New Weird (literary movement)
New Weird is a contemporary literary movement that merges elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, primarily set against urban backdrops featuring heightened realism. Emerging in the 1980s and gaining prominence in the 1990s and 2000s, New Weird takes its name from earlier movements, particularly the Old Weird, which is recognized for its speculative fiction and often nostalgic commentary on modernity. Unlike its predecessor, which typically reflected anxieties about technology and societal change, New Weird embraces the strange and fantastical elements of its stories, often using them to critique contemporary realities.
The genre is characterized by richly developed secondary worlds and narratives that challenge conventional perceptions of reality, while also addressing sociopolitical themes related to race, gender, and class dynamics. Notable authors associated with New Weird include China Miéville, whose work "Perdido Street Station" is considered a defining example, and Jeff VanderMeer, known for his "Southern Reach Trilogy." Other contributors to this movement include Mark Danielewski, Megan Giddings, and Haruki Murakami, among others. The New Weird genre reflects a creative evolution of speculative fiction, offering readers an imaginative escape that simultaneously interrogates current societal issues.
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New Weird (literary movement)
New Weird is a contemporary literary genre that combines elements of science fiction and fantasy. The works are typically set in urban areas and include high levels of realism. The genre takes its name from its predecessor movements "Old Weird" and the "Weird Transition" that themselves derive from Weird Tales, a highly influential pulp literary magazine first published in 1923. The New Weird literary movement began to emerge during the 1980s and matured in the 1990s and 2000s.
Scholars widely acknowledge struggling to precisely describe the formal and stylistic characteristics of New Weird fiction. A 2016 scholarly analysis published in the literary journal Genre describes the New Weird style by comparing it with the Old Weird movement. It notes that Old Weird works incorporated aspects of speculative science fiction and fantasy into realistic settings, but generally rooted their commentaries in nostalgic views of the past and anxieties related to modernity and its technological and social progress. According to the analysis, the New Weird defines itself by rejecting this aspect of the Old Weird aesthetic, instead embracing the trappings and fascinations of its unorthodox take on modernity while simultaneously maintaining the Old Weird fixation on subverting prevailing perceptions of reality.
Background
The New Weird genre is widely interpreted as a contemporary continuation of the Old Weird and Weird Transition creative movements. Old Weird writings first appeared in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and achieved breakthrough popularity in the early part of the twentieth century. Literary historians and scholars widely recognize the American science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) as a seminal figure of the Old Weird genre. Many of Lovecraft's works were originally published in the pulp literary magazine Weird Tales, which provided a platform to authors of atypical works in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Weird Tales also published works from numerous other noteworthy writers who went on to achieve mainstream success, including Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard (1906– 1936) and Robert Bloch (1917–1994), who published Psycho in 1959. Bloch's Psycho was the source material for the acclaimed 1960 horror film of the same name, which was directed by legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980).
Old Weird is broadly described as a genre of speculative fiction incorporating aspects of science fiction, fantasy, and horror into settings often inspired by modernity. Many works also import the stylistic techniques of psychological realism to elevate the immediacy and believability of the strange cosmologies and fantastic events depicted in Old Weird stories. Scholars have also noted a recurrent tendency among Old Weird writers to use their works to invoke nostalgia and reactionary political views, a feature that analysts have frequently described as a reflection of the rapid pace of technological and social change that defined the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many Old Weird works are defined by mysterious encounters between regular people and murky, terrifying, and powerful supernatural or alien forces that expose the naivety of humankind and its diminutive standing in a universe shaped by forces beyond its comprehension.
Around 1940, the Old Weird movement entered an evolutionary phase described by some observers as the Weird Transition. The 2016 Genre commentary defined the Weird Transition as a period when Old Weird fiction went into popular decline in its literary forms, but saw its established tropes and stylistic elements permeate other forms of popular entertainment including television and motion pictures. One well-known example of the Weird Transition period is the original Twilight Zone anthology television series, which was created by screenwriter and television producer Rod Serling (1924–1975) and debuted in 1959.
New Weird represents a modern revival of the Old Weird genre and reclaims the movement's literary roots from other forms of entertainment media. Though critics and expert commentators do not attach a firm point of origin to the New Weird style, the movement's emergence is generally dated to the 1980s. Like the Old Weird movement, the New Weird style was strongly shaped by the publication of early works in science fiction and fantasy literary magazines such as Interzone, which published its first issue in 1982 and was an anchoring presence in New Weird fiction until its demise in the mid-1990s. Following the closure of Interzone, a new literary magazine titled The Third Alternative began to operate in the United Kingdom (UK). Its publishers envisioned The Third Alternative as a medium for emerging authors to publish innovative works of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and enterprising blends of these and other genres.
