The New Weird, p 1
The New Weird (Download new_weird_1.doc)
TTalkback: Harrison, M John: The New Weird
By MJH on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 10:39 am:
The New Weird. Who does it ? What is it ? Is it even anything ? Is it even New ? Is it, as some think, not only a better slogan than The Next Wave, but also incalculably more fun to do ? Should we just call it Pick'n'Mix instead ? As ever, *your* views are the views we want to hear--
By Neil A on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 01:44 pm:
Or NuWeird even, Noo Weiyerd for the Noo Yoikers.
By iotar on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 01:53 pm:
Is it a bit like science fantasy but with more than a passing nod towards horror? Presumably the "Weird" refers back to Weird Tales - a pre-generic pulp era where SF, fantasy and horror were less well defined. I'm guessing here, based upon the Mieville attribution. Personally I think "Weird Shit" would be a better label - I'd like to see bookshops with a Weird Shit section.
Next Wave kinda smacks of suburban hairdressers. Stu-Stu-Stu-Studio Line!
By Jonathan Oliver on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 03:43 pm:
Hi MJH
Who coined the phrase The New Weird? I haven't seen it in use before?
Jon
By MJP on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 03:48 pm:
Actually it's a mis-spelling. It should read, Own Wired. It means it's like one of those do it yourself transistor radio kits.
By Al on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 04:24 pm:
Would definitely rush to Weird Shit shelves, think they should be balanced with Heavy Shit also.
Dictionary Weird - 'Strange or bizarre... supernatural, uncanny'
Uncanny's nice - makes me thing of unheimlich, which I suppose is a v. good definition of it - uncomforting fiction...
By iotar on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 04:30 pm:
I'm not sure I'd go near uncanny shelves. I've seen what sort of injuries falling books can cause.
"Excuse me miss, can I see the Heavy Shit librarian?"
By MJH on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 05:24 pm:
Nuevo Weird ? Iotar, the Heavy Shit librarian, sums things up as ever. It makes that exact allusion to Weird Tales and especially the fact that, back then, in that marvellous & uncorrupted time of the world, everything could still be all mixed up together--horror, sf, fantasy--and no one told you off or said your career was over with their firm if you kept doing that. I heard it in conversation with China Mieville his self, and cheekily reapplied it in a preface to "The Tain" (mainly so I could use the title "China Mieville & the New Weird", which I thought was second in impact only to "Uncle Zip and the New Nuevo Tango").
He writes it. But who else ? And what are its exact parameters ? Indeed, do we *want* it to have exact parameters ? Do we even want it ? Is it, as Steph says, instantly rendered Old by being spoken of as New ?
By nick on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 06:50 pm:
Didn't I suggest to Andy that he should change the title of his flagship magazine, if he was going to change it to anything, to Weird Shit?
By Steph on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 07:45 pm:
The New Weird is a wonderful development in literary fantasy fiction. I would have called it Bright Fantasy, because it is vivid and because it is clever.
The New Weird is a kickback against jaded heroic fantasy which has been the only staple for far too long. Instead of stemming from Tolkein, it is influenced by Gormenghast and Viriconium. It is incredibly eclectic, and takes ideas from any source. It borrows from American Indian and Far Eastern mythology rather than European or Norse traditions, but the main influence is modern culture – street culture – mixing with ancient mythologies.
The text isn’t experimental, but the creatures are. It is amazingly empathic. What is it like to be a clone? Or to walk on your hundred quirky legs? The New Weird attempts to explain.
It acknowledges other literary traditions, for example Angela Carter’s mainstream fiction, or classics like Melville. Films are a source of inspiration because action is vital. The elves were first up against the wall when the revolution came, and instead we want the vastness of the science fiction film universe on the page.
There is a lot of genre-mixing going on, thank god. (Jon Courtney Grimwood mixes futuristic sf and crime novels). The New Weird grabs everything, and so genre-mixing is part of it, but not the leading role.
The New Weird is secular, and very politically informed. Questions of morality are posed. Even the politics, though, is secondary to this sub-genre’s most important theme: detail.
The details are jewel-bright, hallucinatory, carefully described. Today’s Tolkeinesque fantasy is lazy and broad-brush. Today’s Michael Marshall thrillers rely lazily on brand names. The New Weird attempts to place the reader in a world they do not expect, a world that surprises them – the reader stares around and sees a vivid world through the detail. These details – clothing, behaviour, scales and teeth – are what makes New Weird worlds so much like ours, as recognisable and as well-described.
It is visual, and every scene is packed with baroque detail. Nouveau-goths use neon and tinsel as well as black clothes. The New Weird is more multi-spectral than gothic.
But one garuda does not make a revolution… There are not many New Weird writers because it is so difficult to do. Where is the rest? Jeff Noon? Samuel R. Delany? Do we have to wait for parodies of Bas-Lag? MJH how many revolutions have you been part of??
The New Weird is energetic. Vivacity, vitality, detail; that’s what it’s about. Trappings of Space Opera or Fantasy may be irrelevant when the Light is turned on.
By Des on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 08:26 pm:
Vivid and clever, yes, and uncluttered. The text itself need not be untextured, though. Densely textured (or neo-Proustian) *and* limpid would apply to the New Weird at different times ... but always uncluttered by anything else or anything unconnected with the text. IMHO
Des
By Steph on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 10:11 pm:
Des: I agree. So the text is not 'baroque'; style must be elegant even though it can be dense. On a practical level, the speed of reading is very important for action scenes!
The surreal aspect is my favourite (I like colourful) but even in this the New Weird is not New - Moorcock's "End of Time" books.
The sub-genre is a combination of all these traits. But let's not make it too proscriptive...
By MJH on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 11:05 pm:
MJH: "in that marvellous & uncorrupted time of the world, everything could still be all mixed up together--horror, sf, fantasy--and no one told you off or said your career was over with their firm if you kept doing that."
You could also include 'realistic' fiction, thriller and symbolist fiction in that definition. The book I am reading, half way through it, Rain, by Karen Duve, uses alot of those categories. It's very sly about it, and very, very funny. It seems realist, straight sober, well-mannered fiction but it subverts the entire ball game. So far anyway. She is very talented.
By MJP on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - 11:06 pm:
Whoops - knew something was wrong with that last post. It's me, MJP, not MJH. Clear?
By Jonathan Strahan on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 12:14 am:
On 29/4 MJH wrote:
"The New Weird. Who does it ? What is it ? Is it even anything ? Is it even New ? Is it, as some think, not only a better slogan than The Next Wave, but also incalculably more fun to do ? Should we just call it Pick'n'Mix instead ? As ever, *your* views are the views we want to hear-- "
Or is it the sound of one hand re-inventing itself? I can't believe anyone is proposing another possible movement title. I mean aren't you a New Wave Fabulist or something?
Seriously...I think it's a load of old cobblers. Much like the new space opera (a term invented by a bunch of critics to cover the fact that they got distracted by cyberpunk and didn't notice that no-one had stopped writing the other stuff), the new weird/new wave fabulist/slipstream whatever seems to be a pretty happy and healthy outgrowth of some things that came before which would probably be much better off if left unlabelled and left to grow in the dark where they belong. I certainly can't believe that you (MJH), China, VanderMeer, or anyone else would be better off if you were packaged up with some handy-dandy label.
Best
J
(who obviously will do anything to avoid actually writing what he should)
By MJP on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 09:15 am:
I understand this idea differently. So called mainstream Anglo-American fiction tends to be very literal minded. A chair is a chair, a bus is a bus kind of thing. You can't have the vertical stripes of a John Lewis logo morphing into a vision of distant hills. It just wouldn't do.
Thus you have mainstream on the one hand and science fiction on the other. Only in science fiction does the logo morph, etc.
This bifurcation is less pronounced in European literature. The metaphysical *is* in the mainstream.
By Al on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 09:28 am:
Have been pondering all this myself recently - and ranting to people about it as non-realist fiction, ie fiction that's aware that it's not real (it's just ink on paper, at the end of the day) and does interesting things with this, at whatever level.
I don't see the point in trying to make a literal representation of a reality (itself a doomed enterprise) to talk about that reality, when you can have a dragon stick its head through the window, or the ghost of a spacemen wander past. For me, abandoning strict definitions of the real (tho' I think you still need emotional / thematic / internal coherence etc) leads to more interesting narratives, richer imagery, and a wider field of view in general.
