Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between V: The Ecological Weird – Rafe McGregor

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.

 

Recommended Reading

Fiction

China Miéville, King Rat, Macmillan (1998).

Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories, Canongate Books (2015).

Jeff VanderMeer, Finch: A Novel, Underland Press (2009).

Nonfiction

Jeff VanderMeer, The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’, The New Weird, Tachyon Publications (2008).

S.T. Joshi, The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction, McFarland & Company (2001).

M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir, Serpent’s Tail (2023).

Minority Report | review by Rafe McGregor

Steampunk criminology, paradoxical policing.

Minority Report, which was released in 2002, is set in Washington, D.C. in 2054, in the ninth year of PreCrime, a crime prevention programme. The programme originated with genetic experimentation conducted by Dr Iris Hineman (played by Lois Smith) for the purpose of healing the neurotrauma suffered by the children of women addicted to neuroin, a powerful opiate that was becoming popular in the illegal drug market. The intervention was unsuccessful, with most of the children dying, but unintentionally provided three of the survivors with the power of prevision. These ‘precogs’, pre-cognitives, developed the ability to envision murders – and only murders – up to four days in advance of their occurrence. This mutation was exploited by the District of Columbia’s criminal justice authorities, who use the precogs to drive an apparently perfect, albeit unverifiable, predictive policing programme under the directorship of Lamar Burgess (played by Max von Sydow). PreCrime is maintained by sequestering the precogs in a room called the ‘temple’ in police headquarters, where their neural activity is permanently monitored while they are kept in a state of semi-consciousness, semi-immersed in a tank of amniotic liquid. Their visions are projected onto a screen that police detectives use to solve the crime before it occurs and the programme involves both judicial and penal participants, with a judge and forensic expert witnessing the detection and detention by videolink and arrested suspects sent to the Department of Containment, where they are kept in a similar state of semi-consciousness to the precogs for the rest of their lives. PreCrime has been operational for six years and was an immediate success, reducing the murder rate in Washington, D.C. by ninety percent in its first month and one hundred percent ever since. The projected visions of all three of the precogs, Agatha (played by Samantha Morton) and identical twins Arthur and Dashiell (played by Michael and Matthew Dickman respectively), are apparently always complementary and the balance of probability of the available evidence suggests that they have always been accurate. Occasionally, the precogs see the same murder more than once, but these ‘echoes’ are easily identifiable and disregarded by the detectives and PreCrime is widely recognised as a perfect crime prevention programme.

The operational head of PreCrime is Chief John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) and the narrative opens at a crucial stage of its development: despite opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Attorney General is considering expanding it from a municipal to a national initiative and has sent a Justice Department agent, Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell), to subject it to a final scrutiny. The central plot of the film is set in motion when Anderton, who is a neuroin addict, is alerted to a future murder in which he is the perpetrator and the victim a man named Leo Crow (played by Mike Binder), who is unknown to him. The identification of Anderton as a murderer provides an exploration of the relationship between free will and determinism as he attempts to find Crow in order to discover why the murder has been predicted – but in doing so brings himself and Crow into close proximity, enabling the murder. Now that he has been identified as a perpetrator, Anderton is anxious to find out whether there have ever been any differences in the predictions of the three precogs and discovers that there have been times when Agatha has made predictions that differed from those of the twins. These are the ‘minority reports’ of the title and the film is based on Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story, ‘The Minority Report’. While Dick is the most obvious inspiration, the ‘sprawl’ and the repeated use of the prefix neuro are both allusions to William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the first novel in his Sprawl Trilogy. In Gibson’s dystopian novel, the Sprawl is an extended urban area on the eastern seaboard of the US, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. In Minority Report, the sprawl is a neglected, crime-ridden part of Washington, D.C. Spielberg’s acknowledgement of the influence of Gibson is a reminder of another of the latter’s works, The Difference Engine (1990), his collaboration with Bruce Sterling.

