The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [154]
Swainston: 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.
John Powell: "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.
Jonathan Strahan: 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.
Powell: 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.
Robertson: 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 spaceman 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.
Swainston: Jonathan: 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