The New Weird 2: The Weirdening
Is New Weird a collection of tropes, or is it something more?
I think it’s safe to say that Gideon the Ninth was a successful novel, what with its multiple award nominations, its Locus Best First Novel win, it’s new sequel, and it’s surprisingly wide media coverage outside of traditional science fiction circles.
It’s also the first time I’ve seen a prominent book from a new author tagged so frequently with the label New Weird.
Which has me wondering – is the New Weird back? Is this the Newer Weird, New Weird 2.0, or New Weird: Tentacle Drift?*
You can see why the book would inspire the comparison. Gideon the Ninth flings genres into a blender with giddy abandon. It’s not just that it mingles science fiction (spaceships, an interplanetary space opera empire) with fantasy (magicians and necromancy) with a hefty dose of horror (see above re: everything is powered by the dead) it is also basically a bonkers version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None as filtered through a JRPG/anime aesthetic, plus a coming of age story and a romance. (This book, in both its strengths and its weaknesses, has strong First Novel Energy, and I always admire that tremendously.)
It is, in other words, as close to textbook New Weird as you can get.
If there was such a thing as textbook New Weird.
If there ever was such a thing as New Weird, which is debatable.
Because the New Weird, I have been told on more than one occasion, is either long dead, or died in its cradle.
How appropriate, then, to use Gideon the Ninth, a book crammed with necromancers, to discus the life, death, and afterlife of the New Weird?
What the heck is/was the New Weird?
The New Weird, as an idea, was born following the publication of a few extremely odd books that were generally marketed as fantasy, most notably China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station in 2000 and Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen in 2001.
I cannot understate the impact Perdido Street Station had on me at the time; I was twenty-two and picked up a copy at Vancouver’s venerable White Dwarf Books. I was fired up by the dense prose, the weird and vivid setting, and the refusal of the book to stick to traditional fantasy character archetypes – there were no destiny-marked farmboys or cod-medieval warriors and kings, heavens no, we were going to spend time with a happily fat middle-aged scientist and his artist girlfriend (who had a bug for a head) while they dealt with monstrous gangsters, a clockwork robot uprising, a repressive government, and mind-sucking eldritch abominations.
It wouldn’t be until years later that I encountered VanderMeer’s work via Shriek: An Afterword and his short fiction, but his work had its own animating strangeness, which was unique but clearly akin to Mieville’s in its disdain for conventional tropes and its search for new ways to express something SFnal.
These books, and a few others like them, plus some oddly-styled science fiction mostly from the New Space Opera and the weirder trailing edges the various punks (biopunk, steampunk, ribofunk, etc) were sort of vaguely gestured at by critics – something was happening. Was it new? If so, what was it?
Today, if we think of New Weird, we think of it as either a failed movement or, more likely, as a sort of sub-genre – when I opened by talking about Gideon the Ninth, I was speaking of it largely in terms of tropes and elements. That’s one axis of how we argue about genres. Robots and ray guns and unselfconsciously phallic spaceships? Science fiction. Elves and dragons and people eating stew? Fantasy.
So one big argument in SFF is around how we assemble the bones of our stories. How rigorous is the science, how much detail needs to go into the worldbuilding, how’s your magic system work? What puts the S in SF, how many violet-eyed elves do you need?
On the other side of the ledger, you get the constant push-pull between the literary and the pulp, between the “hey, this is just fun stories about space and pew-pew rayguns” and the folks who want to have, like, themes and stuff.
The fight on this side began early too, with writers like Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester actually trying to art now and then, and even the most hardened Campbellian Golden Age writers often reached for some kind of style or voice that could elevate their tales, but it was brought to prominence by the New Wave in the 1960s.
So. On the one hand, we’ve got the building blocks of SFF and its many squabbling sub-genre children to play with. On the other, there’s a sort of sliding scale that runs from “pure pulp” all the way to “actual goddamn literature”
New Weird, such as it was, was about both arguments.