I do hesitate slightly to put a name on things - tho' it's good to have an inclusive banner to march under, it's also problematic if that becomes an exclusive banner to judge with. My attitude - if it works, use it, if it doesn't, find out why, and use that knowledge. Having said that, there's definitely something developing out there...
By Steph on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 10:09 am:
Johnathan Strahan: yes, agree that these authors would be better off without labels at all. Each is so individual anyway: China is writing his own style, etc. But they're too smart to feel limited by the fact some reviewer has bounded them together.
That the authors have ten labels thrust upon the authors by readers/reviewers/publishers probably makes them want to rationalise it into one label! It isn't the authors doing the labelling, or wishing to join anything. Perhaps the rest of us are just trying to make sense of it.
This is not the crest of a high and beautiful wave - it's a sub-genre with a lot of developing to do. Good writers are going to do what they do regardless of others' labelling and they'll outlive any fad (if this really exists, and if it is a fad).
By Rick on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 10:23 am:
I have to confess that this thread represents the extend of my exposure to the New Weird. So far my initial reaction is similar to Jonathan S's.
Apart from the new label (Oh good, another new label...), what is new? Judging by Steph's explanation above, Clive Barker and Christopher Fowler have been newly weird for years, and possibly Banks as well sometimes. You might even be able to get away with hiding some of Moorcock's antiheroic stuff in there too - although perhaps not stylistically. A list of influences and sources from which borrowing is identifiable does not bode well for an exciting new movement.
The healthiest stuff has always mixed and matched or mismatched without regard for labels. With determined *dis*regard for labels. A new movement... Apart from stuff like cyberpunk and space opera, which have the definition built into the label thus making it really easy for everyone, many of the movements that have gone before seemed to represent more of a shape-shifting, natural mutation: magic realism, Brit new wave, slipstream. All reactionary, but with blurred or easily disposable manifestos.
New labels and sub-genres encourage people to try to write what fits fashion. Cyberpunk should have made that clear (shudders).
Don't like labels. Don't like canons. Like beer.
By Jonathan Oliver on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 10:33 am:
I think that Rick sums up that argument nicely:
"Don't like labels. Don't like canons. Like Beer"
I'll second that and, what's more, I'll drink to it.
(When I get home, obviously I'm not allowed to drink beer at my desk. BASTARDS!)
By MJH on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 11:04 am:
Hi Jonathan. The old dog learns to amuse itself wherever it can, sometimes by learning new tricks, sometimes by the copious use of irony, sometimes both. I believe I'm an honorary New Wave Fabulist, yes, along with about twenty other puzzled people. Generous of Brad Morrow to bestow that laurel on me after I so repeatedly savaged his New Gothic in the TLS in the 90s. As Steph remarked, "MJH, how many revolutions have you been part of ?" Two or three, I suppose, and sometimes I was there and sometimes I wasn't. That history gives me satisfactions, along with a point of view on names and naming, that you can't have.
One thing is, I think it reductive to describe China or Justina or Al Reynolds (neither do I think you will be able to describe Steph herself), as a mere regrowth from some buried root. You may be able to describe many US Next Wavers as that, I'm sure. Were you intending to be reductive there, Jonathan, or was that just an accident of prose ? Reductivism can be so close to belittling, can't it ? Don't you find ?
Another thing is, in misreading my opening post here (and ignoring the actual information contained in my second one) you underestimate not just the cheerful ironic glee of new-movement-naming; you underestimate the amount of agenda involved. If I don't throw my hat in the ring, write a preface, do a guest editorial here, write a review in the Guardian there, then I'm leaving it to Michael Moorcock or David Hartwell to describe what I (and the British authors I admire) write. Or, god forbid, I wake up one morning and find *you* describing me.
There's a war on here, Jonathan. It's the struggle to name. The struggle to name is the struggle to own. Surely you're not naive enough to think that your bracingly commonsensical, "I think it's a lot of old cobblers" view is anything more than a shot in it ? One more question, and I think very pertinent to that last one--
Why do you want us to remain in the dark where we belong, Jonathan ? What might your unconcscious motive be for wanting that, do you think ?
By Neil A on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 11:32 am:
Photosensitivity?
By Rick on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 12:09 pm:
Steph: "they're too smart to feel limited by the fact some reviewer has bounded them together".. definitely. The danger is probably for new writers who have yet to build confidence, literary identity and voice.
Mike: your last post is scary. You decribe a literary/political struggle that cries out for canons. Another weapon of ownership surely.
For the record, I thnk China M is brilliant both as a writer, and in his willingness to stand up and be counted where his politics are concerned. Justina is brilliant too. Neither can be described as "mere regrowth from some buried root". You've said yourself that there is nothing but influence. The trouble with labels and movements is that they imply parameters. They encourage people to disassemble what is a fully synthesised whole in a quest for its building blocks, its influences. To de-embed (?). There is plenty that's new or fresh... or that *feels* new and fresh. What are we after? To define it so we can break it down into identifiable components? What then? Understand the bits in a stab at literary determinism. Study enough bits and all possible texts will emerge? Ownership...
Re-reading the above I make no sense at all. Sorry. But *I* know what I mean so I have to post it anyway. Okay, I'm bracing myself...
By MJP on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 01:12 pm:
Structure is what I think we are after. (What I am, anyway.) Handke: "Work is almost all structure ..."
You get the structure, you can do the essay. The story. Or whatever. It falls into place. You can complete. No structure, no completion.
(Eg hard to write an essay on what science fiction is without limiting terms to structure it. On the other hand, what does limit it? Nothing? On these grounds - no essay.)
By Justina on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 01:48 pm:
It's like Venn diagrams, isn't it? Everyone involved in artistic creation has a whole lot of things going on at once. Some are big footprints over predecessors and some come in from the quirky sidelines of whoever's life it is and taken all together you have a full picture of what someone's doing at a particular moment.
Trouble is, all of those Venn circles are politically charged and economically charged, like it or not. The assignment of value (quality) is something you have to do because you're human and everything has to be categorised somewhere on the scale of Important To Me/Not Important To Me. We all know, mostly to our cost, exactly what the Science Fiction/Fantastic stamp is worth in the contemporary economy of literature. It's so powerful a stamp that Margaret Atwood's publicist has gone to enormous lengths (and has been aided) to make sure it doesn't appear in any review of Oryx and Crake in mainstream press. (I say this because as far as I've been able to track it through a discussion on FEM-SF, MA herself has never derided SF).
Saying these divisions are cobblers expresses justified exasperation but it's disingenuous. This is a war, the winners get all the loot and to name the Truth. I think MJH is right. It's also why his stand to claim the right to define, and China's stand, and my stand (see ICA May 14) is pissing in the wind unfortunately as none of us has Recognised Power of Naming.
I think that Literature is going to come to SF and try and take the entire thing over by main force in the next 5 years. Compare, for interest, two recent publications; Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars and Don De Lillo's Cosmopolis. (Personally I think the main difference will be that one is fun to read and the other isn't, but that's not what I'm getting at. I think these 2 books are about exactly the same thing.) I think this has to happen, because the world has turned into an SF world. This won't prevent SF itself remaining marginalised and associated with Trek and Buffy conventions, sigh, and the reason is that if you cold read a new book by an unknown author from a devalued genre then you will never set it up alongside a book from a well known author from an overvalued genre (see peer pressure, psychological weakness of human species, consensus etc...)
By Neil A on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 02:32 pm:
Or you could take the Nemonymous route... Not that the world is going to, but that would be a supremely brave direction for a movement to take... find a few decent publishers, TTA for example, who are willing to alter their marketing and follow Des' example, and a step can be taken towards Mike's 10 books in a library that you know nothing about but actually, yes, do want to read. I know I got a similar pleasure from reading Nemonymous as MJH described... ah, it wasn't on this thread, maybe it was on the canonicity one.
By Henry on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 06:26 pm:
It seems to me that to describe the New Weird as a movement or a school is to fall into a trap; one immediately starts trying to categorize, to reduce, to say that writers of the New Weird are x, y and z, and that x, y and z are what is important about them. It's only one short step from there to self-published manifestoes, official goals and Five Year Programmes. I reckon that it's more useful to think of the New Weird as an argument. An argument between a bunch of writers who read each other, who sometimes influence each other, sometimes struggle against that influence. Who don't ever agree on what the New Weird is, on where it starts and stops, but are prepared to harangue each other about it. Describing the New Weird in these terms involves its own kind of codswallop, but at least it's a less constricting kind of codswallop. But I'm an academic rather than a writer; I -look- and -read- but I don't -do- so I'm writing this from the outside.
