The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [169]
This New Weird movement in Romania followed another Romanian movement in the mid-nineties. Readers and critics referred to me and other writers from this period as the "cyberpunk generation." However, it wasn't really "cyberpunk," in that the cyberpunk motives, attitudes, and technology were wedded to distinctly Romanian touches in terms of historical and mythic touchstones. Now, ten years later, I call it "technopunk fantasy." For example, we have created a weird being, the motocentaur, half-human, half-Harley Davidson (or any other motorcycle brand), writing fantasy like cyberpunk. These were good times for authors like Danut Ivanescu, Don Simon, Sebastian A. Corn, and me.
At the moment, the nearest thing to a New Weird Romanian author is Costi Gurgu, who recently published a novel called Retetarium, about a fantasy world where the supreme goal in anyone's life is to be a Master of Cooking Recipe Receipts. The author lives now in Canada, and I hope he will be published soon in English. He is a unique addition to the field, in my opinion.
However, all in all, I don't think there's a difference between the Romanian approach and the general New Weird. We are all writers in the same world. Sometimes a Weird World. Like our novels.
Hannes Riffel, acquiring editor, Klett-Cotta
GERMANY
Hannes Riffel was born in the blackforest, Southwest Germany, in 1966 and has been running a SF/F/H bookshop for fifteen years now. He has translated, among others, Sean Stewart, Bruce Sterling, Hal Duncan, and John Clute and edited, again among others, German editions of stories and novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, JeffVanderMeer, Mark Z. Danielewski and Maureen F. McHugh. He is the editor of PANDORA magazine and lives with his wife, the translator/editor Sara Riffel, in East Berlin.
"THERE IS NO NEW WEIRD"
We do not have anything like the New Weird in Germany. Europe may be culturally dominated by the United States, but that does not mean that we are on the same level of theoretical debate. Most of the important English-language writers get translated (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Hal Duncan), but there is little reflection going on about whether they are different and in what way. One of the laudable exceptions is Ralf Reiter, whose essays in the Heyne SF Jahrbuch display a sharp eye for literary evolution, and some articles published in Franz Rottensteiner's Quarber Merkur.
This may have something to do with why, for me, the New Weird is not a certain form or school of literature, but a gut feeling. As a bookseller and genre editor I have to read so much cliche fiction, that every time I discover something special, something that goes against the grain, the butterflies in my stomach go wild. It may be a useful description that those butterflies buzz around the work of China Miéville, and that they get excited in a certain way while I read Jeff VanderMeer, Steph Swainston or Hal Duncan. But they get excited as well when I read Elizabeth Hand or Kelly Link, and I would not consider those two ladies as being part of any kind of New Weird.
To be honest, I never thought New Weird existed at all. I felt the same way about Cyberpunk: some guys and gals wrote stuff that was different, referenced from each other, broke rules in a way that at least from the outside looked similar. But in the end Cyberpunk is only useful to highlight a certain development in the history of Science Fiction. We can talk or write about the way Snow Crash took its password from Neuromancer, Accelerando from Snow Crash, and so on.
Names like New Weird and Cyberpunk are just that: names. As a bookseller I try to find out what people like and get them turned on to books of the same ilk ― which is mostly like set theory, where you have to find out what goes together. To my mind naming things just pigeonholes them, and no one wants that to happen with a story or a book they've written. As I do not earn my money writing academic papers (although I've taught at university, so I know what it's all about),