But one garuda does not make a revolution. There are not many New Weird writers because it is so difficult to do. Where is the rest? Jeff Noon? Samuel R. Delany? Do we have to wait for parodies of Bas-Lag? [M. John Harrison,] how many revolutions have you been part of?? The New Weird is energetic. Vivacity, vitality, detail; that's what it's about. Trappings of Space Opera or Fantasy may be irrelevant when the Light is turned on.
Des Lewis: Vivid and clever, yes, and uncluttered. The text itself need not be untextured, though. Densely textured (or neo-Proustian) and limpid would apply to the New Weird at different times. but always uncluttered by anything else or anything unconnected with the text.
Swainston: Des: I agree. So the text is not "baroque"; style must be elegant even though it can be dense. On a practical level, the speed of reading is very important for action scenes! The surreal aspect is my favourite (I like colourful) but even in this the New Weird is not New ― Moorcock's "End of Time" books. The sub-genre is a combination of all these traits. But let's not make it too proscriptive.
John Powell: "in that marvellous & uncorrupted time of the world, everything could still be all mixed up together ― horror, sf, fantasy ― and no one told you off or said your career was over with their firm if you kept doing that." You could also include "realistic" fiction, thriller and symbolist fiction in that definition. The book I am reading, half way through it, Rain, by Karen Duve, uses alot of those categories. It's very sly about it, and very, very funny. It seems realist, straight sober, well-mannered fiction but it subverts the entire ball game. So far anyway. She is very talented.
Jonathan Strahan: Or is it the sound of one hand re-inventing itself? I can't believe anyone is proposing another possible movement title. I mean aren't you a New Wave Fabulist or something? Seriously. I think it's a load of old cobblers. Much like the new space opera (a term invented by a bunch of critics to cover the fact that they got distracted by cyberpunk and didn't notice that no one had stopped writing the other stuff), the new weird/new wave fabulist/slipstream whatever seems to be a pretty happy and healthy outgrowth of some things that came before which would probably be much better off if left unlabelled and left to grow in the dark where they belong. I certainly can't believe that you (MJH), China, VanderMeer, or anyone else would be better off if you were packaged up with some handy-dandy label.
Powell: I understand this idea differently. So called mainstream Anglo-American fiction tends to be very literal minded. A chair is a chair, a bus is a bus kind of thing. You can't have the vertical stripes of a John Lewis logo morphing into a vision of distant hills. It just wouldn't do. Thus you have mainstream on the one hand and science fiction on the other. Only in science fiction does the logo morph, etc. This bifurcation is less pronounced in European literature. The metaphysical is in the mainstream.
Robertson: Have been pondering all this myself recently ― and ranting to people about it as non-realist fiction, ie fiction that's aware that it's not real (it's just ink on paper, at the end of the day) and does interesting things with this, at whatever level.
I don't see the point in trying to make a literal representation of a reality (itself a doomed enterprise) to talk about that reality, when you can have a dragon stick its head through the window, or the ghost of a spaceman wander past. For me, abandoning strict definitions of the real (tho' I think you still need emotional / thematic / internal coherence etc) leads to more interesting narratives, richer imagery, and a wider field of view in general.
I do hesitate slightly to put a name on things ― tho' it's good to have an inclusive banner to march under, it's also problematic if that becomes an exclusive banner to judge with. My attitude ― if it works, use it, if it doesn't, find out why, and use that knowledge. Having said that, there's definitely something developing out there.
Swainston: Jonathan: yes, agree that these authors would be better off without labels at all. Each is so individual anyway: China is writing his own style, etc. But they're too smart to feel limited by the fact some reviewer has bounded them together.
That the authors have ten labels thrust upon the authors by readers/ reviewers/publishers probably makes them want to rationalise it into one label! It isn't the authors doing the labelling, or wishing to join anything. Perhaps the rest of us are just trying to make sense of it.