By Cheryl Morgan on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 10:53 pm:
Labels are marketing gimmicks. I've been asked to be on a panel about the New Wierd (although it isn't called that) at Wiscon. The main reason the panel exists is that China is one of the GoHs and lots of eager Americans want to know where they can find "more like this". So yes, Jonathan, it may be a load of old cobblers from a literary theory point of view, but it is also an opportunity to sell more books, and perhaps even secure a US publishing contract or two.
So who wants me to claim them for the New Weird?
By Rick on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 - 11:14 pm:
I could live with that as an alternative interpretation, but then it becomes an in-crowd in-joke.
MJP: I think there's scope for debate about carts and horses here. Structure is often something that is only seen in retrospect. Depending on the method favoured by the writer, it is not unusual for structure to be the last thing on an author's mind. In these cases it emerges from the struggle and the resolution. Completion occurs and then, later, the structure is perceived.
I'm still mulling over Justina's post. It's the one that's made me think my opinion may be more flexible than I realised. It's taking me longer to think through than it took Justina to write... I'm a slow thinker.
Nemonymous is a labour of love and genius. I see Des Lewis as a splendid example of a brilliant label- and movement-resistant writer. There was a time when the British small press could have been defined in terms of the man.
It's starting to sound to me like it's time for a resurgence of the punk spirit that drove the late 80s/early 90s small press. I've just experienced a strange thing that nearly made me cry: a feeling of pausing to look around to get my bearings... and finding that I'm in a strange land of chattering classes, buzzwords and general post-modern style-over-contentness. Metawriting. I can't be clever enough, because it just doesn't interest me.
I'm off.
By Al on Thursday, May 01, 2003 - 12:13 am:
Hmm - labels certainly marketing gimmicks, and with my marketing hat on New Weird v. useful label, clearly defined area of fiction appealing to clearly defined target marketplace etc.
But I don't like talking about fiction like this, hold onto notion that you write what you need to write and that the great struggle as a writer is not to write like a part of a school but to write like yourself. Other considerations certainly present, but secondary.
If people can be recognisably grouped, it's I hope because they share concerns / strategies / effects / etc, because they share these they create fiction that has a common mindset - that overlaps with each other - not because they've taken a market driven or insecurity driven decision to do so. I hope that you are a certain type of person, with certain interests, certain concerns, therefore become a certain type of writer as a natural expression of where you are. Perhaps naive - certainly economically so.
Therefore label useful as a means of identifying that sharedness, but something that comes after the writing, not before it or driving it. Rick - totally agree - structure (at least, critical structure) often retrospective - a post rationalisation of something that was intuitive when carried out.
But naming is power (as MJH points out) because it defines the thing named, includes certain things / people / etc, excludes certain things / people / etc. But if the name doesn't work it will be shortlived. There has to be an interaction, a sense of appropriate relationship. If the name is wrong, created for short term political reasons, whatever, it will drop away. Hype great but temporary, it never lasts, it's quality that endures.
Hmm.
By JP on Thursday, May 01, 2003 - 03:09 am:
And what about - "Straight! It's the New Weird." Novels of piercing insight and clarity into everyday life, written by people who look suspicously like David Byrne.
By Jonathan Strahan on Thursday, May 01, 2003 - 07:06 am:
Hi Mike -
>The old dog learns to amuse itself wherever it can, sometimes by
>learning new tricks, sometimes by the copious use of irony, sometimes both.
I certainly saw the irony it, and even wondered if there was more than a little desire to struggle against the labelling impulse by throwing more labels out there just to mischievously confuse the labellers.
>I believe I'm an honorary New Wave Fabulist, yes, along with about
>twenty other puzzled people. Generous of Brad Morrow to bestow that
>laurel on me after I so repeatedly savaged his New Gothic in the TLS in the 90s.
I don't think I've heard of a single NWF who was pleased with or felt some connection to the label. I don't even think Straub had anything to do with it, so it's a little unfortunate it is gaining any currency.
>One thing is, I think it reductive to describe China or Justina or Al Reynolds
>(neither do I think you will be able to describe Steph herself), as a mere
>regrowth from some buried root. You may be able to describe many US Next Wavers
>as that, I'm sure. Were you intending to be reductive there, Jonathan, or was
>that just an accident of prose ? Reductivism can be so close to belittling,
>can't it ? Don't you find ?
No, I wasn't attempting to be reductive or to in any sense belittle the achievement of any of the writers mentioned in this forum. What I was suggesting though, is that the endless search by a small-ish group of commentators to label and sort what is happening in the genre is a) reductive itself and b) ignores the fact that many of those writers are wholly or in part influenced by existing traditions. I would also add that I strongly feel that any label reduces and limits perception of a work of art, and so is often less than helpful. I also note my own tendency to a) label and b) use labels. It's something I try to fight
>Another thing is, in misreading my opening post here (and ignoring the actual
>information contained in my second one) you underestimate not just the cheerful
>ironic glee of new-movement-naming; you underestimate the amount of agenda involved.
Well, I would say that rather than misreading, I took a particular approach...
>If I don't throw my hat in the ring, write a preface, do a guest editorial here,
>write a review in the Guardian there, then I'm leaving it to Michael Moorcock or
>David Hartwell to describe what I (and the British authors I admire) write.
>Or, god forbid, I wake up one morning and find *you* describing me.
Mike, the only way I'm interested in describing you is as you. Fiction by Mike Harrison is Mike Harrison fiction. It may echo something here or there, but it's still mostly Mike. As to the need to seize the labelling day, as it were - I understand and sympathise. I guess it's just my instinctive reaction to try to beat back the labellers and and prevent the very war you mention.
>There's a war on here, Jonathan. It's the struggle to name. The struggle to name
>is the struggle to own. Surely you're not naive enough to think that your
>bracingly commonsensical, "I think it's a lot of old cobblers" view is
>anything more than a shot in it ?
Not at all. I understand, but it wrankles. I don't think the war is a productive or intrinsically worthwhile thing because it leads to a reductive view of art rather than an attempt to understand what is actually being achieved by the artists in question.
>One more question, and I think very pertinent to that last one--
>Why do you want us to remain in the dark where we belong, Jonathan ?
>What might your unconcscious motive be for wanting that, do you think ?
I think this is your sense of mischief coming to the fore. I don't think you seriously believe that by ridiculing an attempt to drum up a label for work that may have some vague commonalities that I'm in any way trying to keep anything in the dark. If I have an unconscious motive, it's to not have to go through the whole stupid cyberpunk thing again and live through a decade of people with very little talent dressing their latest trilogy up in new weird drag. Besides, what's the matter with the dark...
J
By Jonathan Strahan on Thursday, May 01, 2003 - 07:14 am:
Cheryl -
I certainly take your point re: marketing. I just don't like labels.
J
By MJH on Thursday, May 01, 2003 - 10:33 am:
I agree with everyone here on the basic point. It would be difficult not to, having said so many times that fiction should be written by individuals.
But two things: there *is* a struggle to name, whether we like it or not, and that struggle is also a struggle to define and own. I think labels are crap, but I'm not willing to give up my own definition of what's going on without a fight. Especially, paradoxically, since one of the best things going on with this form of fiction is its genuinely unlableable (is that a word ?) quality, the sense I have of real, lively writers doing exactly what they want to do. So please excuse me, all of you, if I go over the top a bit about this sometimes.
I think I agree most with Justina and Cheryl's pragmatism here: anything that does a job for the fiction, I'm in favour of.
Steph, I take your point about ownership: I just don't ever intend to wake up being owned by someone else--otherwise, why be a writer in the first place ? The New Wave named itself (or stuck itself to the best label it could find from those on offer), not just for publicity purposes, not just as a flag, but because to name yourself is to take responsibility for your ideas. That's a way to prevent commercialisation and carpetbagging, especially now, when we're surrounded by middlemen who live by that kind of parasitism.
Henry: I so wholly agree with this: "I reckon that it's more useful to think of the New Weird as an argument. An argument between a bunch of writers who read each other, who sometimes influence each other, sometimes struggle against that influence. Who don't ever agree on what the New Weird is, on where it starts and stops, but are prepared to harangue each other about it. Describing the New Weird in these terms involves its own kind of codswallop, but at least it's a less constricting kind of codswallop."