The big attempt to define the new movement/mode of writing/subgenre was a months-long discussion on the TTA Press discussion boards in 2003. I have never read the entire multi-faceted thread; the best I can do with the time I have between eating, sleeping, and working is to skim key points, or to read summaries of the whole mess and its aftermath, a quite decent one of which can be found here at the Jonathan McCalmont’s essay on Big Echo, Nothing Beside Remains. (McCalmont puts the whole history of the non-genre in better focus than I ever could.) I wish someone had the ability to edit, format and publish the whole crazy debate at TTA Press; you could call it The New Weird Project, or The (Still)Birth of a Genre, or M. John Harrison Gets Cranky With Absolutely Everybody.
I find the whole exercise absolutely bizarre. It’s as if in the mid-1950s, Buddy Holly and Little Richard and Elvis Presley and the guys from Sun Records had sat down and all tried to hash out what, exactly, rock and roll was supposed to be instead of just, y’know, making music.
It was probably doomed from the start, especially because it seemed to be a more or less constant argument between people who saw New Weird as a very amorphous movement (or a “moment,” the word is thrown around a lot) that might become something, and those who are trying to pin it down as a kind of new genre and slap labels on it.
M. John Harrison, despite being deeply argumentative, wrote some of the clearest declarations of what he wanted and didn’t want to see come of this new energy that was bursting up in the late 1990s/early 2000s, including:
I'm aware here that I'm not talking directly about the New Weird, & that I've bundled it with Brit SF. Deliberately, because I see them both as responses--or not quite that, probably some better word--to the same situation, which is the increasing convergence of concerns between literary mainstream fiction and f/sf.
And later:
I see only a kind of maximum writing space, in which every technique from every genre is available to solve the individual problem of the individual writer on the day. (That is, you have something to say: how do you set about saying it ?)
That last statement is interesting – Harrison was primarily interested in whatever the New Weird was as a sort of omnivorous literary experiment, gobbling up other genres in the interests, not of selling more books, but of making art.
Harrison, who has long carried the banner of LITERATURE in SFF was definitely on to something here, but one of my favourite attempted definitions comes from Steph Swainston, who is herself one of the core “original” New Weird authors:
Even the politics, though, is secondary to this sub-genre’s most important theme: detail.
The details are jewel-bright, hallucinatory, carefully described. Today’s Tolkeinesque fantasy is lazy and broad-brush. Today’s Michael Marshall thrillers rely lazily on brand names. 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 makes New Weird worlds so much like ours, as recognisable and as well-described.
It is visual, and every scene is packed with baroque detail. Nouveau-goths use neon and tinsel as well as black clothes. The New Weird is more multi-spectral than gothic.
But one garuda does not make a revolution…
The worst-case scenario for the New Weird circa 2003 was what happened to cyberpunk, something a number of participants referenced directly.
I’m sure you’re familiar with this – cyberpunk began as The Movement, or just a bunch of writers who were pissed off at the holdovers of the Golden Age and the 1960s/70s eras who, they felt, had run out of steam. Cyberpunk tackled new technologies and social milieus, and often did so with a fresh literary sensibility, owing more to hardboiled fiction, Beat literature, and the emerging worlds of zines and BBSs than to its SF elders.
And then the whole thing got commoditized, fast. Cyberpunk as a genre was quickly reduced to a blurry photocopy of a shallow understanding of Neuromancer – all cyber-ninjas and neon and mirrorshades, the aesthetic swallowing the meaning whole and shitting it out. The equivalent of the journey from The Pixies to Nirvana to Nickelback, but in fewer steps.
The New Weirdos (possibly another reason the movement didn’t take off; not a lot of great names for participants) didn’t want that to happen to them. Many resisted labels. They fretted that in a decade, New Weird could mean “cheap copies of Perdido Street Station written by people who’d never heard of Gormenghast.”
That didn’t happen, and I’ve always wondered why.
Because frankly, Young Me probably would have eaten that shit up, if it had been close enough to the original. There was a built-in audience for it, after the huge success of Perdido Street Station and then The Scar. And it’s not like people didn’t appropriate elements of Mieville’s style! The aesthetic of his books certainly influenced strands of urban fantasy and steampunk/gaslamp fantasy over the following decade. The prose wasn’t nearly as good, in most cases, the scope wasn’t as broad, the grotesquerie forced.