The novel is the canonical work of the steampunk genre, which Patrick Jagoda characterises as ‘alternative histories that frequently explore the rise of new technologies in Victorian England and throughout its global empire’. Like steampunk, Minority Report combines the old (Victorian setting and film noir style respectively) with the new (advanced technology in both) and this combination of the retrospective and the prospective is repeated in the central concept of the film, the PreCrime Programme. The desire to be able to predict all crime (or all of a particular type of crime) with perfect accuracy harks back to the positivist imperative of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which sociological, biological, and psychological variations of determinism aspired to be able to forecast human behaviour with mathematical certainty. The London of The Difference Engine features a ‘Central Statistics Bureau’ that is home to departments of ‘Quantitative Criminology’, ‘Deterrence Research’, and ‘Criminal Anthropometry’, all of which are aimed at the making of ‘utterly objective, entirely statistical investigations’ of social reality. The idea is that if crime can be predicted with accuracy, it can be prevented with certainty, producing a crime-free utopia. What elevates Minority Report above its achievement as a gripping and clever thriller is the logical paradox it identifies at the heart of all crime prevention programmes: the moment one combines prediction with policing, the prediction is falsified. The previsions would only be accurate if the murders were allowed to take place – but the whole point of employing the previsions in PreCrime is to alter the future they predict. The real-life paradox to which the fictional film alludes involves a second combination, between pre-emption and prosecution. Pre-inchoate offences, which have become increasingly popular since the beginning of the War on Terror, are concerned with pre-empting harmful conduct before the opportunity for its commission arises. But if an offence is not even in its initial stages, then the only means by which it can be called an offence is prediction. The paradox, which is legal rather than logical, is how anyone can justify prosecuting a suspect for such an offence. We can, it seems, have pre-emption or prosecution, but not both. What I find particularly interesting about Minority Report is that it was filmed in the spring of 2001, several months before the September 11 attacks that have produced so many changes to so many laws in so many countries ever since. *****

Clementine by Cherie Priest – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

As Clementine by Cherie Priest (Subterranean Press, ebook, 2508ll) begins, the American Civil War has ground on for twenty-four years or so, rather than lasting from 1861 to 1865 as it did in our history. Airships sail the American skies: from huge armoured battleships down to speedy two-seaters (for passengers who don’t mind a stiff breeze). Slavery persists in the south, and strange things are going on up in Seattle. Across these disunited States, in a tiny, nameless airship, flies Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey – one of the twelve Macon Madmen, who “made a big, nasty show of escaping from the prison there in ’64” – and his two men Simeon and Lamar, in pursuit of the Free Crow. His ship has been stolen by the scoundrel Felton Brink, renamed the Clementine, and sent cross-country with a mysteriously heavy load. Southern lady Miss Maria Isabella “Belle” Boyd has been sent to stop him by the Pinkerton Agency, but an encounter with an old friend will bring her older loyalties to the fore.

The Ebb Tide by James P. Blaylock – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The Ebb Tide by James P. Blaylock (Subterranean Press, ebook, 1093ll, originally published in 2009) is (or was, when first published) a new adventure for Langdon St. Ives and his friends, taking place, as the not entirely reliable afterword explains, seven years after the events of the novel Homunculus, on 6 May 1822. It begins with an urgent delivery to the Half Toad Inn in London, which unfortunately precludes the consumption of a delicious meal. The result: “there wasn’t a man among us who didn’t have the look of a greedy dog”! One feels for them, but the latest edition of Merton’s Catalogue of Antiquities demands their immediate attention. Its listings include a tatty hand-drawn map showing roughly where the wagon of an ally sank beneath Morecambe Sands. The race is on to recover a treasure that went down with their chum, but less savoury types are also in the hunt, led by Ignacio Narbondo – also known as Frosticos!

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar (Angry Robot, ebook, 4253ll plus extras), is the first in a series that has so far run to three volumes (the sequels being Camera Obscura and The Great Game). It’s set in a world much changed since Amerigo Vespucci landed on the island of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Caliban’s people, Les Lézards, have installed themselves as the rulers of our island nation, whales sing in the Thames, the police are supported by automatons, airships fly overhead, and Moriarty is Prime Minister. Orphan is a young poet given to literary mischief, rebel rather than revolutionary, but when tragedy strikes a mission to Mars his need to set things right throws him into an adventure that will take him from London to the Mysterious Island of Jules Verne, and leave the future of the planet in his hands.