Jonathan: you're right, of course, there was deliberate mischief-making in both my posts; and, yes, it was designed to get us all baying at one another; and yes, I wish to God we could have our cake and eat it. This whole process is as undignified as hell, especially right at the start of something that might get no further but which has to describe itself (and thus nurture itself) somehow.
Justina: Speaking of carpetbagging from the mainstream, I think you're absolutely right, and that a big convulsion is in the offing. We need to take the advantage and get our act together, certainly. But I'm not as convinced as you that we'll lose. (After all, we have Battleship Mieville.) It's up to us, as individuals and as sharers of some labelled or unlabelled umbrella, to make ourselves as strong and feisty as possible. There *will* be a melting pot, at some level, although personally I think it will take the form of a steadily-enlarging slipstream. Up to us to allow for that and see it as an opportunity, not a defeat. To be honest, I'm in favour. The prospect shakes me out of my old guy's lethargy. I'm ready to swim or drown.
As you say, we begin this process at the ICA on the evenings of the 14th and 15th of May, times to coincide with the Arthur C Clarke Awards on the 17th. Two panels of very determined people will be arguing the toss on all this, led by TTA's own Muriel Gray--
14th: Muriel Gray, Justina Robson, the novelist Toby Litt and Jon O'Connel, literary editor of Time Out clash on and around the question, "Is genre the new mainstream" ?
15th: Muriel Gray, Paul McCauley, Gyneth Jones and Andrew McKie (sf critic of the Telegraph and totally-committed supporter of what's going in new British f/sf), discuss just that, the state of British f/sf.
Kim Newman has found us, and will introduce, the original TV version of Nigel Kneale's "Quatermass & the Pit", which we'll show in two groups of three episodes after the panels. China Mieville (with Kim's help) has found us Nigel Kneale himself, and Kim will be interviewing this living legend before the showing on the 14th. Tickets from the ICA, who have a website at--
http://www.ica.org.uk/
--although at the moment they seem rather confused about both the nature of the event and its actual dates! More on that.
Please come along if you can, and join in the shouting. China Mieville and John Courtenay Grimwood have worked like heavy horses to organise the event and will be introducing the items. So you can shout at them too.
By Jonathan Strahan on Friday, May 02, 2003 - 06:05 am:
Hey Mike
You win. Just used new weird in a book review. Let's do a definitive anthology to celebrate!
J
By MJH on Friday, May 02, 2003 - 10:11 am:
OK Jonathan. Now, what shall we call it...
By Jonathan Strahan on Friday, May 02, 2003 - 12:18 pm:
Why The New Weird, of course. Or maybe Old Worlds: The Best of the New Weird
J
By Jonathan Strahan on Friday, May 02, 2003 - 12:20 pm:
That be Odd Worlds: The Best of the New Weird.
J
By MJH on Friday, May 02, 2003 - 06:33 pm:
Hi Jonathan. The Worst of Both Weirds ?
For full details, including where to book, prices, etc, on the ICA event, go here--
http://www.mjohnharrison.com/
Thanx Zali!
By Zali on Friday, May 02, 2003 - 07:06 pm:
No problem, yr 'onor!
By Jonathan Strahan on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 12:51 pm:
Mike -
So the next obvious question is, who are the new weirdos? We have China and Jeff and ...
J
By Cheryl Morgan on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 04:16 pm:
Thank you Jonathan, that's exactly the question I need answered for my Wiscon panel. (And you have the two names I have.) Suggestions would be appreciated.
By the way, I have suggested to Wiscon that "New Weird" be used in the panel title.
By MJH on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 04:55 pm:
Hi Jonathan. I think naming names would be making rather too much mischief, for me, at present. The Wiscon panel Cheryl mentioned will surely produce a list we can all argue over. Instead I've been mulling over Justina's point above, trying to match it to my own sense that something is happening here (but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones ?) which I see as really quite new in the history of the ghetto's relationship with the mainstream. As Justina says: it's a science world now, & they're just waking up to that out there, also how to speak about it, or let it speak itself through you.
This is in a way a development from the highly fashionable science & the arts movement which has been going on in other dsiciplines 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. One of the things we need to signal in the ICA discussions is that we've got a lot of experience no one else has, and we're not frightened to use it for their purposes as well our traditional ones.
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 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 irrelevent.
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 The Scar or 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.
By MJH on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 04:58 pm:
Sorry, Cheryl, I must have been writing my post as you posted yours...
By Jonathan Strahan on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 05:03 pm:
Cheryl -
I'm not sure who I'd add. Zoran Zivkovic, Jeffrey Ford, Paul Di Filippo, Mike Harrison, Elizabeth Hand, Mike Moorcock - you could probably make arguments that would have any of them fit a little. I'm just not sure who fits a LOT.
I don't really have a very clear picture of what the New Weird is yet, other than I'd describe it as the stream of fantasy that evolved parallel to, and at least in part in opposition to, Tolkien-esque fantasy, and that has somewhere at its roots the work of Mervyn Peake.
I should add I'm wary of suggesting this in this forum because I haven't given the subject enough thought yet, because I don't want to be reductive, and because I think the perception of what the New Weird may be is still in the process of forming and I think ideally it should be left to do so free of imposed descriptions by the likes of me.
Best
Jonathan
By Jonathan Strahan on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 05:45 pm:
Mike -
I made the mistake of not stopping to read Justina’s clear-eyed and well reasoned post earlier, for which my apologies.
If we set aside discussion of how the recent boom in British SF and fantasy (be it in the New Space Opera or the New Weird or whatever) is perceived within the genre, and instead turn our attention, as you and Justina both suggest we should, to how it is seen outside the genre and how that may be best exploited so that the winners do get all the loot and a chance at naming the Truth, then these are dangerous times indeed.
Justina says “I think that Literature is going to come to SF and try and take the entire thing over by main force in the next 5 years”. I think she’s partially right. I don’t think that Literature is coming to SF to take things over. Rather, I think the world has evolved to a point where we are so intensely future shocked that day-to-day experience (the stuff of Literature) has become the stuff of science fiction*. Now, I’m not talking ray guns and spaceships, but the notion that the future will be completely unlike the present is now a common perception. That’s science fictional, and what it means is that when Literature reflects life, it reflects SF. But it’s not SF approached from within the confines of the genre. It’s SF that lies completely outside that tradition.
And, writing this on the fly, I wonder if that’s also where the New Weird comes from. Not so much specifically from Peake or anywhere else, but from writers steeped in the traditions of the genre trying to make sense of science fictional 21st world.
How does that get us in the running to have a chance at being in charge, though? Justina refers to pissing in the wind, but hey, what else can you do? Give up? I’m not someone writing in the field, but I’m a passionate observer, and I think there’s a slight chance, and that chance is that you straighten your metaphorical tie, put down the cup of Earl Grey and start coming at the reviews editors and commentators and whoever else who control perceptions of what literature is. And you keep coming at them. And you’re fucking relentless. You do it through books like THE SCAR and LIGHT and NATURAL HISTORY and MORTAL LOVE and THE LAST WITCHFINDER and QUICKSILVER. And through smart manifesto anthologies that aren’t published as disposable genre paperbacks, but are instead pitched at places like the OUP where the mainstream is paying attention. If you do that. If you’re relentless, if you’re good, if you don’t stop, then there’s an outside chance that what will happen is that when Literature swallows SF wholesale and turns it holus bolus into the mainstream that it will have to, at least in part, resemble SF. It will have to, at least a little, contain us.
So, can you picture an anthology that doesn’t come out of Tekno Books downtown offices, but is instead smart and savvy, aimed dead smack at the heart of where science fiction and “literature” are going through this metamorphosis. Because THAT is the kind of thing that needs to be done if there is to be a chance of winning.
Jonathan
* I want to add (though it's not particularly relevant here) that I don’t think that science fiction has somehow “won” as I’ve heard a number of people say. Science fiction, to the extent that we’re talking about Hugo Gernsback sourced convention attending SF, has been completely bypassed. Yes, SF looked at how the future might be. But then the future happened, and the question there is what now?
By MJH on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 06:29 pm:
Hi Jonathan. You wrote--
>>and what it means is that when Literature reflects life, it reflects SF. But it’s not SF approached from within the confines of the genre. It’s SF that lies completely outside that tradition.
>>And, writing this on the fly, I wonder if that’s also where the New Weird comes from. Not so much specifically from Peake or anywhere else, but from writers steeped in the traditions of the genre trying to make sense of science fictional 21st world.