(Man, think how embarrassing it would be now to have been one of those writers cranking out bad imitations of Mieville in the mid-2000s. Ha ha ha ha… ha. Ah ha.)
So for whatever reason, including quite possibly a sense of enervation among professionals involved in the ATT Press discussion, the New Weird label never took off. It was never etherized and pinned down and reduced to a list of tropes.
And that’s… probably for the best.
Take a look back at what Steph Swainston and M. John Harrison were saying about what they hoped New Weird could do.
Between some of these attempts at definitions, or at least goals, we can see that the early New Weird standard-bearers were approaching their work with a particular attitude. They weren’t mashing together genres because it was fun (well, not just because it was fun) they were using the Big Toolbox because it let them say new things. It let them write fiction that could convey feelings, messages, stories that the Little Toolboxes maybe couldn’t. It was not just an aesthetic, or a list of tropes.
So to loop back around, is Gideon the Ninth New Weird, released at last from the Locked Tomb?
I think only Tamsyn Muir knows for sure how much, if any, DNA her work shares with the writers at the core of the original New Weird moment. But from the outside, it looks a lot more like parallel evolution than a lineal descendant.
The New Weird as a series of tropes was, more or less, inevitable. Mixing genres has been a frequent pastime since then, and it’s commonplace in manga and anime and video games and tabletop roleplaying games that have suffused the 2000s and the 2010s. (If all it takes to be New Weird is mixed genres, then Naruto is New Weird, and that’s a bridge too far.)
It’s also impossible to imagine a book like Gideon without the influence of the last dozen years of ferment in SFF, from Racefail ‘09 onwards, to not see it as somehow in conversation with a world that saw repeated attempts by the Sad/Rabid Puppies to force their revanchist version of SFF onto the Hugos. It’s impossible to imagine Gideon without the modern internet, without social media and dumb memes and video games and Twitter jokes and fanfic. It’s a thing of its moment, and that moment is not the same as the one 20 years ago that birthed Perdido Street Station and Shriek: An Afterword and The Year of Our War.
Some of the same tools are on display, yes, some of the same heedless, headlong boundary-breaking. But not to hit people in exactly the same place. Same means, new ends.
If we’re going to argue about genre (and we will, it’s a fun distraction in this, our Second Plague Year) we should acknowledge that genres are more than subject matter, they are a point of view. They are, or are born as, a group of authors who see the well-trodden path of SFF literature laid before them, and choose to go chopping their way through the underbrush. Path? We’ll make our own path!
Genres are political. Genres are literary movements. Genres are born in reaction to their time, their culture. They are conveyances for particular joys and dreads, and when they stop bringing those gifts, they die, or transform.
So is Gideon the Ninth New Weird? I actually started writing this not sure which way I’d come down on that question, but ultimately I don’t think it is. It feels different, which is both a cop-out, and the only measure that matters.
Gideon is its own thing, of its own era.
So now maybe we get to start arguing about what new genre, movement, or tendency it represents? OH BOY, DO WE GET TO NAME IT? How about… hmm… Necro Opera? Maybe Swashbuckling Romance? Galactic Fantasy? Bear with me, I’ll come up with a good one and we can get a whole discussion thread going here, I’m sure it’ll go well…
I’m going to make one more argument about New Weird before I wrap this up, and that’s the simple fact that there was LOADS of stuff being written from the 1960s up to the dawn of the New Weird that was designed to do some of the same things in a literary sense (often leave the reader in a sense of mingled wonder and unease, to drown them in unsettling detail), but which didn’t necessarily use the same tools. A brief list of my favourites:
• Fairyland, by Paul McAuley
• City of Bones, by Martha Wells
• Queen City Jazz, by Kathleen Ann Goonan
• Hearts, Hands and Voices (UK)/The Broken Land (US) and Necroville (UK)/Terminal Café (US) by Ian McDonald
• Pollen, by Jeff Noon
• Take Back Plenty, by Colin Greenland
• The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick
Self Promotion Corner
Since I’ve already mentioned I have a story coming out in Analog (in the very next issue!) called The Acheulean Gift, which you are no doubt looking forward to already, I might as well link again to my most New Weird-adjacent story, which is also the first thing I ever sold professionally: The Anatomist’s Apprentice.