The 21st Century's New Literary Movement or Not?

As I looked over the different literary movements that were given to us as suggestions, I stumbled across what is called the New Weird.  The movement became defined around 2003 and the key author was by China Mievelle.  The movement engages the modern world through the vehicle of cities that are not the normal tradition fantastical cities that come out of an ideal or idea of medieval time or Byzantine cultures-they are secondary world fantasies that engage in the new world and can be political-and usually tie in with what people are doing right now.  The New Weird was crystallised more recently by the popularity of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station,  a transgressive horror, a type of fiction repurposed to focus on the monsters and grotesquery but not the scare itself. It is a genre that defies genre boundaries, embracing a range of writing from in-your-face horror through fantasy and science fiction to mainstream, the common element being the author's willingness to "surrender to the weird", to use the conventions of pulp fiction to locate literature, and to apply literary sophistication to genre landscapes. From what I have read, the New Weird stories are mainly set in urban secondary world settings that choose realistic, complex settings that have a combination of both science fiction and fantasy.  One definition what I found while researching was by a British writer named Steph Swainston.  She also is considered in the New Weird genre and this is how she described the movement.

 

It is incredibly eclectic, and takes ideas from any source. It borrows from American Indian and Far Eastern mythology rather than European or Norse traditions, but the main influence is modern culture – street culture – mixing with ancient mythologies. 

The text isn’t experimental, but the creatures are. It is amazingly empathic. What is it like to be a clone? Or to walk on your hundred quirky legs? The New Weird attempts to explain. 

It acknowledges other literary traditions, for example Angela Carter’s mainstream fiction, or classics like Melville. Films are a source of inspiration because action is vital. The elves were first up against the wall when the revolution came, and instead we want the vastness of the science fiction film universe on the page. 

There is a lot of genre-mixing going on, thank god. (Jon Courtney Grimwood mixes futuristic sf and crime novels). The New Weird grabs everything, and so genre-mixing is part of it, but not the leading role. 

The New Weird is secular, and very politically informed. Questions of morality are posed. 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.

The major writers in this movement are China Mievelle and Jeff VanderMeer, along with some of the others that I have given biographies on with examples of their work.  Pre-cursor or stimuli, as Jeff & Ann name it in their book "The New Weird" are M. J. Harrison, Mervyn Peake, H.P. Loveless & Michael Moorecock.  Even pioneers such as J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings Trilogy) who is famous as a fantasy writer and H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds, The Time Machine) who is considered "the father" of high science fiction, has been noted as influences on many of the authors throughout my research.

I have come to the conclusion that I am more confused now that I have read about this new genre and almost (no, not almost) wish I would have done my salon on something more concrete.  I personally love watching movies that were written or directed in this style but it is not my choice of book to read.  I do have to say that some of them sound interesting and one day when I have some free time, I just may download one onto my Kindle.  Another thing I learned while researching this was that there are actually "trailers" for the upcoming newly released books.


So, what do you think?  Is "New Weird" actually a literary movement or just a new name given to work that in my opinion, has been out there all along?

Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is an American writer, editor and publisher.  He is known for his contributions to the New Weird and his stories about the city of Ambergris, in books like the City of Saints and Madmen.  Ann, his wife, is an American publisher and editor. She is also the editor of Weird Tales, which she has won a Hugo Award for her work. Ann is also the founder of The Silver Web magazine, which is a periodical that is devoted to experimental and avante-garde fantasy literature.

The New Weird

An avant-garde anthology that presents and defines the New Weird—a hip, stylistic fiction that evokes the gritty exuberance of pulp novels and dime-store comic books—creates a new literature that is entirely unprecedented and utterly compelling. Assembling an array of talent, this collection includes contributions from visionaries Michael Moorcock and China Miéville.

The title of this collection of stories, essays, and online discussion threads refers to a subgenre of modern horror that has roots in New Wave literature and the off-kilter fantasy spawned by Weird Tales. In contrast to the eerie nostalgia of Bradbury or the haunting supernaturalism of Lovecraft, the New Weird more often leans toward grotesque urban noir and cross-genre experimentation. The contributors here constitute a multitalented lineup ranging from such veterans as Clive Barker and Michael Moorcock to rising stars, such as Jay Lake and Alistair Rennie. Kathe Koje’s “The Neglected Garden” follows the transformation of a spurned lover who takes revenge by crucifying herself on her ex’s wire fence. China Miévelle, whose celebrated Perdido Street Station (2000) epitomizes the subcategory’s visceral blend of fantasy and realism, contributes a gritty tale about the veneration and inevitable capture of an outlaw cyborg. In the anthology’s final section, an experimental collaboration between seven authors embellishing a plot hatched by Paul DiFillipo exemplifies the New Weird’s propensity for pushing the boundaries of literary invention. --Carl Hays

Interview with the VanderMeers

First of all, let’s start with a big question. Can you define what you mean by ‘Weird fiction’? Is it just a state of mind/mindset?

