Formalist critics call this estrangement: defamiliarizing the familiar, making it new. And as creative artists, whether we're writers, visual artists, or musicians, in some manner, to some degree, that is what we all do. Writers of fantasy, science fiction, and other arealist fiction, of course, work both sides of the street, willfully courting the unfamiliar, taking the familiar for joyrides out past the campfires, hoping they'll all get along....
At the baseline of creativity, meanwhile, lies a paradox. On the one hand, what we create has to be representative, alignable with the reader's experience of his or her world in such a way that it resonates—those Aristotelian recognitions. Yet countering such universality, what we create—our world, our characters, our trash cans, trains, and street signs—must be specific.
Rather than progressing, art moves forward by continuous self-edit and emendation, reinvesting itself with this bit of clothing, that contour or calumny, abandoned years before. From penny dreadfuls to P.I. stories to urban crime novels, from swing to folk to hiphop, each culture and virtually each generation seems to find its own twist, its own place to pitch a tent and go about the work of defamiliarizing dailyness.
Our most useful view of any new movement in the arts may come at the moment things begin palpably to change, that in-between stage where the fish has hauled itself up onto land and sits there thinking Now what?
Within the field of fantasy and science fiction, intimations of such a change became apparent in 2003 with M. John Harrison's entry on a message board: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?"
There followed a cascade of respondents and rejoinders. Often, when waters are so disturbed, potential swimmers find themselves rallying about a specific venue or work; in this case, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. And the beat went on.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's anthology documents “the moment or movement known as New Weird,” that particular moment when strains of science fiction, epic fantasy, and transgressive horror got thrown together in the basket and hauled up to the builders.
Of course that moment is gone in the very instant we fix upon it, as the editors acknowledge:
The constant flux-and-flow of support and lack of support for New Weird in the same individuals would be taken as ‘waffling’ in a politician. In a writer, it is part of the necessary testing and retesting connected to one's writing, as well as part of the need to continually be open to and curious about the world.
This comes as one of several footnotes to an introduction that is in fact a remarkably concise, thoughtful, and balanced essay on the “moment or movement.” The VanderMeers touch upon the lineage in Mervyn Peake, Jack Vance, and the New Wave; the influence of Clive Barker's grotesquerie; multiple, shifting discourses from Harrison, Miéville and others; the commercial and “corrosive” aspects of the label; what it may have wrought.
There are three sections of fiction here. The first, “Stimuli,” comes from pathfinders, with stories by Harrison, Barker, Moorcock, Simon Ings, Kathe Koja, and Thomas Ligotti. The second comprises China Miéville's “Jack,” Jeff Ford's “At Reparata,” K. J. Bishop's “The Art of Dying” and six more, works squarely in the rubric and bearing, as it were, the imprimatur. The surround includes thirty-odd pages of discourse—message-board transcripts, an essay, and three pieces written for this anthology—along with a final round-robin story written to embody strains and individual takes on New Weird. Co-conspirators here are the editors, Paul Di Filippo, Cat Rambo, Sarah Monette, Daniel Abraham, Felix Gilman, Hal Duncan, and Conrad Williams.
Some touchstones:
New Weird had the sense of unease that is found in Horror, but that unease wasn't resolved in a moment of terror. Instead, that grotesquerie was part of the secondary worlds’ aesthetic as a whole.
—from the essay, “Tracking Phantoms” by Darja Malcolm-Clarke
The New Weird attempts to place the reader in a world they do not expect, a world that surprises them—the reader stares around and sees a vivid world through the detail. These details—clothing, behaviour, scales and teeth—are what make New Weird worlds so much like ours, as recognisable and as well-described. It is visual, and every scene is packed with baroque detail.
—Stephanie Swainston, from the Third Alternative Message Board
While one might question the general reader's interest in what is after all rather a scholastic pursuit, there's little doubt that the editors achieve their goal. We have here a long thought suspended in time, a moment during which writers caught sight of, and struggled toward, new ways to (in Goethe's words) recreate the world around them through the world inside them.
