New Weird Anthology
Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:07 amJeff Vandermeer says the New Weird is dead. I for one am bloody glad about that. He says long live the Next Weird, and so do I, but let’s not call it the Next Weird, eh? Literary taxonomy gives me palpitations and dyspepsia.
Anyway, for anyone who would like to examine the exquisite corpse of the New Weird, representative bits of it are here in this handsomely packaged anthology, called appropriately enough The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, from Tachyon Publications. Authors include Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Clive Barker, Jeffrey Ford, China Mieville of course, Steph Swainston, yours truly, and several more. There are also critical essays (one by me, though it’s more of an extended drabble) and a round-robin story.
Despite not being a great fan of the New Weird label, I couldn’t be happier about being in this book in the abovementioned company. Many thanks to Ann and Jeff for their work. I’m certainly looking forward to getting my copy. Oh, and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review!
(On the subject of weird: When you put ants in the microwave (accidentally, I swear), they are still alive after 1 minute!)
February 8th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Oh, Next Weird is just a rhetorical device in the intro. No worries there.
JV
February 8th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Lol, Jeff, I didn’t know you read this blog. Or do you use a text-trawler?
February 8th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Ants don’t contain too much body fluid, so i am not shocked about it lasting a minute.
But what I want to know is how it got in the microwave in the first place, and if it amuses me i wont complain to green peace.
February 8th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Very boring answer - it was on the bowl I put in there. Either that or this $60 microwave isn’t airtight.
February 8th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
> Literary taxonomy gives me palpitations and dyspepsia.
YES. There’s an author I know who keeps going on about what he mostly calls “Post-Industrial fantasy” (though he keeps changing what he wants to call it), and he gives these rigid definitions of what it can and cannot be, and talks about how important it is to be giving precise names to these tiny segments of what can be done with writing, and about 90% of it sounds to me like so much fapping. What he actually writes under this header is interesting, though. I just stay away from him when he sounds off about terminology because, after one discussion we had about it, I’ve decided it’s best to agree to disagree.
February 8th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
MEN!! God, it’s always men. I swear. In my essay drabble I call the literary taxonomists a committee of Adams. Some must be women, I suppose, but I’ve never met one. The need to put everything into these tiny little boxes is like some sort of OCD on the Y chromosome. Maybe they want to be Robert de Niro going “This is this. This ain’t something else.” Only it is something else, snicker. Snickersnack. Vorpally. Drip.
But he should call it Post-Industrial Fantasy, since that is PIF, and taxonomical study on the subject can then quite neatly be called piffle.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
“like some sort of OCD on the Y chromosome”
This is commonly called Autism.
and part of the extreams of it from studies to date are blamed on the Y chromosome
February 8th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
He argues that we MUST give these things names and definitions and rules. But if we’re currently trying to do away with rigid genre boundaries in fiction at the moment, if we’re trying to say “why call it fantasy-variant-x-y or literary-variant-z-x, when such terminology confines fiction rather than allowing it to explore new areas and thoughts,” surely giving names to new explorations in fiction is only compounding the old problem rather than promoting change. I’m all for explorations, for ignoring the boundaries of terminology like “fantasy” and “science fiction” and so on. The term “interstitial” is one of the few that doesn’t seem to have negative connotations, because its definition seems to be that there need be no definition; you make of it what you want to, and the word is there only as a signpost to what can be done rather than being a wall around an attempt at rules. That latter is what this author’s arguments feel, to me, to be doing.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Colin - Oh, of course! I had forgotten autism. This obsessive labelling tendency does seem like something a person with mild autism might have.
Alankria - does he say why we must give these things names and definitions and rules? And does he respect the rights of other authors to refuse labels or insist upon labels of their own choosing?
(Am I ever likely to meet him, and how is his kung fu?)
February 8th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
One thing he said: “Anyway, naming is only part of it. When we name something, as humans, it takes up a space in the language portion of our mind. names are symbols that work as a form of grouping process- getting the right name will explain so much of what’s going on without needing to explain as much.”
A lot of what he’s discussing is what exactly is going on in genre right now. He sees that important things are happening, changing — the developing of Post New Weird, or Next Weird, or whatever it is. His most recent post in a community journal he developed for the discussion of this feels a little less restrictive (http://brokencircles.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/lets-start-this-whole-thing-over-again/), but at other moments it feels like he’s over-emphasising what exactly this movement can include, rather than desiring an open-ness, a willingness for ~anything~ to happen.