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more on both points--especially the second one. My increasing sense is that both the New Weird & the New Space Opera, although they have clear and acknowledged roots, are a response to *now*, rather than a kind of inturned, in-genre historical development, or just a development from an alternative but equally historical root. Those writers are writing about the world now. That's why I like what's going on so much, that's why it's all so invigorating: that's also why I want to be careful who defines it.
I can't fault your conclusion either: we have to get out there and do the absolute best we can in what will be a Darwinian environment. In fact, I'm optimistic enough to think we've already begun to do that. Iain Banks, China Mieville and Jon Courtenay Grimwood certainly have. Aside from their books, they are very, very good at relating to the "out there" in the practical ways that are neccessary. Our best ambassadors for a generation.
By Cheryl Morgan on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 08:28 pm:
Wow, we have some good stuff going on here. Thanks folks.
Good list of names, Jonathan. Liz certainly, though I suspect that Winterlong is the most New Weird thing she's done and she's rather steadily more Fantasy since. Must read some Zivkovic. Gene Wolfe has of course been blurring SF and Fantasy for years.
As to Justina's stuff, a number of questions occur to me.
Firstly one of the things that we often forget is that what We mean by SF is often not what They mean by "science fiction". Sometimes they mean the sort of thing you would see in Flash Gordon as opposed to the sort of thing you might find in Asimov or Clarke. Mostly they mean Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Files, X-Men and a pile of bad Bruce Willis movies. Disturbingly often they mean "people who believe in UFOs". None of this has any great bearing on what we do.
Next question, when Justina says that the mainstream is going to "take over" SF, what
does she mean? Does she mean that a lot of good mainstream writers will produce books like those written by Mike, China, et al? Then great, I want to read them. That's why I have a mainstream book featured in each issue of Emerald City. If she means that a lot of bad mainstream writers will come along and produce books like David Eddings and Robert Jordan, well who cares? I guess it will be tough for the existing genre writers who are doing the same thing, but maybe a bit of Darwinian pressure will be good for them.
Alternatively Justina might mean that the mainstream guys will write SF&F, have their
stuff put on the genre shelves, and crowd out the likes of Mike, China and herself so that none of us can get contracts any more. I can't see that happening. I don't think they will want to be ghetoised, and I our existing stars have a good enough reputation to survive that sort of thing.
Finally I guess that she might mean that SF as a genre will disappear (as I understand from a delegate to ICFA is already happening in Germany). That would then mean that our people would be competing with theirs for shelf space and whichever writers' books sold best would survive. Here we have to trust to the fact that, as Mike says, We are addressing the important themes and They are not.
Of course They have to understand that we are addressing those themes. With apologies to Jonathan who I'm assuming is in Australia, did anyone else read the review of Pattern Recognition in today's Independent Magazine. As far as I could see the reviewer didn't really understand the book at all, and I find it depressing that mainstream reviewers are still that a book can't say anything important about life unless it includes direct references to current political issues. There is still a gulf between out understanding of the world and theirs, and people who are unable to imagine anything beyond the end of their noses will never appreciate what we have to say.
By the way, good point about Gernsback and "fandom", Jonathan, but that's another discussion entirely.
By Jonathan Strahan on Sunday, May 04, 2003 - 04:03 am:
Cheryl -
The Gibson review is online here (http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=402553) and I've had a glance at it. Whatever the faults that PATTERN RECOGNITION may have, I think it's considerably more elegant than the reviewer suggests. I would say, though, that it's a fascinating snatch of a dialogue that is happening all around us:
GIBSON: I'm a writer living in a world influenced by a novel that I wrote and trying to write novels that attempt to address that world.
REVIEWER: I don't understand. The world has moved on. What are the protocols that you're using to try to explain this?
GIBSON: The tools and protocols of the mainstream. I'm writing a novel that has a science fictional understanding of the world set in an alternate history version of last year to try to understand the trends that are happening around us.
In a sense this dialogue is taking place on the very cusp of the moment.
More soon on other stuff...
J
By Justina on Sunday, May 04, 2003 - 09:01 pm:
Cheryl, Jonathan and MJH you all make excellent poitns. I agree with Jonathan's attitude and Mike's plan to take the battle out there, although I've been negative about it because I'm a kind of Eeyore person. Also had a great anthology for sale for 5 years that I thought was really interesting stuff - no takers.
Anyway. To clarify my meandering point on Literature vs SF mortal kombat. I think that all writers will have to do what Gibson claim's (soundbitily) that he's doing. It's not that the future will be different at all, the scary thing is that this is yesterday's future and it is just like yesterday in every way except that the inside of our heads is radically altered by information and technological possibility and our emotional selves are racked by unprecedented tsunami of compassion and terror due to this. Our future will be even more like this - on the outside, looks like contemporary life, on the inside FUCKKK!! And the individual prole has ever dereasing circles of comprehension and control.
From the SF angle we have a lot of scope for examining this - we're a veritable clinic of excellence -0 but mainstream writers haven't studied us much, so they're wallowing and mainstream readers are way behind the game on how our work works (and does that mean that it doesn't, I wonder?)
Literature will necessarily swallow our portion of SF (Cheryl, you make a good point that we aren't talking about all of it, only the high-end lit part) because the world we live in _is_ realtime SF. I guess I'm redefining Literature.
No, I can't see Martin Amis starting to rewrite AE Van Vogt's greatest hits. What's the point? The stuff they're already writing will stay firmly in their bit of the shop (proper books) and we will have to fight tooth and nail to get into it or else perish alongside Smallville tie-in novels. Look at PKD's history - STILL not accepted as the US greatest writer of the 20th century. John bloody Updike, I ask you (no, no shut up, he is very good but all teh same...).
It IS important that we get to say 'look, we've got this entire toolkit already worked out. No need to reinvent the wheel, kids.' It's important for US that we are recognised or yes, we'll get utterly trampled flat and ignored and it will be a pity (not least for our wallets, careers, and the entire bloody point of our lives). From their perspective we must look like a lot of geeks from the back of the class who are trying to mumble 'hey, I know somethin' 'bout technology.'
As MJH says we need articulate and strong-minded frontmen. He has the pick of them in Jon CG China and himself. We have to be able to talk coherently with Mainstream art before we can do anything else at all.
But I wonder if the 'rest' of SF, who are happy as things are, care two hoots for all of this. Who are we speaking for here? The entire genre or a few people?
By Cheryl Morgan on Sunday, May 04, 2003 - 10:05 pm:
Justina has a good point in questioning whether the mainstream will understand what we do. It is all very well having them recognise that the thing they have to be writing about is the impact of technology, it is quite another for them to recognise that we are already doing that. (Remember, they think we all believe in UFOs.)
Obviously we are getting there in having people like JCG doing reviews in high profile places, which helps, but there's still a long way to go here. So as I see it there are two possibilities.
Firstly, the mainstream folks could continue to fail to understand, in which case their writers will mainly produce bad SF and their reviewers will pan the stuff that is good because they don't understand it. Which leaves us pretty much where we are now. And given that what is in the mainstream will be mainly bad I don't accept that SF publishers will suddenly stop publishing the good stuff.
Alternatively they will get it, in which case they will recognise that we do it very well and we can all look forward to slightly fatter pay packets.
But Justina is right when she says that we are by no means spoeaking for the entire community here. The sort of people who continually vote Robert Sawyer and Kim Stanley Robinson onto the Hugo ballot don't want literature and are very happy in their little Gernsbackian ghetto. As I said to Jonathan, there's a whole other conversation there.
By Jonathan Strahan on Monday, May 05, 2003 - 12:07 am:
Hi Justina,
I'm going to skip a lot of interesting stuff in your post because I need to think about it some more (living here at the ends of the Earth it's tough to find people to talk to about SF in any meaningful way), and cut right to your last point, where you say:
But I wonder if the 'rest' of SF, who are happy as things are, care two hoots for all of this. Who are we speaking for here? The entire genre or a few people?
I think we're talking for a VERY few people. I think that as science fiction has increasingly become part of the day-to-day visual and conceptual language of the 20th and 21st centuries both the people who create SF and the people who consume it have splintered into smaller and smaller groups, and those groups have much nothing in common. This leads to one group of writers producing books that pretty much only speak to their intended audience, whether they be adventure fiction writers producing Star Trek novels, romance writers producing bodice-ripper fantasies, or serious, intellectual SF writers producing novels and short fiction for what I would for want of a better term call the core audience that subscribe to magazines like Locus and are aware of the history of the field.