This is not the crest of a high and beautiful wave ― it's a sub-genre with a lot of developing to do. Good writers are going to do what they do regardless of others' labelling and they'll outlive any fad (if this really exists, and if it is a fad).
Rick (last name unknown): I have to confess that this thread represents the extent of my exposure to the New Weird. So far my initial reaction is similar to Jonathan S's. Apart from the new label (Oh good, another new label.), what is new? Judging by Steph's explanation above, Clive Barker and Christopher Fowler have been newly weird for years, and possibly Banks as well sometimes. You might even be able to get away with hiding some of Moorcock's antiheroic stuff in there too -although perhaps not stylistically. A list of influences and sources from which borrowing is identifiable does not bode well for an exciting new movement.
The healthiest stuff has always mixed and matched or mismatched without regard for labels. With determined disregard for labels. A new movement. Apart from stuff like cyberpunk and space opera, which have the definition built into the label thus making it really easy for everyone, many of the movements that have gone before seemed to represent more of a shape-shifting, natural mutation: magic realism, Brit new wave, slipstream. All reactionary, but with blurred or easily disposable manifestos.
New labels and sub-genres encourage people to try to write what fits fashion. Cyberpunk should have made that clear (shudders). Don't like labels. Don't like canons. Like beer.
Harrison: Hi Jonathan. The old dog learns to amuse itself wherever it can, sometimes by learning new tricks, sometimes by the copious use of irony, sometimes both. I believe I'm an honorary New Wave Fabulist, yes, along with about twenty other puzzled people. Generous of Brad Morrow to bestow that laurel on me after I so repeatedly savaged his New Gothic in the TLS [ Times Literary Supplement] in the 90s. As Steph remarked, "MJH, how many revolutions have you been part of?" Two or three, I suppose, and sometimes I was there and sometimes I wasn't. That history gives me satisfactions, along with a point of view on names and naming, that you can't have.
One thing is, I think it reductive to describe China or Justina or Al Reynolds (neither do I think you will be able to describe Steph herself), as a mere regrowth from some buried root. You may be able to describe many US Next Wavers as that, I'm sure. Were you intending to be reductive there, Jonathan, or was that just an accident of prose? Reductivism can be so close to belittling, can't it? Don't you find?
Another thing is, in misreading my opening post here (and ignoring the actual information contained in my second one) you underestimate not just the cheerful ironic glee of new-movement-naming; you underestimate the amount of agenda involved. If I don't throw my hat in the ring, write a preface, do a guest editorial here, write a review in the Guardian there, then I'm leaving it to Michael Moorcock or David Hartwell to describe what I (and the British authors I admire) write. Or, god forbid, I wake up one morning and find you describing me.
There's a war on here, Jonathan. It's the struggle to name. The struggle to name is the struggle to own. Surely you're not naive enough to think that your bracingly commonsensical, "I think it's a lot of old cobblers" view is anything more than a shot in it? One more question, and I think very pertinent to that last one ― Why do you want us to remain in the dark where we belong, Jonathan? What might your unconscious motive be for wanting that, do you think?
Rick: Steph: "they're too smart to feel limited by the fact some reviewer has bounded them together". definitely. The danger is probably for new writers who have yet to build confidence, literary identity and voice.
Mike: your last post is scary. You describe a literary/political struggle that cries o
ut for canons. Another weapon of ownership surely.
For the record, I think China M is brilliant both as a writer, and in his willingness to stand up and be counted where his politics are concerned. Justina is brilliant too. Neither can be described as "mere regrowth from some buried root". You've said yourself that there is nothing but influence. The trouble with labels and movements is that they imply parameters. They encourage people to disassemble what is a fully syn-thesised whole in a quest for its building blocks, its influences. To de-embed (?). There is plenty that's new or fresh. or that feels new and fresh. What are we after? To define it so we can break it down into identifiable components? What then? Understand the bits in a stab at literary determinism. Study enough bits and all possible texts will emerge? Ownership.
