The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [174]
In spite of this, there is a group of writers who, in their short stories and novels, have begun to approach creating fictional, fantastic worlds and characters in a similar way to that of New Weird authors. I think that it is very promising, and that we are on the verge of a revolution in imaginative fiction which, hopefully, will bring more novels as original and important as those of Dukaj and Huberath.
LABORATORY
Festival Lives
THE NEW WEIRD ROUND ROBIN
PAUL DI FILIPPO, CAT RAMBO, SARAH MONETTE, DANIEL ABRAHAM, FELIX GILMAN, HAL DUNCAN, CONRAD WILLIAMS
WE COMMISIONED this piece as a kind of laboratory experiment. Given a brief of coming up with a "New Weird" story, how would some of our finest fantasists generally not identified as "New Weird" interpret that brief? In a sense, we wanted them to show us their take on the term in fictional form. The result was never intended to be a complete story, although it definitely has closure. Di Filippo came up with the milieu and provided avenues for inspiration with his opening, after which each writer was asked to write about a particular element from Di Filippo's opening. The further brief was to advance the plot while also expanding on Di Filippo's milieu. (A conclusion created specifically for the internet by Di Filippo can be found on the Tachyon website at www.tachyonpublications.com on the page devoted to this anthology.)
― THE EDITORS
VIEW 1
Death in a Dirty Dhoti | PAUL DI FILIPPO
THE TERRORIST got off the train amidst hundreds of other noisy pilgrims, all debarking into the cavernous, cast-iron columned interior of the Battidarmala station on Khunds Road.
The perfect cover, thought the killer, not for the first time, and as if to reassure himself. Masquerading as a mindless worshipper ofChuzdt, during the locust god's own annual Festival. Millions of pilgrims flooding
into immense Riarnanth. The city authorities abandoning all checks of papers. Vast crowds interposed between me and any pursuit. Mindless religious fervor obscuring proper civic vigilance.
How simple it was going to be, to make the ruling Sengpa sept pay dearly for their cruel treatment of the Dardarbji.
The terrorist had been traveling for six wearisome days, his train stopping for new passengers, it seemed, at every other collection of four hovels or more, across three thousand miles of heterogeneous terrain: from Dardarbji itself, the small northern mountain-nestled city named for its majority sept, down alpine slopes studded with summer flowers, over trestles threading the foothill swamps of Swatay, across the endless village-dotted plains of Neethune, detouring most circumspectly around the jungles of Kubota, hugging the shore of the Verminous Sea for the last hundred miles, train tracks slicing through acres and acres of squalid slums, until finally, blessed and wicked Riarnanth rose up against a backdrop of towering cliffs, occupying the long, long, miles-wide strip of land between the Dallut Escarpment and the pleasant jade waters of Bangma Bay.
At random intervals along the curving cliffs, the terrorist noted as his chuffing train made its slow, populace-clogged way to the station, dozens of sizable waterfalls plunged over, their atomized mists casting perpetual rainbows. Captured at the bottom in big marble-ledged artificial ponds surrounded by tiled plazas, the resulting rivers rushed to the bay through an assortment of canals: the Meritful, the Easeful, the Tranquil, the Imponderable, the Torpid and others, trafficked by boats and bathers alike.
At last, inside the Battidarmala terminal, the tedious first stage of the terrorist's journey had come to an end.
And excruciatingly tedious it had been. Most of the trip had been spent standing, packed pelvis-to-buttock with seething humanity. Sleep was accomplished