The key point here is that I think there is almost no overlap between these groups. I would imagine that someone like Laurell K. Hamilton or Sara Douglass is very happy and thinks things are going swimmingly, and wouldn't see the need for this conversation. They're selling books, making money and have lots of fans. On the other hand, I'd imagine that writers like Mike, China and dozens of others might be less than satisfied with the status quo and how things are evolving, and are looking very concerned at how things might turn out.
So, what I think we're actually suggesting is necessary here isn't a revolution for science fiction at all, but rather a way for the best written, most challenging (these descriptions don't really work, but you know what I mean) SF to essentially abandon the rest of the field and meld with the conceptual high end of Literature, creating something new that follows our agenda, recognises our talents and people, and doesn't doom us to either sitting on bookshelves alongside Smallville or a lifetime of Don de Lillo does Silverberg.
J
By Jonathan Strahan on Monday, May 05, 2003 - 12:20 am:
Hi Cheryl -
A question that I'm struggling with at the moment is whether we are dealing with the situation that you describe where mainstream writers produce bad SF and the genre's best work gets either panned or ignored, or if we are actually dealing with a different situation completely.
I suspect that what is happening is that we get mainstream writers attempting to write fiction that comes to terms with today's future shocked world and, in doing so, producing something that LOOKS like bad sf, but is actually something ELSE. I'm not quite sure what, but something that's not-SF.
The principle characteristic of not-SF is a complete lack of SF's genre protocols, which are the things that make good SF seem like good SF to an SF reader and make it unreadable to a non-SF reader. I suspect, for example, that an average volume of Gardner's Year's Best would actually be unreadable to someone unfamiliar with genre protocols. We are literally talking to ourselves, when this happens.
If I'm right (and I may be completely wrong), then if SF writers want to make the move from the SF world to the Lit world part of what they need to do is to find a way to write SF that either translates genre protocols for readers at large, or that achieves essentially the same effect without actually using those protocols at all. I have a suspicion that this is what Gibson, however successfully or not, is trying to do.
As to whole other conversations, some time we're going to have to talk about Stan Robinson. I think you're giving him a little bit of bum rap over on Emerald City and are completely unfair to in any sense compare him to Sawyer. Stan may have his flaws, but I don't think he's really part of the Gernsbackian ghetto.
Best
J
By Cheryl Morgan on Monday, May 05, 2003 - 03:34 pm:
You are worrying me, Jonathan. If SF-ness is a function of containing genre protocols then presumably more genre stuff means greater SF-ness and you are essentially making a case for fossilization. As a corollary you would end up defining much of the Conjunctions anthology as not-Fantasy. I invoke Gary K. Wolfe (and the interview I've just done with Mike).
By Dan on Monday, May 05, 2003 - 11:03 pm:
J. Strahan said:
"If I'm right (and I may be completely wrong), then if SF writers want to make the move from the SF world to the Lit world part of what they need to do is to find a way to write SF that either translates genre protocols for readers at large, or that achieves essentially the same effect without actually using those protocols at all. I have a suspicion that this is what Gibson, however successfully or not, is trying to do."
Think you are probably right, Jonathan - assuming SF writers DO want to make that move. JG Ballard did it, as have others (MJH, in particular, as a fellow New Waver, has shown he can do it through his short fiction. Sorry, MJH, this might possibly count as my first ever pisspore attempt at a "review"). I've enjoyed Gibson over the years (though I've read nowhere near his complete fiction) and I'm looking forward to reading Pattern Recognition.
Interesting fiction always deviates from the safety of the genre.
Dan.
By Jonathan Strahan on Monday, May 05, 2003 - 11:50 pm:
Cheryl -
You can't invoke Gary - he works for me . Seriously, though, I don't think that your response follows automatically from what I've said. I think science fiction is, to some extent, comprised of a number of well-developed protocols that are understood by both writers and readers. These protocols are an intrinsic part of the evolution of science fiction over time, starting with how we look at a Gernsbackian ray gun and ending up with what we already understand about the implications of a Vingean singularity. If science fiction didn't possess any of these protocols, I don't know that it would be SF. And to say that I'm making a case for fossilization ignores that the fact that the evolution and deployment of these protocols has been one of the key developments in SF texts from "The Black Destroyer" to LIGHT.
As to the corollary with fantasy, I'm not sure it follows in quite the same way. Fantasy has different roots to sf, employs a different language, and many of the protocols that are the basis of fantasy are closer to what underpins non-genre fiction. I would add that I'd actually define more of Conjunctions as not-good than as not-fantasy. At this point I'd also add that I'm in the camp that is undecided about the genre-ness of Crowley's "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines". It's a wonderful, wonderful story (easily the best thing in the book), but I'm not sure that setting up a situation where the reader is expecting the fantastic to enter the story but it never does qualifies. I would add that this part of the argument is where I tend to drift into the "who cares?" camp. Crowley has written a magnificent story. Who really cares if it's genre or not? I honestly can't see how it matters at all.
Best
J
By GabrielM on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 04:32 am:
In terms of the genealogy of "New Weird", we shouldn't forget that it stems from "weird fiction", a term that has been in use from before Lovecraft but that he popularized and found especially useful to describe his own work and that of certain writers he admired, such as Blackwood, Machen, Ashton Smith. (See, e.g., his "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" or his chapters "The Weird Tradition in America" and "The Weird Tradition in the British Isles" from his seminal essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature"). Critics and writers did not begin using "weird" because of the title of "Weird Tales" -- it was the other way around. I like very much the fact that China has rescued the term "weird", but I appreciate even more the fact that he's given appropriate credit for the term to Lovecraft and his contemporaries.
By Jeff VanderMeer on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 04:55 am:
The marketing part of this discussion is relevant but not interesting. The literary part of this discussion is interesting but not relevant.
I think a lot of us would prefer no labels at all, and to be considered part of the wide spectrum of fiction. It certainly would clarify issues quite a bit, although I'm sure some would disagree. But then at least what I write and what others write could be understood in the context of both its genre and non-genre influences. And this is a more complete understanding.
When I read Mike H's work, some of the pleasure derives from the fact that he does find his influences everywhere. Which results in new combinations and thus mutation. Light's a perfect example.
Labels, to me, are almost always inaccurate. At best (although again, this isn't an interesting topic), an effective label might sell some more books. But on an artistic level it's a load of crap. Theoretically, if you're really good and if you really stay committed and don't get sidetracked, you're a moving target anyway. You don't stay in one place for too long. So you're left with a label that leads to misunderstanding, and which might never have applied to you even when you were first lumped in with the other literary convicts.
Let's examine specifics. Recently, Jeffrey Ford, Paul Di Filippo, China Mieville, and I have all created specific city-based fantasies. Because they share an urban setting, they seem similar. Because in the case of Jeff, China, and me these cityscapes include a healthy dose of the Decadent and Surreal, there also seems to be a similarity. But it's really like saying all painters who use oils and paint cityscapes are alike. The application of the paint, the brushstrokes, the colors, and much else are different. The philosophy behind the books is much different.
Sticking these examples into the same file folder marked "Surreal Cityscape Subgenre" doesn't do that much good as far as I can see. I kind of like "New Weird" because it acknowledges the pulp influences in the work, but it's still amorphous and inaccurate.
Now I'm going to go back to writing my novel. It doesn't particularly care what it's called as long as when I finish it it doesn't have five arms and no legs.
Jeff V.
By Justina on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 09:35 am:
Jeff, of course your points are artistically perfect - as a writer how could I disagree? But is an SF novel a bad novel full stop if it's so written that any average reader can't 'get into' it because they aren't soaked in genre habits? I think that question is artistically interesting and marketing interesting and relevant on both counts.
By MJH on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 11:04 am:
>>I think that question is artistically interesting and marketing interesting and relevant on both counts.
Me too, Justina.
Jeff says, "I think a lot of us would prefer no labels at all, and to be considered part of the wide spectrum of fiction."