Jeff: “Weird fiction” can be a lot of things, including stories influenced by surrealism. “The Weird” is a more taxonomically precise label for certain types of supernatural fiction and also fiction allied with the supernatural that may achieve the same effect without a supernatural element. Admittedly, this last distinction is going to be controversial, but we found weird SF stories and weird ritual stories that gave us the same feeling as supernatural weird. Definitely, though, this is one of those areas where readers will differ on what they find “weird,” and that’s perfectly fine. It doesn’t mean there isn’t such a thing as The Weird—just that it can be slippery at times.

Ann:  I like the first paragraph of our introduction as an answer to this question...A “weird tale,” as defined by H.P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane—a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or defeat of…fixed laws of Nature”—through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.

To read the rest of the interview, click here: http://sffworld.com/interview/309p0.html

Michael J. Moorcock

Michael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels. Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States.

Excerpt from the Jewel in the Skull

Book One

Then the Earth grew old, its landscapes mellowing and showing

signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner

of a man in his last years…

—The High History of the Runestaff

Chapter One

Count Brass

Count Brass, Lord Guardian of Kamarg, rode out on a horned horse one morning to inspect his territories. He rode until he came to a little hill, on the top of which stood a ruin of immense age. It was the ruin of a Gothic church whose walls of thick stone were smooth with the passing of winds and rains. Ivy clad much of it, and the ivy was of the flowering sort so that at this season purple and amber blossoms filled the dark windows, in place of the stained glass that had once decorated them.

To read more of the excerpt, click here: http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/02/the-jewel-in-the-skull

Nora K. Jemisin

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is Nora K. Jemisin first novel. Prior to this release, she used to write short fiction. The second book in the Inheritance Trilogy is named The Broken Kingdoms and is coming out in fall 2010. The working title for the third and final book is Kingdom of Gods.     
                                                      

Summary

Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history.

Interview excerpt:

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first book in The Inheritance Trilogy. When did the idea for the series first come to you?
Originally I thought of the story about 14 or 15 years ago, while I was in graduate school.  It was probably some kind of reaction to thesis-writing stress; I remember having a vivid and disturbing dream of very strange people.  One was a man with stars in his hair.  If you tried to touch his hair your hand would just keep going and you’d fall in.  Another was a boy juggling these beautiful polished stone balls — which, when you looked closely, turned out to be planets.  I woke up in a fever to come up with a narrative to explain these characters.  These images sort of fused with all the mythology I’d absorbed over the years and turned into enslaved gods.

To read the entire interview, click here:http://www.sfwa.org/2011/06/nebula-awards-2010-interview-n-k-jemisin/

Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan

Caitlín R. Kiernan has published seven novels, most recently The Red Tree, which has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards. Her short fiction has been collected into several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. In Spring 2011, Subterranean Press will release Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). She studied geology and paleontology at the University of Alabama and the University of Colorado, and has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. She’s currently working on her next novel. Kiernan lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn

Excerpts from an interview:

“The same way that I don't want to be thought of as a horror writer, I don't want to be thought of as a gay writer, or 'that transsexual writer.' In interviews it's something I shy away from addressing directly. I don't want strictly feminist critics saying, 'You have no right to be writing all these women from their point of view because you're not a real woman,' or whatever. I've never tried to keep the transgenderism a secret; I just don't put a big sign over my head. It does not define me.

“So, as a transsexual, how can I not write about the transmutation of flesh? How can I not write about having one mind, and a body that doesn't match? So when I'm writing about parahumans in a story like 'Faces in Revolving Souls', it's partly autobiography -- writing about what I've been through. I'm never going to be comfortable in this body, for a lot of reasons, and I'm constantly drawn to the subject of transformation, in a lot of different aspects.” 

Excerpts from the book “'Faces in Revolving Souls'

The woman named Sylvia, who might as well still be a child, is waiting for the elevator that will carry her from the twenty-third floor of the hotel—down, down, down like a sinking stone—to the lobby and convention registration area. She isn’t alone in the hallway, though she wishes that she were. There are several others waiting to sink with her—a murmuring, laughing handful of stitches and meat dolls busy showing off the fact that they’re not new at this, that they belong here, busy making sure that Sylvia knows they can see just exactly how birth-blank she is. Not quite a virgin, no, but the next worst thing, and all that pink skin to give her away, the pink skin and the silver-blue silk dress with its sparkling mandarin collar, the black espadrilles on her feet. The others are all naked, for the most part, and Sylvia keeps her head down, her eyes trained on the toes of her shoes, because the sight of them reflected in the polished elevator doors makes her heart race and her mouth go dry.