Powell: Structure is what I think we are after. (What I am, anyway.) Handke: "Work is almost all structure." You get the structure, you can do the essay. The story. Or whatever. It falls into place. You can complete. No structure, no completion. (e.g. hard to write an essay on what science fiction is without limiting terms to structure it. On the other hand, what does limit it? Nothing? On these grounds ― no essay.)
Justina Robson: It's like Venn diagrams, isn't it? Everyone involved in artistic creation has a whole lot of things going on at once. Some are big footprints over predecessors and some come in from the quirky sidelines of whoever's life it is and taken all together you have a full picture of what someone's doing at a particular moment.
Trouble is, all of those Venn circles are politically charged and economically charged, like it or not. The assignment of value (quality) is something you have to do because you're human and everything has to be categorised somewhere on the scale of Important To Me/Not Important To Me. We all know, mostly to our cost, exactly what the Science Fiction/Fantastic stamp is worth in the contemporary economy of literature. It's so powerful a stamp that Margaret Atwood's publicist has gone to enormous lengths (and has been aided) to make sure it doesn't appear in any review of Oryx and Crake in mainstream press. (I say this because as far as I've been able to track it through a discussion on FEM-SF, [Margaret Atwood] herself has never derided SF.)
Saying these divisions are cobblers expresses justified exasperation but it's disingenuous. This is a war, the winners get all the loot and to name the Truth. I think [M. John Harrison] is right. It's also why his stand to claim the right to define, and China's stand, and my stand.is pissing in the wind unfortunately as none of us has Recognised Power of Naming.
I think that Literature is going to come to SF and try and take the entire thing over by main force in the next five years. Compare, for interest, two recent publications: Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. (Personally I think the main difference will be that one is fun to read and the other isn't, but that's not what I'm getting at. I think these two books are about exactly the same thing.) I think this has to happen, because the world has turned into a SF world. This won't prevent SF itself remaining marginalised and associated with Trek and Buffy conventions, sigh, and the reason is that if you could read a new book by an unknown author from a devalued genre then you will never set it up alongside a book from a well-known author from an overvalued genre (see peer pressure, psychological weakness of human species, consensus etc.).
Henry: It seems to me that to describe the New Weird as a movement or a school is to fall into a trap; one immediately starts trying to categorize, to reduce, to say that writers of the New Weird are x, y and z, and that x, y and z are what is important about them. It's only one short step from there to self-published manifestoes, official goals, and Five Year Programmes. I reckon that it's more useful to think of the New Weird as an argument. An argument between a bunch of writers who read each other, who sometimes influence each other, sometimes struggle against that influence. Who don't ever agree on what the New Weird is, on where it starts and stops, but are prepared to harangue each other about it. Describing the New Weird in these terms involves its own kind of codswallop, but at least it's a less constricting kind of codswallop. But I'm an academic rather than a writer; I look and read but I don't do so I'm writing this from the outside.
Cheryl Morgan: Labels are marketing gimmicks. I've been asked to be on a panel about the New Weird (although it isn't called that) at Wiscon.
The main reason the panel exists is that China is one of the [Guests of Honor] and lots of eager Americans want to know where they can find "more like this". So, yes, Jonathan, it may be a load of old cobblers from a literary theory point of view, but it is also an opportunity to sell more books, and perhaps even secure a US publishing contract or two. So who wants me to claim them for the New Weird?
Rick: I could live with that as an alternative interpretation, but then it becomes an in-crowd in-joke. MJP: I think there's scope for debate about carts and horses here. Structure is often something that is only seen in retrospect. Depending on the method favoured by the writer, it is not unusual for structure to be the last thing on an author's mind. In these cases it emerges from the struggle and the resolution. Completion occurs and then, later, the structure is perceived.
Robertson: Hmm ― labels certainly marketing gimmicks, and with my marketing hat on New Weird vs. useful label, clearly defined area of fiction appealing to clearly defined target marketplace etc.
