The New Weird Archives
No one has centralized copies of the discussions of what "cyberpunk" should be. Bits and pieces exist in sources like Bruce Sterling's Cheap Truth. But the real discussion is mostly lost.
But electronic archives of the discussion of The New Weird do exist despite their disappearance from the Web a few years ago. There is a sad little "404 - Not Found" message at the pages where these discussions used to be, which has been there for a number of years. I've decided to host copies of the New Weird files that have been floating around in the aether.
So. HERE THEY ARE! (Back to haunt the lot of us.) The discussion happened in 5 segments:
- 1 (The New Weird)
- 2 (Function follows Form: New Weird 2)
- 3 (The New Weird 3: The New Weird)
- 4 (The New Weird 4: Own Wired)
- 5 (New Weird 4.5 : the net on both sides)
The discussion is quite long and some of the formatting gets lost in translation, but I've included links at the top of each page to text files with better formatting.
At the time I declared the exercise "The Mad-Hatter's Tea Party of literary discussion" and vowed never to do such a thing again. For more on my thoughts about it at the time, see my New Weird category.
MEANWHILE, Jeff & Anne VanderMeer have an anthology coming out on this subject which is sure to straighten us all out on what all the fuss was about.
(I gather that a computer game of telephone has mangled China Miéville's name throughout. I'll try to fix that this evening.)
(New Weird polemicist M. John Harrison shown above. Photo by Pat Cadigan.)