To read the entire short story click here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/faces-in-revolving-souls/

 

Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake
artist, illustrator, novelist, poet
1911 - 1968
Mervyn Peake, a man of many talents, a creative virtuoso, and an eccentric genius, had a profound and singular interior idea. His work has frequently been compared to that of Dickens, albeit an off-center Dickens with a fantasy element.

But the name "Mervyn Peake" is relatively unknown in the United States. His books have been translated into many languages and have achieved a kind of cult status in England, while in America few have heard of the kingdom of Gormenghast. 

Excerpt from Titus Groan

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

H.P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft was an American author who wrote horror, fantasy and science fiction. He is especially known for the subgenre known as weird fiction.  His stories express a profound indifference to human beliefs and affairs.  His most famous work is Cthulhu Mythos story cycle and the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. 

Excerpt from
"Call of the Cthulhu" 1926

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

To read more of the excerpt, click here: http://jcolavito.tripod.com/lostcivilizations/id15.html

K.J. Bishop

Kirsten J. Bishop is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her first book, The Etched City, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the Best Novel  category.

Ashamoil, the etched city, survives in a crumbling world of degenerated civilisations in which rival warlords oversee businesses based on gun-running and slaving against a background of vast deserts and impenetrable tropical forests. Ancient canals, inhabited by giant snakes, run through jungles where tigers laze on the stones of forgotten temples. Seers, occultists, mediums and shamans exploit the fears and superstitions of Ashamoil's many inhabitants. Dreams and reality are indistinguishable. Landscape and imagery are as important to KJ Bishop's fantasy as character, but it's a measure of this Australian writer's talent that she is as comfortable with her protagonists as she is with visions and moral complexities.
The Etched City has all the vitality of a first novel and few of the vices. Any initial meagreness of plot is compensated for by a compelling atmosphere that has something in common with M John Harrison's Viriconium but more closely resembles JG Ballard's The Drowned World or The Drought. Like Ballard (or, indeed, Conrad), Bishop's images possess an authenticity drawn from the Pacific Rim.

Excerpt from The Etched City
There were no milestones in the Copper Country. Often a traveller could only measure the progress of a journey by the time it took to get from each spoiled or broken thing to the next: a half-day’s walk from a dry well to the muzzle of a cannon poking out of a sand-slope, two hours to reach the skeletons of a man and a mule. The land was losing its battle with time. Ancient and exhausted, it visited decrepitude on everything within its bounds, as though out of spleen.
In the south of the country, arid scrubby plains alternated with stretches of desert. One road crossed this region, connecting the infrequent hamlets and oases, following the line of a derelict stone wall built long ago by a warlord. Along it, at distant intervals, were the remains of watchtowers and small forts. The greater part of the wall and its fortifications lay in complete ruin, but occasional sections stood intact enough to provide shelter.

To read the full excerpt click here: http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/etched/full/

Pan's Labrynth by Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico and is a director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and designer. He is mostly known for his acclaimed films, BladeII, Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy film franchise.  His films draw heavily on sources as diverse as weird fiction, fantasy and war.   Raised by his Catholic grandmother, del Toro developed an interest in filmmaking in his early teens. Later, he learned about makeup and effects from the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist, 1973) and worked on making his own short films. At the age of 21, del Toro executive produced his first feature, Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1986). Del Toro spent almost 10 years as a makeup supervisor, and formed his own company, Necropia in the early 1980s. He also produced and directed Mexican television programs at this time, and taught film.

Pan's Labyrinth Movie Poster

Pan's Labyrinth Book

Quotes

“Do whatever the fuck you want, even if it's wrong, and then tell about it with honesty. That is film-making to me...Success is fucking up on your own terms.”

“I fabricate everything. There's not a single real thing in Pan's Labyrinth, because ultimately I'm very specific about [those details]. Context is everything in a fable, because every story has already been told. So the only variations I find are the voice of the storyteller and the context in which it's told.”

 

Excerpt from The Strain
Book One of The Strain Trilogy

Chapter One

The Legend of Jusef Sardu

Once upon a time," said Abraham Setrakian's grandmother, "there was a giant."

