The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [168]
How do we pick books for our New Weird line? Every book must have something more than cross-genre leanings (science fiction, fantasy and horror). Every book must do more than attempt to create a story with the use of techniques more common to mainstream literature (like surreal visions for example). It must have a truly unique spirit and the desire to create something both good and new. These are qualities you see in the works of such New Weird predecessors like Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, or M. J. Harrison. I realize that what I've detailed may still seem too general, especially since I have to convey them in a foreign language, but such difficulties are at the heart of the issues with the New Weird movement itself.
All of this success and interest has helped in other, tangential ways as well ― like creating a Czech edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for example. It has also forced other Czech publishing houses to make room for books by fresh new fantasy writers like Daniel Abraham, Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Alan Campbell, Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, David Marusek, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross. Perhaps even more importantly, we can also publish special editions of anthologies containing work by foreign newcomers who don't even have books published in the Czech Republic.
This is the only true answer to the question. For us, it isn't "Maybe!" For us, the New Weird movement exists. Maybe it doesn't exist in the United States or Great Britain, but we have our own version in Czech Republic ― we've created it to work for us.
Michael Haulica, editor-in-chief, Tritonic Publishing Group
ROMANIA
In addition to his work for Tritonic, Michael Haulica is editor-in-chief for the FICTION.RO magazine and a decorated writer who was Romania's Man of the Year in Romanian SF&F for 2005. Haulica has had over fifty short stories and novellas published in Romanian, English, Danish, Croatian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Australian magazines. Haulica has also written several award-winning books while also writing columns on genre fiction for two of the most important Romanian literary magazines.
"THE NEW WEIRD TREACHERY"
For me, New Weird is science fiction, fantasy, and horror mixed together, with a literary approach. That's why the New Weird authors transcend the genres and anger the "hardcore" fans, especially the fans of any genre who feel they and their devotion have been betrayed by these authors. In the meantime, New Weird authors seem to forge greater alliances with "mainstream readers" ― those who usually don't read genre fiction but do read these weird tales because they are extremely well-written, like any other kind of "high literature."
Therefore New Weird novels are the literary shuttles between two worlds: genre and mainstream. They form first contact expeditions, and, in some cases, the second and third contacts come soon after.
New Weird is also a literature for twenty-first-century readers written by the real twenty-first-century writers. This is true even if the history of New Weird has roots in the last hundred years in H. P. Lovecraft's works, H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Adolfo Bioy Casares's La invencion de Morel (1940), and many other writers who lived with the consciousness that the world is a very weird place.
In Romania, New Weird has taken genre literature from the "genre ghetto" and given it to a larger audience. After I published China Miéville's New Crobuzon Trilogy, the first in a book line without Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror as a label on the covers (a trend continued with M. John Harrison's Viriconium omnibus), many "mainstream readers" began to read our science fiction and fantasy books. After that, it was easier for us to publish and attract readers for Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground and K. J. Bishop's The Etched City. Readers who enjoyed this "first contact" then moved on to books by Geoff Ryman, Kelly