I like the idea of anything happening with writing, of not being able to anticipate where another writer will go next. I worry that saying “okay, now we’re doing Next Weird” is just going to wind up with a whole new generation of people needing to break away from it and open it up, only to close it back in again to “The Next Weird After That.” While examination of trends in fiction is interesting and can be informative, thought-provoking, my personl opinion (at this time) is that naming anything is actually counter-productive. He seems to be saying that you need to name it in order to examine it.
(If you read anything on the broken circles blog, check to see who’s posting; there are a few of them.)
(I have no idea how good his kung fu is.)
February 8th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
The post of his that got really got my goat was this: http://kapo.ws/wordpress/?p=1054 (What he is calling grunge fantasy there is what he renamed post-industrial fantasy.)
He says in response to me (I’m Alex D M there) that this is only one response to the problems he perceives with fantasy, that of course he doesn’t think this is the only way people can or should write in the future. But I still find the idea of picking out possibilities, naming and defining them, as counter-productive. Maybe it’s useful to have descriptors, maybe, but the danger is when descriptors become prescriptors amd then we’re back to having walls around us.
February 8th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Garg. He uses many words.
I made a little post.
I agree with what you say about descriptors becoming prescriptors. And as I see it, the more descriptors you have, the more holes you have between them and the more you have to run around filling them up with descriptors-as-putty.
Now I’m going to go draw Gwynn and the Rev in a gay moloko bar. Double plus retro smut weird ahoy XD
February 8th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
=D
February 8th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
I THINK I KNOW SOMEONE WHO FITS ALANKRIA’S DESCRIPTION.
(Glaring in Scott’s direction right now.)
On the one hand, I will accept you need some loose terminology for literature, for the purely practical purposes of aiding in finding what you’re looking for, if nothing else. On the other hand, setting rigid boundaries and exclusive definitions and arguing vehemently over what classification something falls under as if it freaking matters! (Glaring at Scott some more.) That serves no purpose whatsoever but to feed some rampaging nerd-ocd.
So many labels are getting thrown around lately, and I’ve a growing suspicion no one knows what many of them even mean.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I want to defend myself by saying that Genre is an animal that needs to be respected and defended. There are people out there who lump a whole ground of things into single genres which are not interrelated. For example, “Science Fiction and Fantasy”, although most fans enjoy both they are very different animals and should not be listed together on the same shelf.
Less practical annoyances is the overuse of the term “Speculative Fiction” when you mean “Urban Fantasy”; the use of the term “Science Fiction” to describe anything that uses space as it’s main setting. Star Wars, for example, is lumped in with movies like “Star Trek”. “Star Trek” is an idealized view of the future while speculating on the technology that has to develop to get us to that future; Star Wars is an adventure story with magic. They are not the same genre.
So I suppose that it’s not loose genre titles that annoy me most, it’s misrepresentation of genre.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Hiya Kirsten,
Now how does that old quote go? “Man is the animals who names things”, or something like that - with an emphasis on the ‘man’!
I confess I am regarding this artifact with a certain amount of nostalgia, even though ‘nostalgia’ may be the wrong term for so brief an event, so close to the present. What exactly “it” was, I can’t quite put my finger on – maybe it was just a generational change in genre fiction but when you put leading lights like Mieville, VanderMeer, Swainston and your own good self together, authors who seemed to be writing in a similar ethos and claimed literary descent from Harrison and Moorcock (leading lights of The New Wave, one of the last clearly defined genre movements), it sure seemed that something was going on. Hell, even Cheryl Morgan thought so!
I think that anyone interested in reading work by the most inventive authors of the last five years will thoroughly enjoy this little treat from JeffV and I do believe a is winging its way to me as we speak. If nothing else it feeds my obsession to own a copy of anything you’ve ever put into print!
All the Best,
Jonathan K. Stephens
Ps. I am greatly looking forward to a Wowee! finish to the Etched City Doujinshi. Let’s see, a bishop and a gunslinger walk into a bar…
February 8th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
^ I knew he was going to do that
February 8th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
er. Somehow the above comment ended up in the wrong place?
What??? How???
February 8th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
OH. Because someone else commented. HAHA, I’m just going to go sleep now before I hurt myself.
February 9th, 2008 at 5:23 am
GAY MOLOKO BAR YAAAAAAAY. They should have some of the old in-out perhaps? Well that may be a little..squick worthy.
I really need to get that book. KJ AND VANDERMEER? ORGASMIC.
