Theaker's Quarterly Fiction: Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between V: The Ecological Weird

The fifth of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the ecological weird.

New Weird?

When I introduced the weird tale as originating in Gothic Romanticism in part I, I acknowledged that it was a contested claim and there is a similar dispute about the relationship between the new weird and the weird tale (or old weird). ‘New Weird’ was coined by M. John Harrison (b.1945), an author, editor, and critic associated with the New Wave of science fiction in the nineteen sixties and seventies. There are claims that the coinage first appeared in Harrison’s introduction to China Miéville’s (b.1972, pictured) The Tain (2002) and in an internet forum (where the date is usually given as 2003), but regardless of its precise source, Benjamin Noys and Timothy Murphy note that the term was initially used to refer exclusively to the work of Miéville (who rejected the label). Those who take Miéville to have inaugurated the new weird tale usually identify his Perdido Street Station (2000) as the first in the genre, which was established with the publication of the rest of the Bas-lag Trilogy, The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004). Literary critic S.T. Joshi, who has been almost single-handedly responsible for contemporary critical and academic interest in both H.P. Lovecraft and weird fiction also rejects the term, preferring ‘modern weird tale’. Joshi argues that there was no break between the old and new (and no in-between, as I suggest throughout this series), but that later authors simply breathed new life into the genre perfected by Lovecraft.

Part of the process of revitalisation described by Joshi involved the publication of successful weird novels. Lovecraft’s longest narrative was At the Mountains of Madness (serialised in Astounding Stories in February, March, and April 1936), which is approximately forty thousand words long, and his next longest The Shadow over Innsmouth (first published as a novella with a print run of two hundred in 1936 and then posthumously abridged for the January 1942 issue of Weird Tales), which is approximately twenty-seven thousand words long, placing both at the short end of the novella format. Joshi maintains that the weird tale is essentially a tale – i.e., a short story – and I agree that horror fiction in general is much better suited to the short format (and crime fiction to the novella format). The reinvigoration of the weird tale after 1940 saw the publication of novel-length weird tales such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), Ramsay Campbell’s Incarnate (1983), T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies (1984), and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld (1987). Crucially for Joshi, these exemplary weird novels have nothing in common (beyond, presumably, meeting the criteria for his definition of weird fiction), which is why he is reluctant to admit the birth of a new genre or even a transformation of the original genre. Roger Luckhurst prefers the idea of a Lovecraftian revival rather than a new weird, drawing particular attention to the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan (whom I discussed in part II).

Tales of the City?

Jeff VanderMeer (b.1968, pictured), who is one of the three authors most often associated with the new weird – along with Miéville and Kelly Link (b.1969, pictured) – favours the term and refers to Perdido Street Station as the first ‘commercially acceptable’ new weird tale (in virtue of its length). VanderMeer defines the new weird as urban speculative fiction that is based on complex real-world models, employs elements of the surreal or transgressive, and is acutely (if not overtly) aware of the politics of the modern world. In this sense, it is both a continuation and transformation of the weird tale’s pursuit of an abstruse and possibly even unattainable understanding of the supra-natural and the un-rational. Noys and Murphy regard the new weird as indicative of precisely such a transformation, although they trace it beyond Miéville to the nineteen eighties, locating its origin in the work of Thomas Ligotti, Barker, and Brian Evenson. Like me (see part II), they foreground Ligotti’s contribution, claiming that he ‘formulated a new and desolate conception of a fundamentally chaotic universe’. James Machin also supports the classification, but pushes the origins back further still, to New Wave science fiction, which began in the nineteen sixties, was characterised by a self-conscious appropriation of literary modernism, and was associated with the work of Michael Moorcock, Harrison, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard (1930-2009), Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and Roger Zelazny.

Where, then, does this leave us…new or not, urban or not, Miéville or more? My view is that Noys, Murphy, VanderMeer, and Joshi are right to foreground the relatively recent development of the novel format in weird fiction. Without it, the genre is unlikely to survive much longer in the twenty-first century and there are unlikely to be repeats of 2018, for example, when three contemporary weird tales appeared on the big and small screen (discussed in my review of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water). Which is not to belittle the wonderful short stories of authors like Link and Sarah Monette – the genre needs both formats. With that in mind, however, there has been an overemphasis on Miéville’s work in discussions of the new weird because he prefers the novel format and often writes very long novels – as opposed to VanderMeer’s, which are much shorter, and Link, who remains faithful to the short story. The focus on Miéville at the expense of others has also created the overemphasis on the urban to which VanderMeer falls foul in defining the new weird. Miéville’s predilection for the urban – in King Rat (1998), the Bas-lag Trilogy (2000-2004), Un Lun Dun (2007), The City & the City (2009), The Last Days of New Paris (2016), and other stories – has produced a misleading association of genre and setting. The urban is more closely aligned with the steampunk genre and the Bas-lag Trilogy more exemplary of that genre than of weird fiction (although the two are quite obviously related), perhaps even its most accomplished novels after William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990).

Weird Ecology?

Miéville is nonetheless rightly identified as one of the best authors of weird fiction in the twenty-first century, with his initial contribution being King Rat rather than Perdido Street Station. There is of course some irony in VanderMeer defining the new weird in terms of urban settings and themes because it was precisely his work – specifically, his Southern Reach Trilogy – which demonstrated that whether or not the new weird was new, it could function as well if not better in rural settings and with biological themes. Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance were all published in 2014, the cinematic adaptation of Annihilation (directed by Alex Garland) was released by Paramount Pictures and Netflix in 2018, and (as with so many successful trilogies) the Southern Reach will become a quartet with the publication of Absolution next month. VanderMeer’s well-deserved success has, in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, shifted the initial emphasis on the urban to the rural and highlighted links to what is variously called eco-fiction, cli-fi, or climate change fiction, a category of science fiction (and, perhaps, literature) that probably began with Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous (1889, translated as The Purchase of the North Pole). VanderMeer’s bridging of the divide between eco-fiction and weird fiction has led critics to speak of his ecologically minded weird fiction and ‘weird ecology’, to describe him as the weird Thoreau, and to associate his work with global weirding.

Although I shall discuss the precursors to and origins of the Southern Reach Trilogy in more detail in part VI, I want to recommend two things here that will conclude my answers to the questions raised earlier. First, that the ‘new weird’ and its affiliation with Miéville and the urban be retired in favour of the ecological weird. If weird fiction (and, indeed, literature) is to, in VanderMeer’s words, remain acutely aware of the politics of the modern world, then it must reflect on the conditions of its own production in the Anthropocene and on the kind of issues I discussed in my essay on climate change culture, published in TQF76 in April. This does not restrict the category to stories with a rural setting or biological themes and reinforces the value of Miéville’s King Rat, which is outstanding ecological weird fiction. Replacing ‘new weird’ with ‘ecological weird’ also reveals what seems to me to be a clearer origin of the transformation of the weird tale, which I locate in Ballard’s four prototypical climate fiction novellas: The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World. Ballard was dismissive of The Wind from Nowhere, but aside from being his first published novella, Kate Marshall makes a convincing case for it anticipating what I am calling the ecological weird and what she calls novels by aliens. Second, as with occult detective fiction, the ecological weird is a category within weird fiction and, as such, requires only a minor revision of my previous definition: the ecological weird is philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounds the alienation within ourselves. It is to this (self-)alienation that I turn in part VI.