Young Abraham's eyes brightened, and immediately the cabbage borscht in the wooden bowl got tastier, or at least less garlicky. He was a pale boy, underweight and sickly. His grandmother, intent on fattening him, sat across from him while he ate his soup, entertaining him by spinning a yarn.

A bubbeh meiseh, a "grandmother's story." A fairy tale. A legend.

"He was the son of a Polish nobleman. And his name was Jusef Sardu. Master Sardu stood taller than any other man. Taller than any roof in the village. He had to bow deeply to enter any door. But his great height, it was a burden. A disease of birth, not a blessing. The young man suffered. His muscles lacked the strength to support his long, heavy bones. At times it was a struggle for him just to walk. He used a cane, a tall stick...taller than you...with a silver handle carved into the shape of a wolf's head, which was the family crest."

To read the full excerpt, click here:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/strain-guillermo-del-toro/1100151899#product-commentary-read-an-excerpt-1

China Miéville

China is an award-winning English fantasy fiction writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction"  (after early twentieth century pulp and horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He has stood for the House of Commons for the Socialist Alliance, and published his PhD thesis as a book on Marxism and international law. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University.

Quotes

"I’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have... I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?"

"I don't think you can distinguish science fiction, fantasy and horror with any rigour, as the writers around the magazine Weird Tales early in the last century (Lovecraft in particular) illustrated most sharply. So I use the term 'weird fiction' for all fantastic literature - fantasy, SF, horror and all the stuff that won't fit neatly into slots.

Excerpt from Embassytown:
The children of the embassy all saw the boat land. Their teachers and shiftparents had had them painting it for days. One wall of the room had been given over to their ideas. It’s been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but it’s a tradition to represent them with such trails. When I was young, I painted ships the same way.
I looked at the pictures and the man beside me leaned in too. ‘Look,’ I said.
‘See? That’s you.’ A face at the boat’s window.
The man smiled. He gripped a pretend wheel like the simply rendered figure.
‘You have to excuse us,’ I said, nodding at the decorations.
‘We’re a bit parochial.’
‘No, no,’ the pilot said. I was older than him, dressed-up and dropping slang to tell him stories. He enjoyed me flustering him. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘that’s not…It is amazing though. Coming here. To the edge. With Lord knows what’s beyond.’ He looked into the Arrival Ball.
 

To read the full excerpt click here:  http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/05/embassytown-excerpt

Kathe Koja

Kathe Koja is an American writer who is known for speculative fiction for adults, but over the past few years she has turned to writing young adult novels.  She has also written short stories and most of them along with her novels concern characters who have been in some way marginalized by society, often focusing on the transcendence and/or disintegration which proceeds from this social isolation.

"Some of the keenest pleasures in fiction come from meeting the characters who seem to be moving sideways between the world constructed for them on the page by the writer and the more lasting, more ephemeral world of the readers’ continued imagination."

One of the short stories mentioned in the book "The New Weird", edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer is “The Neglected Garden”.  It is a breakup story – but it’s a breakup unlike any you’ve read about before, as a woman responds to being kicked to the curb by crucifying herself on her ex’s backyard fence. Not only will she not leave, she won’t even move – not so much as batting an eyelash.

To read an interview with Kathe, please click on the link below.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_09_013428.php 

Works Cited

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/01/new-weird-reading-list/
http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/horror/the-new-weird/
http://www.sfsite.com/03a/nw267.htm
http://www2.sacurrent.com/arts/story.asp?id=70823
http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/the-new-weird-p-1.html
http://thecontextuallife.com/2011/11/22/new-weird/
http://trashotron.com/agony/audio/2008/2008-news/012508-vandermeers.mp3
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/16/fiction.bestbooks
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/faces-in-revolving-souls/
http://www.locusmag.com/2008/Issue12_Kiernan.html
http://damiengwalter.com/2011/02/22/repost-the-new-world-of-new-weird/
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/strain-guillermo-del-toro/1100151899#product-commentary-read-an-excerpt-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._J._Bishop
http://kjbishop.net/bio.html
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/etched/full/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/gormenghast/novels/peake.html
http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?R=2744296
http://www.sfwa.org/2011/06/nebula-awards-2010-interview-n-k-jemisin/
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16939.Michael_Moorcock
http://www.crescentblues.com/3_6issue/moorcock.shtml
http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/02/the-jewel-in-the-skull
http://jcolavito.tripod.com/lostcivilizations/id15.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft
http://thecontextuallife.com/2011/11/22/new-weird/
http://sffworld.com/interview/309p0.html
http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/horror/the-new-weird/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mi%C3%A9ville