February 9th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Fairly briefly… I agree with Laurie that a degree of labelling is useful. It helps the reader in a bookstore. The old divisions of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror seem ok to me - along with Romance and Crime. There will always be books that could go on the genre or the general shelves, or on one or another of the genre shelves, and the publisher has to make the call as to how the book will be packaged and marketed. Which sucks a bit, but if you start having shelves for cyberpunk or interstitial or anything fiddly and bijou like that, you’ll only increase the chance of a book being shelved in an inappropriate place.
Jonathan - We’re golden oldies already! If the whole thing has given the publishing industry an ongoing interest in fantasy with a liberated imagination, then I think the discomfort of the label has been worthwhile.
Before the term New Weird really came into vogue I talked to my English publisher about what I called The Mieville Effect, which was that a number of odd books - like mine - which otherwise would not have seen mainstream publication were taken by the big publishers in the wake of CM’s commercial success. He thought I was probably right. Always look for an economic cause behind any phenomenon, I say…
Scott - stop it you must, or blind you will go.
Jenna - ohChristsquick. Aiiieeek!! Honestly, I don’t think they could. I mean, their penises would probably flee in terror (in opposite directions).
February 9th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
^ And so would the rest of us.
February 9th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Quite understandably!
Btw, Scott - I think I get what you’re saying. You’re protesting the current division of works along “furniture’ lines (spaceships=SF, dragons=fantasy), but you see different lines, such as the theme or purpose of the work. Which is interesting. Your idea of genre seems more like the old one of comedy, tragedy, pastoral, picaresque, etc.
If I’m wrong, I bow out, none the wiser.
February 9th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Kirsten–I discuss that Mieville effect in the intro. I have to tell you–we’ve already had a ton of emails from new writers, writers in their 20s, who are so glad to have this anthology. Not to define a movement, but to introduce them to a ton of writers they didn’t know about and are now in love with. The fact is, in the US at least, a kind of whimsical slipstream has taken hold the last few years and the more hard-edged “NW” stuff is something people are really looking toward as an alternative. Anyway, I’ll be interested when you see the book what you think of it. In my humble opinion Ann and I have done what we set out to do: show that there was this confluence of new weirdness, that it had definite antecedents, was definitely not slipstream or interstitial, etc.
I agree about naming, but then think about this: Tachyon was going to do this antho whether we edited it or not. We just decided we’d rather be the ones putting it together since we were there, so to speak, rather than suffer someone who wasn’t there defining it and making a mess.
JeffV
February 10th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Jeff - I see… well, the things I’m working on now may be closer to the whimsical slipstream…but I’m just glad if there’s an interest in non-formulaic work of any sort. And if the NW has boosted the commercial profile of non-formulaic work and broadened readers’ horizons, that’s wonderful.
I’ll certainly read your arguments when I get my copy. I’ll tell you honestly what I think. Maybe I’m oversensitive to the label. I was very afraid of it becoming prescriptive. That’s why I’m so relieved to hear you call the NW dead. Maybe the commentatorial assembly will just talk about individual authors now. But I think my mind is a particularly non-categorical one by nature; I like to feel that I’m in a liquid medium that I can slip through without bumping into boundaries. My id needs to run around with its pants on its head.
That said, I am really glad about the way you and Ann did this anthology, with the critical/historical overview included. I’m glad the project was in your hands. For readers to see the variety of work is great. I hope it inspires young writers to do their own thing - whatever that may be.
February 10th, 2008 at 6:41 am
i have a better idea for genres,
Lets call it fiction and non fiction, and if people need a bigger seperation from there
bokks with words books with pictures books with 100 page so on and so forth
then with that system it stops people going on with artistic toss about why their form of expression should be called this as opposed to that when really all they are saying to the world is “I know how to make things sound or look pretty but all i really know is bugger all squared in a box”
February 10th, 2008 at 6:43 am
I played in a band that wanted to be some bloody obscure sub genre that no one had ever heared of.
and they got pissy with me when i said just call it Rock and be done with it.
February 10th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Was it something like this? (random from Wiki):
“As with most subgenres affiliated with metalcore, there is a strong feeling of backlash and resentment from traditional metal and extreme metal fans who feel as though their music is being co-opted and cashed-in for profit, and that bands such as Job for a Cowboy and Despised Icon don’t truly understand or appreciate their subculture. Though there are clues to the opposite (stemming from interviews and pictorials of the band members in standard death metal fan regalia), many would argue that metalcore-derived genres have a feel and aesthetic that does not truly mesh with that of other, more purist metal subgenres, which has caused many bands to find themselves mislabeled or attacked through the internet and in print in critical chastising, even before normal musical development can occur.”
February 10th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Close but it wasn’t metal.