The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [1]
The Braining of Mother Lamprey | Simon D. Ings
The Neglected Garden | Kathe Koja
A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing | Thomas Ligotti
EVIDENCE
Jack | China Miéville
Immolation | Jeffrey Thomas
The Lizard of Ooze | Jay Lake
Watson's Boy | Brian Evenson
The Art of Dying | K. J. Bishop
At Reparata | Jeffrey Ford
Letters from Tainaron | Leena Krohn
The Ride of the Gabbleratchet | Steph Swainston
The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines | Alistair Rennie
SYMPOSIUM
New Weird Discussions: The Creation of a Term
"New Weird": I Think We're the Scene | Michael Cisco
Tracking Phantoms | Darja Malcolm-Clarke
Whose Words You Wear | K. J. Bishop
European Editor Perspectives on the New Weird | Martin Šust, Michael Haulica, Hannes Riffel, Jukka Halme, & Konrad Walewski
LABORATORY
Festival Lives | PREAMBLE: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
VIEW 1: Death in a Dirty Dhoti | Paul DiFilippo
VIEW 2: Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered | Cat Rambo
VIEW 3: All God's Chillun Got Wings | Sarah Monette
VIEW 4: Locust-Mind | Daniel Abraham
VIEW 5: Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes | Felix Gilman
VIEW 6: Golden Lads All Must... | Hal Duncan
VIEW 7: Forfend the Heavens' Rending | Conrad Williams
Recommended Reading
Biographical Notes
Acknowledgments
THANKS FIRST AND FOREMOST to Jacob Weisman and Jill Roberts at Tachyon Publications for making this experience so positive and energizing. Secondly, thanks to the editors and translators we met on our 2006 trip to Europe whose conversations helped stimulate our interest in doing this anthology, especially: Martin Sust, Michael Haulica, Horia Ursu, Luis Rodrigues, Jukka Halme, Sebastien Guillott, Toni Jerrman, Hannes Riffel, and Sarah Riffel. Thanks also to Cheryl Morgan, Jeffrey Ford, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Konrad Walewski, Nick Gevers, Kathryn Cramer, David Hartwell, and everyone else with whom we discussed "New Weird." Finally, thanks to all of the wonderful writers in this book, who were all very kind in allowing us to print or reprint their work.
The New Weird: "It's Alive?"
JEFF VANDERMEER
ORIGINS
THE "NEW WEIRD" EXISTED long before 2003, when M. John Harrison started a message board thread with the words: "The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?" For this reason, and this reason only, it continues to exist now, even after a number of critics, reviewers, and writers have distanced themselves from the term.
By 2003, readers and writers had become aware of a change in perception and a change in approach within genre. Crystallized by the popularity of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, this change had to do with finally acknowledging a shift in The Weird.
Weird fiction ― typified by magazines like Weird Tales and writers like H. P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith back in the glory days of the pulps ― eventually morphed into modern-day traditional Horror. "Weird" refers to the sometimes supernatural or fantastical element of unease in many of these stories ― an element that could take a blunt, literal form or more subtle and symbolic form and which was, as in the best of Lovecraft's work, combined with a visionary sensibility. These types of stories also often rose above their pulp or self-taught origins through the strength of the writer's imagination. (There are definite parallels to be drawn between certain kinds of pulp fiction and so-called "Outsider Art.")
Two impulses or influences distinguish the New Weird from the "Old" Weird, and make the term more concrete than terms like "slipstream" and "interstitial," which have no distinct lineage. The New
Wave of the 1960s was the first stimulus leading to the New Weird. Featuring authors such as M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, and J. G. Ballard, the New Wave deliriously mixed genres, high and low art, and engaged in formal experimentation, often typified by a distinctly political point of view. New Wave writers also often blurred the line between science fiction and fantasy, writing a kind of updated "scifantasy," first popularized by Jack Vance in his Dying Earth