"Amorphous and inaccurate"

April 1, 2017 1:11 AM

"Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird" by Jonathan McCalmont: "When popular cultural history tells us that the New Weird was born of lengthy discussions held on the now defunct TTA Press forums in May of 2003, it is tempting to imagine a well-ordered discussion in which a bunch of people hammered out a shared set of sensibilities, identified literary pre-cursors and set a creative agenda that would allow them to promote themselves as a new movement. This is not what happened ..."
posted by Wobbuffet (11 comments total)

I remember those discussions, taking part in them secondhand. That really was an interesting time, when wider political concerns and a new generation of f&SF writers combined to shake up some of the genre's staleness.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:54 AM on April 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Thank you for this. Weird fiction - new, old, and really old - has been a fascination of mine since childhood.
posted by mkhall at 8:41 AM on April 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

So many words that could have been better spent on actual stories spent debating labels.
posted by Samizdata at 11:20 AM on April 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

Yes and no. Labels matter. And it isn't as if there is a finite amount of words so that words spent on debating labels are words not spent writing stories.

And given the result, a revitalization of SF, I think the outcome was a good one.
posted by sotonohito at 12:43 PM on April 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I thought Weird was the New Black.

I'll just sit and wait until Wacky becomes the New Weird and we get an "edgy reboot" of "Quark".
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:33 PM on April 1, 2017

I have been attempting to digest this and I think it's just too much for me. That said, it's fascinating to me that these conversations actually happened between writers I have read... It never occurred to me that writers would try to define an emerging idea like this, rather that it appearing as an ex post facto explanation.

As a reader, I have seen things labeled in a marketing manner and I've always found these to be either plainly useless or a signifier of an extruded, cookie cutter product. Particularly with this term. As a reader of Jeff Vandermeer and Mieville and Harrison I do see a bit of shared DNA, but in general I see the application of "New Weird" to simply mean "Someone considers these writers to be of the moment".

It's curmudgeonly to say, but I do think the internet has made matters worse. There's a certain addiction to finding just the right place to slot a work in your database that feels like it comes from computing.
posted by selfnoise at 1:46 PM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

sotonohito: "Yes and no. Labels matter. And it isn't as if there is a finite amount of words so that words spent on debating labels are words not spent writing stories.

And given the result, a revitalization of SF, I think the outcome was a good one."

The only genre label that matters to me is the author's name. Other than that, I really don't "do" labels at all.
posted by Samizdata at 1:50 PM on April 1, 2017

And, you know, there IS a finite amount of time one can write.
posted by Samizdata at 1:50 PM on April 1, 2017

You may not care for genre labels, but publishers do, and SF has traditionally been a good niche for works that fall outside the realm of self-insertion fic about a middle-aged English professor who embarks on an affair with his beautiful young student. If you care about writing about worlds which do not, or could not, exist being a career to pursue, I would suggest paying some attention to genre (not, of course, being an indiscriminate consumer of anything with spaceships on the cover).
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 4:45 AM on April 2, 2017

Wrinkled Stumpskin: "You may not care for genre labels, but publishers do, and SF has traditionally been a good niche for works that fall outside the realm of self-insertion fic about a middle-aged English professor who embarks on an affair with his beautiful young student. If you care about writing about worlds which do not, or could not, exist being a career to pursue, I would suggest paying some attention to genre (not, of course, being an indiscriminate consumer of anything with spaceships on the cover)."

That is what I use the author for. If I see, say, William Gibson on the cover, I know it will be about a certain range of things. If I see, say, Dan Abnett, I know to expect a different experience. If I see Kim Newman, I will see something else entirely. I guess, maybe, part of my problem is that I read a fair bit of genre straddling SF.
posted by Samizdata at 9:24 AM on April 2, 2017

Having finally made my way through the article, I find it both incisive and infuriating. I think its threatment of Kathryn Cramer encapsulates both neatly. At first McCalmont essentially tells her to shut up and accuses her of spoiling the discussion (echoing the treatment she was given by participants on the discussion board) but then he admits towards the end that she had by far the most clear-eyed perspective on what New Weird would become.

That said, I think he's right that there was a birth of a new kind of subjectivity in the first decade of the 21st Century that found expression in New Weird (and other ways too). What New Weird foregrounded in genre literature, or at least what I connected to in books which came out of that moment, was a radical empathy (as mentioned in the article). The example that sticks out in my mind is the way that Miéville described the love between a human male and a woman with a scarab beetle for a head. The way that the passion between them is described was deeply affecting for me and helped me open up the boundaries of my own empathy.

That's not the only way that New Weird opened up new "writespace" but it was significant. Of course this was something that many writers within science fiction and fantasy had done before but New Weird really leaned into that. That goes for the other things I connected with in New Weird, the carefree world-building and the avoidance of plot conventions, they were both fundamental to science fiction and fantasy as genres, and present in both. My feeling as a reader is that what gave New Weird its force was that it leaned heavily into the foundational aspects of genre literature and pushed through into fresh territory.

New Weird authors weren't first to write from the monster's perspective, that's a trope that goes back to Mary Shelley writing from the perspective of Adam in Frankenstein, at least, but they thought about in a new way. And they certainly weren't the first worldbuilders, but they had a different approach to it that felt ground-up (in both senses) instead of being a god's-eye-view (Ursula K. Le Guin has a similar approach as the New Weird writers, to name one of many forebears). Again, this existed before, but they took it in a new direction. Same goes for the ignorance of plotting. Things just happened in New Weird books, and that felt a lot more real than books with conventional plots (William Gibson is similar).

I think that McCalmont is very incisive when he connects New Weird with RaceFail '09. That subjectivity that was finding expressions, including New Weird, in the early part of this century, came from the radical change of discourse that the democratization of the Internet had brought forth. It allowed people who had been isolated within a mainstream to talk to each other about shared experiences. What had been unquestioned was questioned, forcefully.

One effect that resulted was that the humanity of people who had been dehumanized was asserted and pushed into the wider discourse. The once strictly enforced boundaries of empathy were flung open and people started to lean into what made everyone human. New Weird seems to me to be the genre literary version of a broader cultural shift in subjectivity. RaceFail '09 was similarly a genre fan expression of the broader cultural assertion that the lives of people dehumanized by the mainstream are of equal weight as those of people closer to the top.
posted by Kattullus at 7:20 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]