I thought this discussion was getting into some of the practical aspects of that. There has to be a connection somewhere between theory & praxis, what you want & how you get it. Jeff's mentor, Mike Moorcock, was one of the most talented writers I've ever met at making that connection. Unfortunately he seems to have left behind him a definition of the process which Jeff translates as, essentially, if you're wonderful they'll come and find you; your job is to write the books & not think about anything else. This is massively self-limiting and not at all what happened with the New Wave, as a result of which MM was very successful. His apprentices (like myself) didn't do much, because they allowed the inverted arrogance of the "artistic" to leak into the praxis of being a writer, part of which is marketing. Jeff's argument here is grounded in self-defeating assumptions like that.
>>Theoretically, if you're really good and if you really stay committed and don't get sidetracked, you're a moving target anyway. You don't stay in one place for too long. So you're left with a label that leads to misunderstanding, and which might never have applied to you even when you were first lumped in with the other literary convicts.
I certainly agree. But again, as Justina points out, we're talking praxis here. I think Jeff's being a bit mischievous himself (must be catching): he's never been slow in coming forward on behalf of his own work. I think he's also missing the point of the discussion. We've got quite close in the last two days to describing the situation on the ground, ie the structures of thought which cause f/sf/h writers to use the word "mainstream" at all. *They don't use it out there.* You only need a word for "outside the ghetto" if you're in a ghetto. We are getting close to noticing this when Jonathan, Cheryl and Justina can work towards phrasing Justina's question, "is an SF novel a bad novel full stop if it's so written that any average reader can't 'get into' it because they aren't soaked in genre habits?" At the moment those structures are holding an unneccessary distinction in place from "our" side. The whole point of the melting pot is that all the different sets of protocols break down. I've been after that since I was twenty.
And what *about* China ? The success of his work in the broadsheets (& to an extent the success of Light, which certainly wasn't shy in advertising itself as not just sf but *space opera*), along with subsequent increased coverage & sales, hasn't depended on his learning to write outside Jonathan's protocols, but, it seems, by steeping himself in them, or at least some of them. This is new. As Dan says, I can expect my short stories to be received well in the mainstream; what I didn't expect was the burst of applause they gave me for Light. It's more complex than we think, guys. That would always be my message. We never get enough factors into play. Our models are too simple & reductive. But that mustn't stop us from choosing a direction to move in (the very point, or one of them, of Light) while we sort the model out...
Who wants to get labelled ? No one less than me, who's made a career out of refusal. More fun to do exactly what you want. But even more fun to do exactly what you want *and run off with the pot anyway*. That's what China's doing, and I want us all out there getting some. Because (altogether, girls) WE'RE WORTH IT. Not that I'm claiming we can get it by labelling ourselves "the New Weird" or anything else. All we're trying to do here is think outside the box.
By Jonathan Strahan on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 11:19 am:
Mike
I wonder, and I'm definitely not sure of the accuracy of this, if that one of the reasons for China's success (beyond the quality of the work, it's intrinsic merits etc) is that he takes the time in his story to unfold those protocols, to explain himself sufficiently as he goes, so that a reader unfamiliar with genre protocols can understand and appreciate what he does. I wonder if that's one of the reasons his books are so long?
Jonathan
PS: Could you email me at jstrahan@iinet.net.au?
By MJH on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 12:40 pm:
Cool, Jonathan. Try & write every book as if it was the first book written. We're bad at that because the opposite--build every book on the assumption that every reader has read every other book like this--is at the very basis of all genre (and of all in-genre theory). Genre becomes, if it's allowed to, infinitely self-reflexive. Lazy writers freeload on that prepared audience. While loonies of invention just spin-off notions from notions already spun off from previous spun-off notions: result total unreadability except by the cognoscenti. Ever heard that complaint before ? Oh yes. It's the one made most by sf people about mainstream lit-fic...
If you do Pick'n'Mix, you have to bring the reader into a new world every time you write a book. Sf used to do that. It used to understand how to do that. It used to be a kind of travel writing. Now no-one does it.
This is part of addressing the idea of "them" failing to understand "us". We may have to do it by understanding how they read & think, not the other way round. They aren't going to do it. We can forget them coming to us. That's part of doing nothing & waiting for them to discover us & sanctify us & realise their mistake & beg for forgiveness for not understanding how cool we were all along, etc etc. Forget it. There's no practical *reason* for any of them--writers, critics, lit eds, readers--to do that.
PS: I don't think bringing the reader into your world neccessarily means writing longer books. There are lots of other ways of doing that at lengths as short as the short story.
By MJH on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 01:09 pm:
PPS: Horror fiction was always good at that, too, bringing the reader gently into a world that would only exist as long as the story.
Actually, fuck it, that's what *every* kind of writing is good at. Know Patagonia ? Ever been to Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin ? Ever been Bruce Chatwin ? No to all of those, but you can still read In Patagonia. That's because he's a writer and doing his job, ie writing for *people*, not some lazy fucking Patagonia-freak trading off the existence of other Patagonia-freaks as a cheap audience...
My problem is, if I think about this for a second too long my anger knows no bounds.
By jeff ford on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 02:11 pm:
My two cents on China's success with readers --
I think that Perdido and The Scar, as much as they are brand new in many ways, are really the culmination of what has long been promised by "fat fantasy" and never really delivered. These two books are truly epics. They are highly cinematic (I mean this in relation to the reader's inner eye) and a rich rewarding repast of charactrer and concept, whereas in the relatively recent past books that promised this scope were usually so much sawdust. What he has that draws readers is a comprehensive and unyielding power of vision. That energy excites readers. The weird, the fine writing, all add to relaying that vision, but I think the world he writes about is truly alive for him in his own imagination. This is something that can't be duplicated, although I'm sure there will be many who will try.
Best,
Jeff
By Jonathan Strahan on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 03:02 pm:
Justina & Jeff Ford: Couldn't agree more.
Mike: I'll have to apologise for whatever in my post irritated you so much. I'm half jet-lagged by a three year old who hasn't slept the night through in a week, and I'm fitting these posts in where I can (and, unfortunately, not always able to find the time to respond to all of them that I'd like to), so they're not always as well-reasoned as they might be.
I should clarify as a position that I don't support laziness or infinitely self-reflexive genre fiction. I don't believe a writer should do, or needs to, go back to first principles every time. I don't believe you need to talk down to or simplify what you do for a non-genre audience. I do believe that excellence will be recognised and that it may even be recognised widely. That said, I think science fiction has a language and if you speak it densely it makes it hard for the unitiated to parse what you're attempting.
I'm actually torn on a lot of this stuff, to be frank. On one hand, I think a writer should write whatever they want, and do it as well as they possibly can. Then they put on their marketing hat and find a way to make it stick in the larger world. I don't think labels are artistically useful, though I do recognise their marketing value. I don't believe in limiting or reducing an artist, either through what they are allowed to do or by how you describe them.
What else? I agree completely when you say "I don't think bringing the reader into your world neccessarily means writing longer books." I don't think I was suggesting that with my comment re: China, but it may have read like that.
On horror fiction and travel fiction: neither tends to speak its own language quite so densely or self-reflexively as science fiction can at times. Maybe that's the problem with my comments, though. I don't know. Maybe good science fiction shouldn't be so self-reflexive, though I think a lot of it is.
I guess the question to ask back is what should writers be doing then, to achieve what we've been talking about?
J
By jeff ford on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 03:11 pm:
In addition, I think in the work of the other writers mentioned above, VanderMeer, DiFillipo, MJH, and I'll throw myself in here if you don't mind (I won't hold it against you if you do), the sense of artifice is much more evident in the reading experience than in a work like Perdido or The Scar. I'm not saying that we lack vision or that China lacks craft, but what is breathtaking to me as far as a story like "Egnaro" is concerned are the choices that have obviously been made by the writer. In China's epics there are scenes that, if taken individually, would seem like they should be cut, but in the overall flow and effect of the book it is obvious they have to be included because what one is reading for is the entirety of the vision. In Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen, the artifice becomes in a way the vision. I'm not say ing that one of these types of writing is superior to the other, they both render great works (here I'll recuse myself), but the overwhelming vision type of writing is very rare and its uniqueness is something readers seek out. I found the same to be true for Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass. Ok, no more from me. Fire when ready.
