The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [156]
Powell: 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. (e.g. 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.)
Justina Robson: 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, [Margaret Atwood] 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 [M. John Harrison] is right. It's also why his stand to claim the right to define, and China's stand, and my stand.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 five years. Compare, for interest, two recent publications: Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars and Don DeLillo'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 two books are about exactly the same thing.) I think this has to happen, because the world has turned into a 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 could 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.).
Henry: 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