The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [164]
Despite this possible radicalism, it is worth noting that one area hasn't been much explored within the texts being called New Weird: the interrogation of gender and sexuality. For instance, the New Weird could function as a framework for interrogating the discursive production of masculinity and femininity as exaggerations (enter: the grotesque) of sexual dimorphism, issues of power and the body, gendered social inequality, assumptions about normative sexuality and gender ― all of these issues could be productively explored or interrogated through a New Weird mode. It will be interesting to see if, in future years, feminist writers find the New Weird mode a productive space in which to undertake their work.
Another characteristic of the New Weird texts is the mix and medley of fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. New Weird texts often take place in extensively developed secondary worlds governed by metaphysics more magical than scientific ― the stuff of fantasy ― even though they are presented as the latter, the stuff of science fiction. See, for instance, the inter-dimensional paralyzing "oneirochromatophores" of the slake-moths' wings in Perdido, and the magic aether of Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages, which is the keystone of this alternate-history England's economy. This particular blend of genres, cast so often within a grotesque aesthetic, simultaneously seems new and harks back to the "weird" fiction of the early twentieth century, before the genres had emerged or coalesced into the forms as we know them today.
This parallels a current overarching impulse in speculative fiction -the speculative literary mode seems to be undergoing an upheaval, or at least a persistent interrogation, of genre boundaries. We can see this in the increasing popularity of slipstream, which obscures the boundaries between speculative and mimetic (realistic) literature. And we can see it as well in the Interstitial Arts movement, which is interested in cross-pollination, as they say, between the different arts. It's not just speculative fiction ― scholar Brian McHale suggests that since the 1950s, there has been influence back and forth between mimetic/mainstream literature and science fiction.although for the first couple decades, each was looking not at contemporary but older phases of the other. They finally caught up with each other ― both started looking at contemporary manifestations of the other ― in the 1970s or so (228). Today, this back-and-forth influence is visible in contemporary mimetic fiction like that of Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs, Angela Carter, and in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, as McHale points out, and I'd suggest also Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo ― and others besides. Perhaps cross-pollination can also be seen between fantasy and mainstream literatures in the work of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and in works such as Toni Morrison's Beloved and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, to name a very few. Mainstream and speculative fictions are merging to where some points overlap. I believe the New Weird is an example of that process. More specifically, the New Weird constitutes a unique moment or position in which overlapping speculative genres also overlap with mainstream literature.
So, to me, the New Weird represents a productive experiment in fantasy fiction. The New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s arguably embodied science fiction's claim to literary "seriousness." This desire for seriousness is not snobbery, as sometimes suggested by folks who overemphasize the entertainment function of speculative fiction; it's about recognition of the vast