Making no overweaning claims for New Weird, the editors are content to present the dialogue ensuing from work in evidence and from both formal and informal discourse that clustered about it.
"The struggle to name,” Mike Harrison writes in one of the message board entries, “is the struggle to own.” And the true revolutionary does not want to own; he wants only to transform. And perhaps, then, to have entered into history what his struggles have brought.
* * * *
More than anything else, perhaps, the revolutionary struggles upstream of received wisdom, against all that we know inviolably to be true, all the homilies festooning our samplers, our sound bites, our popular arts. He wants new glasses, a new prescription; new tools, charts, and tables. Things as they are, are changed upon the blue guitar.
In 1994, before any codifications of New Weird, Michael Swanwick published, as a sidebar to his novel The Iron Dragon's Daughter, an essay titled “In the Tradition...", in which he called for a new species of fantasy, one that might regather wonder and strangeness to the genre while also limning its worlds in convincing, realistic detail.
For an interview with Nick Gevers, Swanwick expanded on this, explaining that, as an admirer of classic fantasy, “the recent slew of interchangeable Fantasy trilogies” had hit him in much the same way as finding that the woods he played in as a child were now a shoddy housing development.
Consciously, I was trying to write a fantasy that was true to my upbringing and experience.... So when I came up with the image of a changeling girl forced to work in a factory, building dragons, I recognized it as an opportunity to utilize the kinds of environments I knew and had grown up with: factories, and garbage dumps, and malls and stripper bars, and to invest them with a kind of faerie glamor, which would in turn comment fruitfully on the world we have.
Though not a sequel, The Dragons of Babel is set in the same world as that earlier novel, cybernetic jet fighters crashing near isolated villages, elves and alchemy chockablock with malls and massive trains, hippogriffs and Harleys hitched to the same post outside biker bars. It's a world at once familiar and bizarre, often reminiscent, in feel if not in content, of work from two other great originals, Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers—and as deeply troubling.
In a sense, it might even be considered anti-fantasy. Swanwick plays with genre conventions, alternately acceding to and upending them, buffing shadows to hard edges, doing the dozens on our expectations, then on the very expectations he himself has set up. “In practice,” he said in that interview, “holding a fantasy world to the same standards of consequence as the real world does result in a harrowing criticism of the Fantastic.” While always behind—behind the great war being waged, behind political intrigues, behind epic quests and a malleable, ever-changing history—we witness the real history of this world in ordinary people doing their best to live out, as best they can, their lives.
Part mortal Will la Fey becomes informant and enforcer for the dragon that crashes near his village and declares itself king. Then, after destroying the dragon with the magic of a name-stone and elf-shot, he's cast out from his village, adrift in a landscape of warriors, wanderers, and refugee camps, on his way to the great city of Babel. Accompanying him are an ancient woman in the form of a seemingly simple-minded young girl, an infinitely resourceful foxwoman, and con man/trickster Nat W
hilk. Here is an early view of the great melting pot where, of course, Will's destiny awaits him.
[T]rains were continually arriving, disgorging passengers, and then proceeding to a further platform to take on more. Such were the numbers of travelers and immigrants that, though individually they jostled and bumped against one another like so many swarming insects, collectively they took on the properties of a liquid, flowing like water in streams and rivers, eddying into quiet backwaters, then surging forward again until finally they formed an uneasy lake behind the long dam of customs desks at the far end of the hall.
The novel is everywhere filled, as one expects from Swanwick, with such fine, closely worked writing, laden always with perspectives afforded by intelligence and humor. He can go from tough to tender in mid-phrase, have you laughing through the sob half-formed in your throat.
Blind Emma found her refuge in work. She mopped the ceiling and scoured the floor.... The rugs had to be boiled. The little filigreed case containing her heart had to be taken out of the cupboard where she normally kept it and hidden in the very back of the closet.