But I don't like talking about fiction like this, hold onto notion that you write what you need to write and that the great struggle as a writer is not to write like a part of a school but to write like yourself. Other considerations certainly present, but secondary.
If people can be recognisably grouped, it's I hope because they share concerns / strategies / effects / etc, because they share these they create fiction that has a common mindset ― that overlaps with each other ― not because they've taken a market driven or insecurity driven decision to do so. I hope that you are a certain type of person, with certain interests, certain concerns, therefore become a certain type of writer as a natural expression of where you are. Perhaps naive ― certainly economically so.
Therefore label useful as a means of identifying that sharedness, but something that comes after the writing, not before it or driving it. Rick ― totally agree ― structure (at least, critical structure) often retrospective ― a post rationalisation of something that was intuitive when carried out.
But naming is power (as [M. John Harrison] points out) because it defines the thing named, includes certain things / people / etc, excludes certain things / people / etc. But if the name doesn't work it will be shortlived. There has to be an interaction, a sense of appropriate relationship. If the name is wrong, created for short term political reasons, whatever, it will drop away. Hype great but temporary, it never lasts, it's quality that endures.
Strahan: Hi Mike ― "The old dog learns to amuse itself wherever it can, sometimes by learning new tricks, sometimes by the copious use of irony, sometimes both." I certainly saw the irony [in] it, and even wondered if there was more than a little desire to struggle against the labelling impulse by throwing more labels out there just to mischievously confuse the labelers.I don't think I've heard of a single [New Wave Fabulist] who was pleased with or felt some connection to the label. I don't even think [the editor Peter] Straub had anything to do with it, so it's a little unfortunate it is gaining any currency.
No, I wasn't attempting to be reductive or to in any sense belittle the achievement of any of the writers mentioned in this forum. What I was suggesting though, is that the endless search by a small-ish group of commentators to label and sort what is happening in the genre is a) reductive itself and b) ignores the fact that many of those writers are wholly or in part influenced by existing traditions. I would also add that I strongly feel that any label reduces and limits perception of a work of art, and so is often less than helpful. I also note my own tendency to a) label and b) use labels. It's something I try to fight.
Well, I would say that rather than misreading [your "cheerful ironic glee"], I took a p
articular approach.Mike, the only way I'm interested in describing you is as you. Fiction by Mike Harrison is Mike Harrison fiction. It may echo something here or there, but it's still mostly Mike. As to the need to seize the labelling day, as it were ― I understand and sympathise. I guess it's just my instinctive reaction to try to beat back the labellers and prevent the very war you mention.
"There's a war on here, Jonathan. It's the struggle to name. The struggle to name is the struggle to own. Surely you're not naive enough to think that your bracingly commonsensical, "I think it's a lot of old cobblers" view is anything more than a shot in it?" Not at all. I understand, but it rankles. I don't think the war is a productive or intrinsically worthwhile thing because it leads to a reductive view of art rather than an attempt to understand what is actually being achieved by the artists in question.
"Why do you want us to remain in the dark where we belong, Jonathan? What might your unconscious motive be for wanting that, do you think?" I think this is your sense of mischief coming to the fore. I don't think you seriously believe that by ridiculing an attempt to drum up a label for work that may have some vague commonalities that I'm in any way trying to keep anything in the dark. If I have an unconscious motive, it's to not have to go through the whole stupid cyberpunk thing again and live through a decade of people with very little talent dressing their latest trilogy up in new weird drag. Besides, what's the matter with the dark.
Harrison: I agree with everyone here on the basic point. It would be difficult not to, having said so many times that fiction should be written by individuals.
But two things: there is a struggle to name, whether we like it or not, and that struggle is also a struggle to define and own. I think labels are crap, but I'm not willing to give up my own definition of what's going on without a fight. Especially, paradoxically, since one of the best things going on with this form of fiction is its genuinely unlabelable (is that a word?) quality, the sense I have of real, lively writers doing exactly what they want to do. So please excuse me, all of you, if I go over the top a bit about this sometimes.
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