By MJH on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 04:34 pm:
Whoa, Jonathan, we're at cross purposes here. I was agreeing with you! I really have to *signal* more in these posts, clearly. My "Patagonia" rant was an ill-judged attempt to add emphasis to what I'd already said. (Just shows you should leave well enough alone.) No, I think that in the posts of the last few days we've come up with some really valuable insights to do with sf & the mainstream, & this self-referentiality of sf is one of them. I'm really anxious we shouldn't lose that insight, or fall into misunderstanding. I was agreeing with you, but just noting that there were ways of quickly drawing a reader into a world. That led me off on a typical rant, and I do apologise. Jeff Ford makes a good comparison of methods/intentions--
jeff, hi: I can only speak for myself here, of course. The gift about the Egnaro idea is that it works for both sets of readers--the idea of a kind of Edgar Rice Burroughs mysterious country is one that generic readers take in with their mothers' milk; but it can be made to reflect or metaphorises a yearning *everyone* feels. That yearning in itself enables you to condense, minimalise, pull the reader in fast then swat them with the ending.
I think we're all pretty much agreed now that one of the central ways sf has previously described itself--ie, a genre interested in catering to sophisticates of itself--is a bit of a limitation if you'd like to appeal elsewhere. To go back to one of the earlier conclusions of this thread--now that we find ourselves in the Darwinian confines of the melting-pot, competing with mainstream authors for the same subject matter & the same audience, we had better give up or modify those protocols that limit us. One of the ways to do that might be to try & write each piece as if a piece like that had never been written before. Egnaro certainly was, and I think that--ironically, considering how steeped China is in genre and his sense of genre--PSS and The Scar were written that way too. As Jonathan says, they bring the reader into the world carefully and gently. The Scar has the very basic Victorian/Edwardian mechanism of "letters from a journey" to do that.
By Faren Miller on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 05:10 pm:
Thanks, Jonathan, for directing me to this discussion! Interesting to read it all at once and find so many sub-threads. From a US perspective, some of the internal quarrels remind me of squabbling Democrats (though "genre" isn't so directly threatened, or discouraging, as those pols at present). As a reader/reviewer, for me the "label" topic is important because there's currently a great surge of "stuff I like", and the authors mentioned and/or participating in this discussion are part of that amorphous(?) group. As someone who's sticking my toe back into writing my own stuff at the fantasy end of Weirdness, I find the (fiction) writers' comments particularly interesting and cogent. Regardless of literary politics and "box office clout", more and more writers are turning to the Weird and I wonder what's driving us that way. Call the fantasy end retro -- hell, you could call it "Neo Calvinoism" if you want -- but I'd like to hear more about it.
By Cheryl Morgan on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 07:35 pm:
Ah, the sound of buttons being pushed! Mike's are to do with lazy writing, and I suspect we all agree there. Mine are slightly different. When Jonathan talks about "not-SF" my first reaction is to think of those people who believe that fandom and Worldcon sprang fully formed from the brow of Ghod sometime in the 1950s and who scream "not part of our community" when it suggested that either of them might evolve.
So Jonathan, while I'm always happy to study the past, for the purposes of this discussion I'm more interested in where SF might be going. And if fantasy protocols happen to be closer to those of the mainstream, maybe that's because the mainstream has been more comfortable with what fantasy is doing, but hasn't seen the need to adopt any SF protocols - until now.
Because now people are starting to realize that technology is an issue, and if you want to write about it then you'd better that thinking SF. Which is, I think, one of the main reasons why a bunch of us are going to be at the ICA next week getting treated seriously by The Establishment for the first time I can remember.
With regard to bringing people into a novel, those of you who haven't done so should go listen to Mary Doria Russell talking about "The Sparrow". She understands.
And on the subject of Weird, I've just started reading Tad Williams' "The War of the Flowers", in which Faerie appears to have adopted Victorian industrialism (they being always a bit behind us in fashions). Very promising.
By MJH on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 08:18 pm:
>>getting treated seriously by The Establishment for the first time I can remember
Well, Cheryl, we shall have to wait & see whether they do actually treat any of us seriously... But at least it's an announcement; and for China it makes a powerful closing of the circuit they opened when they *publicly* turned him down for inclusion in Granta's "Top Twenty Young Novelists" just--and only--because he's "genre". Time to come back at them.
I think I'd like to put my pick'n'mix hat back on now. I do think it's important we don't define ourselves as retro, precisely for the reasons you mention. It's retrograde *just* to be retro, and neither the New Weird nor the New Space Opera is that, in Britain at least. You cannot define either Justina or China as anything but of their time. Retro is imitable by people who don't care about anything: what China does is done from a viewpoint that can only be described as politically aware. Imitate the Weird aspect of what he does and you will miss entirely the New aspect. I think Jonathan said somewhere above that he dreaded the appearance of dozens of Epic Fantasy writers smearing the Fake Weird over their rubbish just too look new in a flagging market. As critics we could come down like a barrel of cement on that.
One of the other reasons I'm not sure definitions are a good idea is that I wouldn't want to help make an operating manual for carpetbaggers. I saw enough of that post New Wave in the 70s.
By Justina on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 08:58 pm:
Re: China. I've kept quiet on my China views until now. (drum rroll) But I think that what China has, apart from the talent, the craft, the imagination, the background, the education, the political smarts, the intellectual enquiry and the heavy throb of dark romance is self-confidence.
I don't know whether this is innate to his character or the product of his education and it really doesn't matter but it transforms his writing into something almost magisterial, in every sense of the word. With confidence you take your time to do the job of introducing and developing your world at your own pace in the sure knowledge that this is the right pace and this sense of 'being in safe hands' lets readers relax and enjoy, knowing they will be rewarded. It's one of the most important things you can have. Who knows if it comes easily to him or not, but it's the difference between great work and merely very good work and that's an ocean of difference.
China is exceptional because he DID fulfil the promise of large-scale fantasy and at the same time it wasn't just an escapist jump into consolation.
aside: Nobody can carpet bag anything of value anyway, at least, not to anyone who's SEEN the real thing.
By Cheryl Morgan on Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - 10:17 pm:
Mike: I'm not expecting an instant victory. Indeed, I'm expecting a long, slow campaign. But when I am hoping to get out of this is a few friends and allies on the inside.
By MJH on Wednesday, May 07, 2003 - 10:23 am:
Hi Justina: I think confidence is fantastically important for everything going on at the moment. It takes confidence to be inventive. It takes confidence to back your own imagination. It takes confidence to pull off whatever bizarre relationship with the real you've decided your world should have. That confidence was long ago lost by epic fantasists, who gave it retrospectively to Tolkien & a couple of other mentors, encouraging canonical texts to make their decisions for them. I think confidence is a brilliant explanation of China's ability to expand slowly into his own invented world (also why we feel as if we've been so completely drawn in--his narrative confidence grips the reader as well as the text): but actually, we all have bags of it in different ways. So that's another parameter of the New Weird and the New Space Opera: they're written by confident people. Nice one.
Carpetbagging: once the New Wave parameters were codified, there was a general softening-off as second generation writers stripped out the edgier stuff. I mean, I think it's inevitable that people seeking to understand a movement select the similarities rather than the differences between exponents. That drives you towards the mean--the main stream. New writers imitate that, & before you know it, the energy's gone, because it lay in the creative tensions between the different exponents.
Cheryl: "a few friends and allies" is what we need.
Faren: hi, welcome to the blind leading the blind. Are we going to let the received shape of it remain as amorphous as its methods & techniques ? I hope so. I think we should certainly split methodology, intent and history. I'm not so interested in history, myself; and it's difficult to identify a methodology when pick'n'mix is one of the parameters. That leaves us with intent... Oh, and personnel of course.
By Jonathan Strahan on Wednesday, May 07, 2003 - 11:50 am:
Mike -
I guess these things happen when you're posting to notice boards at the end of a very long day.
I agree that the discussions here are both interesting and worthwhile.
- Jonathan
By Jonathan Strahan on Wednesday, May 07, 2003 - 11:51 am:
Cheryl -
The button pushing thing is interesting, indeed. I understand your reaction intellectually about not-SF, but not really emotionally. I don't really come from a fandom/Worldcon background and have found some of that tradition's tendency to claim the genre a little excessive.
In any case, I agree that we're mostly talking about the future. The only reason it's worth touching on the past is to understand where we're coming from so we can better understand where we might go from here.
On THE WAR OF THE FLOWERS: I'll be interested to see what you think. I read it because I was struck by what an interesting and intelligent commentator Williams was at the recent WorldCon. The book has interesting points, but is a little flabby.
- Jonathan
By Jonathan Strahan on Wednesday, May 07, 2003 - 11:57 am:
Mike
Did that REALLY happen to China. I know I'm out of touch here in the farthest reaches of the modern American Empire, but I hadn't heard that they'd turned him down and