Or this:
Lack of sleep gifted everything with an impossible vividness. The green moss on the skulls stuck in the crotches of forked sticks lining the first half-mile of the River Road, the salamanders languidly copulating in the coals of the smithy forge, even the stillness of the carnivorous plants in his auntie's garden as they waited for an unwary toad to hop within striking distance—such homely sights were transformed. Everything was new and strange to him.
As indeed, with each turn of events, with almost each sentence and turn of phrase, it is to us.
Things as they are, are changed upon the blue guitar.
It's been said of Hammett and Chandler that they took murder out of the manor houses and drawing rooms and gave it back to the people who actually commit it. In the fifties the very magazine you are reading, with stories by writers like Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, became a beacon in the blending of grainy realism—the stuff of daily lives—with the fantastic. Something of the same demotic impulse is at work, I think, in much of the best contemporary fantasy such as that written by Michael Swanwick and by New Weird writers and those influenced by them. There seems an ongoing effort here to take back the soul of fantastic fiction, to steal it away from glib commercial forms and restore to it its heritage as a dark, troubling form, one rooted deeply in our psyches: to reestablish it as a literature of substance.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Reader's Guide by Lisa Goldstein
Ms. Goldstein says that when her first novel, The Red Magician, was reprinted recently in a Young Adult edition, she opened up her first copy and found inside—yes indeed—a guide for readers. Fortunately, she had already completed this new tale so any similarities between the two are purely coincidental.
1. How does Mary Bainbridge, the author of Winter Swan, let us know that Donny is unhappy? Is it significant that the novel takes place in winter?
2. In what ways does Bainbridge contrast Donny with the other farmers?
3. Do you think everyone else in this town is really as cheerful as Bainbridge shows them to be? What kinds of problems might they be hiding: bankruptcy, blackmail, adultery, madness, murder? Do you think Mr. and Mrs. Conway, who own the farm down the road, are really brother and sister?
4. What is the significance of the single swan on the lake? The swan's mate has died; what does he have in common with Donny?
5. Why did Bainbridge set Winter Swan at the beginning of the twentieth century? If the story was set in the present, which characters would have cell phones? Which ones would have iPods? Rewrite Donny's love letter to Mrs. Thompson as a text message.
6. How would the story be different if the characters were lemurs?
7. How many times does Bainbridge call Great-aunt Gracie “quaint"? Did you think she really was quaint? What words would you use to describe her? How important is it for a writer to have a large vocabulary, or at least a good thesaurus?
8. There are other symbols in Winter Swan besides the single swan: for example, Donny gets lost in the woods to symbolize the fact that he's lost his way in life; the farmer Ephraim, who disapproves of Mrs. Thompson dating so soon after she lost her husband, is colorblind—that is, he sees things in black and white. What other symbols are there? Do these symbols seem heavy-handed to you? Do you think they might seem heavy-handed to Donny as well?
9. What about all the coincidences? Isn't it strange that whenever Donny goes to the lake Mrs. Thompson is there too?
10. Are these symbols and coincidences so obvious that Donny might come to suspect that he's in a story?
11. If he does realize he's in a story, what can he do about it?
12. On the other hand, strange coincidences do happen all the time. What coincidences have you experienced? Go to the nearest lake in your town and wait on the shore for ten minutes. Did you meet your true love? (If there is no lake near where you live, find something with the word “lake” in it—Lakeshore Avenue, for example, or Lake Dry Cleaners.)
13. Why do you think love stories are so popular? Did you fall in love with Donny and/or Mrs. Thompson?
14. Do you think people really spend this much time thinking about how much milk they have to buy, the way Donny does, or what they should get their great-aunt for her birthday, like Mrs. Thompson? Aren't people, in the privacy of their own thoughts, more interesting, more complex, than this? What are some interesting thoughts you have had, thoughts you have never shared with anyone? Do you think Donny and Mrs. Thompson might be aliens?
