The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [162]
Tracking Phantoms
DARJA MALCOLM-CLARKE
WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT the New Weird, it's almost as though they are talking about a ghost. Some have seen it, some are open to the possibility. Others are non-believers. All manner of discussions have cropped up around the question of whether or not something called New Weird actually exists. Does the name describe an emergent subgenre? Is it (merely) a coincidental proliferation of a kind of speculative fiction? Or is it a mass hallucination created by a constituency hungry for yet another way to categorize fiction? Regardless of the answers to these questions, the effect New Weird has had on the genre fiction community is undeniable.
However, I should say that on one level, to me personally, it doesn't much matter whether the New Weird is "real" or not ― the New Weird as an idea led me to a set of texts I might not have otherwise pursued. I wouldn't be the same reader, writer, or scholar if I hadn't read New Weird fiction. I daresay the genre fiction field wouldn't be the same, either, if the New Weird movement or "moment" hadn't happened. For me, it changed the kinds of questions I ask about literature and the kinds of things I want from literature; it served as a partial guide to what I wanted to do in my own fiction; and it changed what I thought I could get from a book.
I first came to the New Weird as a graduate student at Indiana University studying post-World War II science fiction. It happened by chance: I returned from a vacation to find that the SF Studies Reading Group I was part of had selected a text called Perdido Street Station for its next read. I didn't know anything about the New Weird then, but I was so drawn into the milieu of Perdido, and the way it seemed to mix the aesthetics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, while also admiring its use of language and style, that I was bowled over when I heard there was a "movement" of texts with somehow similar qualities. As I read more of this movement, I was captivated on every level at which I relate to books ― as a critic, writer, and long-time speculative fiction reader.
These texts made me read like a kid again, voraciously, with glee. It was hard to resist the sheer fun of their myriad fantastical/pseudo-scientific contraptions, settings, and worldviews ― the Fisherwives and Yardbulls in Paul Di Filippo's "A Year in the Linear City," which bear away the bodies of the recently dead; the parallel world called the Shift in Steph Swainston's The Year of Our War; the race of mushroom dwellers in Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen; Miéville's interdimensional Weaver in Perdido and the Possible Sword of The Scar.
All of those elements we could say defamiliarize the way we see our own world, and ask us to re-envision what we know about, or rather, how we conceptualize, the metaphysical makeup of our own world. They did it in a way that seemed somehow new even though their aesthetic struck me as vaguely familiar ― it evoked H. P. Lovecraft's grotesque cosmology and the bizarre worldview produced through his sanity-shattering elder gods.
But the grotesquerie of the New Weird wasn't the extreme cosmic horror of Lovecraft, or even of supernatural horror, but one of degree ― grotesquerie of exaggeration. New Weird had the sense of unease that is found in Horror, but that unease wasn't resolved in a moment of terror. Instead, that grotesquerie was part of the secondary worlds' aesthetic as a whole. It could be seen in elements like the Festival of the Freshwater Squid and in the Living Saint of City of Saints, for instance; in the mangled bodies of the Remade and the physical squalor and moral degradation of New Crobuzon in Miéville's Bas-Lag texts; the presence of Insects, with their mindless consumption of living beings, the Tines' "creative mutilation," and the Vermiform worm-girl in The Year of Our War; and the living animal amalgamations and rampant deformity of stillborn children borne of an entire city gone awry in The Etched
City. These elements mirror an aesthetic that can