The New Weird
Page 44
JEFFREY FORD'S stories and novels have been nominated multiple times for the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Fountain Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. He has been the recipient of three World Fantasy Awards, for his second novel The Physiognomy, the short story collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories, and his short story "Creation."
FELIX GILMAN was born and raised in London. He currently lives in New York, where he works as a lawyer. His first novel, Thunderer, will be published by Bantam Spectra in early 2008.
M. JOHN HARRISON recently won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel Nova Swing. Other books include In Viriconium, nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize, Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Memorial Award, and Light, co-winner of the 2003 James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His short stories have appeared in many venues, including the Times Literary Supplement and the Independent. Since 1991 he has reviewed fiction for TLS, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, and young adult fiction in the New York Times.
SIMON INGS was born with a gift for numbers called "synaesthesia," the ability to experience regular mathematical patterns as colors behind his eyes. Around the age of nineteen, his synaesthesia started to fade, and he began writing novels in an attempt to explore the loss. Ings has since taken up more direct ways of dealing with these ideas ― he is currently working on the science book The Eye: A Natural History ― but numbers continue to exert a strong pull on his fiction, as the title of his fantastically intricate twentieth-century historical epic The Weight ofNumbers attests.
KATHE KOJA has written numerous novels for young people and for adults, including Skin and The Cipher; her most recent is Kissing the Bee (Fsg/Foster). She lives in the Detroit area with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and blogs at koja.wordpress.com.
LEENA KROHN is a Finnish author who has received several prizes, including the Finlandia Prize for literature in 1992. Her short novel Tainaron: Mail from Another City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Her books have been translated into English, Swedish, Estonian, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, Latvian, French, and Norwegian.
JAY LAKE lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. Recent novels include Trial ofFlowers from Night Shade Books and Mainspring from Tor Books, with sequels to both books due in 2008. Lake won the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and has been a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be reached through his blog at jaylake. livejournal.com.
MIKE LIBBY is a multi-disciplinary artist who makes sculptures, models, collages, and drawings in a variety of media. For the past eight years, aside from developing his main body of work, Libby has maintained the side project of Insect Lab. In this widely acclaimed and extensive series, he adorns and integrates antique watch parts and electronic components with preserved insect specimens. Borrowing from both science fiction and science fact, these customized invertebrates present the confluences and contradictions between technology and nature, while providing visually rich results.
THOMAS LIGOTTI has published several books now considered classics of dark fantasy, including Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. His work appears regularly in horror and fantasy magazines. An interest in music led him to a collaboration with the musical group Current 93 to produce In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land, a book accompanied by a CD containing background sounds and music intended to accompany the reading.
DARJA MALCOME-CLARKE holds Masters degrees in Folklore and in English and is a Ph.D. candidate in the latter at Indiana University. Her areas of study are post-World War II literature (especially that of the speculative persuasion), gender and embodiment in literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her paper entitled "Subversive Metropolis: The Grotesque Body in the Phantasmic Urban Landscape," which addresses works by New Weird writers, won the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Graduate Student Award in 2006 and can be found in the Spring 2006 issue ofJournal of the Fantastic in the Arts. She attended Clarion West in 2004, and her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld Magazine, the anthology TEL: Stories, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, and elsewhere. She is an articles editor for the online magazine Strange Horizons.
CHINA MIÉVILLE was born in London in 1972. When he was eighteen, he lived and taught English in Egypt, where he developed an interest in Arab culture and Middle Eastern politics. Miéville has a B.A. in social anthropology from Cambridge and a Masters with distinction from the London School of Economics. His novel Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award. Subsequent novels The Scar and Iron Council have been up for multiple awards. He lives in London, England.
SARAH MONETTE, having completed her Ph.D. in English literature, now lives and writes in a one-hundred-and-one-year-old house in the Upper Midwest. Her novels are published by Ace Books, and her short fiction has appeared in many places, including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Alchemy, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Visit her online atwww.sarahmonette.com.
MICHAEL MOORCOCK is an iconic figure in literature, having written in perhaps every genre as well as producing such mainstream classics as Mother London. A multiple award-winner, he lives in Bastrop, Texas, with his wife Linda and several cats.
CAT RAMBO lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest with her charming spouse, Wayne. She is a graduate of both Clarion West and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Among the places in which her work has appeared are Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Asimov's SF, and Subterranean. Cat Rambo is indeed her real name.
ALISTAIR RENNIE was born in the North of Scotland and now lives in Bologna, Italy, where he works as an assistant editor. Prior to moving abroad, he worked as a painter and decorator and a core hand in the North Sea oil industry before studying and teaching literature at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He has published short fiction in Electric Velocipede and Shadowed Realms and non-fiction in the Scottish Literary Journal and Anna Tambour's Virtuous Medlar Circle. His forthcoming publications include short stories in Electric Velocipede and in the British anthology Fabulous Whitby (edited by Liz Williams and Sue Thomason). Among other things, Rennie is a keen musician and regular practitioner of outdoor activities and mountain sports, with a general interest in meteorology, wildlife, and folklore.
STEPH SWAINSTON is the author of three novels, The Year ofOurWar, No Present Like Time, and The Modern World, the source of the excerpt in this volume. She studied archaeology at Cambridge and then worked as an archaeologist for three years, gaining an M.Phil. from the University of Wales. She has also researched herbal medicine and discovered traditional medicinal plants new to science. Swainston is a past finalist for the John W. Campbell Award and the British Fantasy Award.
JEFFREY THOMAS has set a series of novels and short stories in the milieu of his story Immolation, which include the novels Deadstock, Blue War, Health Agent, and Monstrocity, plus the collections Punk-town, Punktown: Shades of Grey and Punktown: Third Eye. In addition, Thomas's work has appeared in such anthologies as The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year's Best Horror Stories, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Leviathan 3 and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. Thomas lives with his wife Hong in Massachusetts.
CONRAD WILLIAMS was born in 1969 and has been a published writer since 1988. He has sold around eighty short stories to a diverse range of publications and anthologies. He is the author of three novels, Head Injuries, London Revenant, and The Unblemished; three novellas, Nearly People, Game, and The Scalding Rooms; and a collection of short stories, Use Once Then Destroy. He is a past recipient of the Littlewood Arc Prize and the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Manchester with his wife, the writer Rhonda Carrier, their sons, Ethan and Ripley, and a monster Maine Coon cat called Reddie.
Editors:
ANN VANDERMEER has been a publisher for over twenty years, running her award-winning Buzzcity Press. Currently, she serves as the fiction editor for Weird Tales magazine. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with co-editor Jeff VanderMeer.
JEFF VANDERMEER is a two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and author of such books as Veniss Underground, City ofSaints & Madmen, and Shriek: An Afterword. The VanderMeers are currently editing the anthologies Best American Fantasy, Fast Ships/Black Sails, Steampunk, Last Drink Bird Head, and The Leonardo Variations, a Clarion charity anthology, among others.
Table of 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 H
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
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