come up with vibrant, memorable venues as well as original characters and creatures became New Weird's most noticeable attribute.
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