A 2008 review published in the UK newspaper The Guardian retrospectively recognized the founding of The Third Alternative as a defining moment in the emanation of the New Weird style as a distinctive literary genre. In 2000, British author China Miéville (1972– ) published his breakout novel Perdido Street Station, which many commentators now consider the defining work of the emerging New Weird genre.
Overview
No uniform or universally accepted definition of New Weird exists, with literary critics and commentators instead describing it in the context of the narrative and stylistic elements employed by its works. These broadly include strong elements of science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror, which are deployed against realistic, often urbanized backdrops and rich, intricately developed secondary story worlds. The genre's strange and fantastic elements are depicted as infiltrating conventional reality at every level, though sometimes in unnoticed or overlooked ways. However, some commentators have described its defining feature as the enthusiastic embrace of the genre's strange, startling, and alien elements. These were the source of anxiety and consternation in the Old Weird genre, but in New Weird, they reflect a welcoming sense of relief from the mundane trivialities and injustices of their realistic settings. The term "New Weird" was coined by the British literary critic M. John Harrison (1945– ) in 2002.
Analysts have also characterized New Weird as a continuation of speculative fiction's longest-established objective, which is to use the boundless creative possibilities of science fiction, fantasy, and horror as a means of interrogating prevailing interpretations of the contemporary real world. Literary subgenres loosely associated with New Weird include such styles as steampunk, urban fantasy, and cyberpunk, among others, with so-called stylistic and generic "mashups" used to make New Weird writing a work of expressive and evocative creativity. At the same time, New Weird continues to explore many of the same tropes and themes established by the Old Weird movement, but in a manner that represents a reversal of the philosophical orientation of the Old Weird while also exploring contemporary questions and issues related to race, gender, and class dynamics, among other sociopolitical topics.
Miéville is recognized by a broad cross-section of commentators as the author most readily associated with New Weird's emergence into a distinct literary genre. Perdido Street Station is the first in a series of related novels known as his Bas-Lag series, which depicts a multiracial, steampunk-style metropolis reminiscent of Victorian London in which magic coexists alongside advanced technologies specific to the series' secondary story world. Miéville has also authored numerous standalone novels, novellas, and short stories that adhere to the New Weird style, with his 2009 novel The City & The City ranking among the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful examples.
American author Jeff VanderMeer (1968– ) is also considered an important pioneer of the New Weird genre. VanderMeer is best-known for a three-novel series collectively known as the Southern Reach Trilogy, which consists of the books Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. The three entries in the acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy were released in rapid succession in 2014, marking an innovative publication strategy that analysts have partially credited with the trilogy's success. The Southern Reach Trilogy revolves around a series of exploratory missions to a mysterious region known as Area X, in which humans have disappeared entirely and the environment has reverted to a condition of perfect purity. The ongoing expansion of Area X appears to pose a unique existential threat to human civilization, which is endangered by the encroachment of pristine nature.
Other authors associated with the loose-knit New Weird movement include American authors Mark Danielewski (1966– ), Megan Giddings (ca. 1983– ), and Drew Magary (1976– ). Acclaimed bestselling Japanese author Haruki Murakami (1949– ) is also associated with the New Weird movement, with Murakami's 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore winning multiple major international awards. Some sources also include bestselling science fiction and horror author Stephen King (1947– ), whose works have sold a reported four hundred million copies worldwide as of 2022, as a foundational influence of the New Weird movement.
Bibliography
"Book List: New Weird." Des Moines Public Library, 21 Nov. 2022, www.dmpl.org/blog-entries/book-list-new-weird. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.
Domini, John. "Renaissance of the Weird: Experimental Fiction as the New American Normal." Literary Hub, 25 July 2022, lithub.com/renaissance-of-the-weird-experimental-fiction-as-the-new-american-normal/. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.
Gelder, Ken. New Directions in Popular Fiction. New York, NY: Springer, 2016, pp. 177–199.
Miller, Laura. "Jeff VanderMeer Amends the Apocalypse." The New Yorker, 17 Apr. 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/jeff-vandermeer-amends-the-apocalypse. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.
Noys, Benjamin and Timothy S. Murphy. "Introduction: Old and New Weird." Genre, vol. 49, no. 2, 2016, pp. 117–134.
Sanderson, Sertan. "Bestselling Author Stephen King Turns 75." Deutsche Welle, 21 Sept. 2022, www.dw.com/en/bestselling-author-stephen-king-turns-75. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.
Walter, Damien G. "The New World of New Weird." The Guardian, 22 Jan. 2008, www.dmpl.org/blog-entries/book-list-new-weird. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.
Wilk, Elvia. "Toward a Theory of the New Weird." Literary Hub, 5 Aug. 2019, lithub.com/toward-a-theory-of-the-new-weird/. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.