And now for something completely different. Well, maybe not
completely, but we’re looking at a subgenre that sits in my wheelhouse, but it
kind of clings to ceiling and drips stuff down on everybody else’s head. See,
starting in the late 1800s and bleeding into the early 20th century,
you had a genre that’s known simply as ‘weird.’ It came before horror and
fantasy and their ilk were really being categorized as such. These were the
writings of people like H.P. Lovecraft and Franz Kafka. They didn’t fit into
what was being written at the time. Mainstream/literary fiction, science
romances, that kind of thing. They were different. Subversive. They were just
plain weird.
You saw the same thing in the sixties and seventies, only
this time it was new wave, not weird. Fantasy and horror were now
well-established genres, and they, along with science fiction, had their own
tropes, their own vibe, and their own expectations. New wave was just as
subversive as weird fiction, but it had much more to subvert. And it did.
Writers like Roger Zelazny and everybody’s favorite curmudgeon, Harlan Ellison
(Who, to take this whole subversion thing to the max, refused to even call his
work sci-fi or fantasy. He insisted on the umbrella term ‘speculative
fiction.’).
As with everything in the publishing world, things come in
cycles (Doubt me? Compare the popular romances of the 80s with the popular
romances of today.). These subversive tendencies cycled right on back through
into the movement I’m finally getting to: new weird. A somewhat inelegant title
for what I consider to be an incredibly elegant subgenre of sci-fi and fantasy.
New weird is a strange beast. It’s not mocking SF/F as much
as it is mocking literary fiction. For years and years, there’s been a struggle
between the lit-fic community and the spec-fic community. As SF/F writers,
we’re very often pushed into the ‘science fiction ghetto,’ because it can’t
possibly be worthy fiction if there are jetpacks or aliens. Then, when there is
something that the literary crowd likes that manages to claw out of the ghetto,
they steal it and take that glory away.
New weird protested, and did it by writing brilliant
fiction. Yes, it’s speculative fiction through and through, but it’s too
completely genius for anyone to brush off, no matter the content. It’s full of
sweeping ideas and it plays against the tropes standard in sci-fi and fantasy
(or at least the tropes standard at the time it was written). Often, it blurs
the line between the genres to a point where you can’t even tell which side of
the line it falls on.
The one name that comes to the top of almost every new weird
list, and for very good reason, is China Mieville. Essentially, it’s what he
writes, and if you pick up his work, you’ll see exactly what new weird is. My
favorite from him is Railsea, a story that could possibly be sci-fi, but could
just as easily be fantasy, but maybe it really doesn’t matter. A world where
the oceans are gone, replaced by railroad tracks lid in an ultimate war. It
mixes religion with science, and you just can’t place it. Pure brilliance.
A few other perennials of the subgenre are His Dark
Materials by Phillip Pullman, and Mervyn Peake’s brilliantly atmospheric
Gormenghast books (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone). New weird even has
its own magazine, for fans of this type of fiction (Tales of the Talisman).
There’s also the SCP Foundation, of which I’m a huge fan. A huge intersection
between all crossroads of speculative fiction, and all very much bound in a
well-woven format.
There aren’t a lot of TV shows and movies like this,
unfortunately, or I would recommend them. It’s a little more common in anime
and manga, where genre lines as we know them blur as it is. Things like
Durarara. I feel like an argument could also be laid out for Gunnerkrigg Court
as new weird, but it would perhaps be better-suited as a straight up science
fantasy. More on that one next week.
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to date on all future Subgenre Saturdays.
Voss
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