15. What other kinds of stories are popular, besides love stories? Why are stories important? People in every culture, in every time, have told stories—do you think there might be a great Library of Story somewhere, where all possible permutations of every possible story might exist?
16. Do you think that writers should always write with passion, to the utmost of their ability? What should happen to writers who don't, who use clichéd plots, cardboard characters, lifeless prose? If there is a Library of Story, do you think there might be a Lord of Story, a Muse who grants access to the great stories, the ones that are told again and again? Would this Muse see and judge the stories that people write? Might he punish lazy authors by, for example, writing Reader's Guides like this one, and causing them to appear in every copy of their novel?
17. To be honest, I'm not the Lord of Story. I'm his acolyte. I'm that kid who spent all his time reading, who read instead of paying attention in class, who hid in the school library instead of playing games with the other boys at recess. Even as a child I felt that there had to be a Lord of Story, someone who kept these stories and gave them to the writers he thought were worthy of them, and when I was twenty-eight I walked away from my job and set out to find him.
I'm a reader, not a writer, but I worked as hard at my quest as any of the great writers; I kept to my task, I answered the riddles I was asked, and even when I lost faith I continued on my journey. And sometime later (how much later it was I don't know—I had lost all track of time) I found myself before the Lord of Story, and I knelt and asked him if I might become his acolyte.
He put me to work in his Library, as a Shelver. Every day I go to the room where I left off shelving the night before; every day I take up the cart that's waiting for me there, filled with books. I walk from room to room with my cart, five up and to the left, five down and to the right, shelving the books according to the code on their spine. The bookcases are all of dark red wood, but there are subtle differences in each room: sometimes tables of the same red wood; sometimes fat comfortable chairs in the corners, beneath old dark portraits of a man or a woman reading a book; sometimes a fireplace filled with fragrant branches. The lamps all cast a gentle glow when I turn them on, though some of them are electric, some gas, some a technology I don't recognize, with a faceted crystal the size of my thumbnail beneath the shade. The floors and walls are made of wood or stone or marble, b
ut there are soft carpets in every room that hush my footsteps when I walk.
The Lord of Story taught me his shelving system, but that was all; he said nothing else about his realm. But I've had years to think about the Library, and when I meet other Shelvers we share our speculations. (Different Shelvers seem to have different patterns, like chess pieces, some moving diagonally through the Library, some in straight rows, and we meet at various points.) I think that the shelves are infinite, or at least I've never reached the end of them, row on row of bookcases, room after room opening out one after the other. And it seems to me that the books that are checked out return to us changed, more substantial; the paper seems thicker, the print darker. I think that these books were once possibilities of story, but that now they exist in the world, given by the Lord of Story to writers who have reached the Library somehow. And sometimes when I'm shelving, a book will appear in my cart from nowhere—a book that, I think, some writer has returned at just that moment, that has just now become a reality where it was once only a possibility.
Maybe my life sounds dull to you; as for me, though, it's all I could ever want. Because when my shelving is done for the day I can read any of the books on the shelves, the ones that have already been written and the ones that have yet to be discovered. I read stories you have never dreamed of—though someone, somewhere, may dream of them one day, and give them to the world.
I talk about these books with the other Shelvers—and here no one makes fun of me for reading, the way they used to in my life before, because here everyone is like me. Sometimes one of us will recommend a book, but we have both been traveling for so long, moving toward each other from places so far away, that the book's code will usually be unknown to the other Shelver, from a room so far distant that it would take months or even years to get there.
We discuss books, as I said, and we discuss the Library, but we also talk about the Lord of Story, who walks through these rooms and has a word for everyone he passes. Other Shelvers have come across him once or even several times, but I've never seen him in all the long years I have been working here, not since that first time, and sometimes I wonder why that is.
FSF, July 2008 Page 4