Weird Fiction Message Board

What is Weird Fiction? I can't find an actual definition that I can agree with - I nicked the quote in the description from China Mieville (undoubtedly a weird fiction writer)

The pic btw is a cuddly Cthulu :)

So what's Weird?

I'm only posting this link because of the above picture.

http://www.logicalcreativity.com/jon/plush/01.html

Talk about Weird Fiction!

EC

Well, as far as weird fiction goes, I reckon you can't go past The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson.

Phosphorous swine creatures au-go-go!

Thought everyone would be interested in a new anthology out in July: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. The anthology describes slipstream as "literature of cognitive dissonance and of strangeness triumphant." Now that sounds like "weird fiction."

I would suggest such titles as James L. Grant's Pedestrian Wolves or Carlton Mellick III's The Baby Jesus Butt Plug: A Fairy Tale.

Also Grant Morrison's The Filth, in the graphic novel category.

The Atrocity Exhibition is easily the weirdest thing I've ever encountered in print, especially in the multi-draft illustrated re/search edition.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases is probably the weirdest thing I personally own.

I think there's a distinction between fiction you might find weird, and what Mieville is referring to as canonically "Weird Fiction". The latter is generally adventurous, surreal fantasy/horror that is written with literary flair and doesn't fit neatly into an existing subgenre. Mieville used the term most famously in a critique of Tolkien that made the rounds a couple of years ago.

Authors who write or wrote what I would consider to be weird fiction: Avram Davidson, Jeff VanderMeer, James Branch Cabell, Gene Wolfe, Clark Ashton Smith (who wrote with H.P. Lovecraft, who probably came up with this term).

Weird fiction should be distinguished from what is sometimes called Slipstream (Thomas Pynchon and others) although I'm not sure the best way to make that case.

PS. I agree with elvendido that Grant Morrison could definitely be said to write Weird Fiction in the graphic novel variety.

I'm not sure I actually can distinguish between Weird Fiction and Slipstream. What's the difference?

I personally think trying to make forced boundaries is silly. Why can't a book be weird fiction from one perspective, fantasy from another, post modernist from another, etc.? I think by looking at a work as only ONE thing is limiting.

Elvendido - This is exactly what I'm having a problem with. Most Slipstream stuff seems to come from a sort of educated SF-meets-postmodernism background, whereas the term weird fiction was coined by horror writers who were trying to expand out of their ghetto. I really think that there is something very different about Gravity's Rainbow and The Divinity Student. But someone like Harlan Ellison could very easily straddle the different concepts.

Lohengrin - I didn't say that the books or authors should be exclusively divided, just the concepts. I think it's a mistake to think of genres as "trapping" works somehow... they can always be discarded, but examining the similarities between works, and how those similarities can be defined, can be very rewarding. These definitions may seem forced or limiting, but they can be very important to writers and I'm interested in why.

Really? Most of the writers I know are frustrated by genres, and being assigned one. I'm not objecting to genres, I'm objecting to this idea that a given work can only belong to ONE.

I don't think anyone here is arguing that a given work can only belong to one genre. But I can think of one reason why a writer may want to be "assigned" a genre: a genre can serve as a marketing category, which helps build an audience for those books.

wasn't slipstream coined specifically to defy genrefication? I think when one tries to put certain books into "wierd fiction" (China Mieville uses the term New Weird btw) vs. "slipstream". One is kind of missing the point of the what these authors are trying to do, which is to defy the genres that marketers, and readers insist must accompany each book.

And while yes genrefication allows marketers to create audiences, it also prevents others from reading books because they belong to a certain genre. I know many people who would have refused to read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, if it was classified as science fiction, but have no problems with its classified as literature. The problem with categorization, is that often times, we have a preconcieved notion of whatthe book is about and how we are going to react to it long before we actually read it. For many excellent writers who don't quite fit the mold, especially in fantasy and sci-fi, it can be stifling.

Instead of encouraging what marketers are doing by saying, hey genres help me decide what I want to read, shouldn't we try to use our own minds? I'm not saying genres are not useful, but it is laughable to name a group New Weird or Slipstream, and laud genrefication.

The whole point is to defy genrefication, not make further subcategorizations.

Thank you, chuchu. That's exactly my feeling on the matter, as well! You said it better than I have been, though.

glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. =)

It's particularly on my mind right now, as I am taking a science fiction course through the english department, and we do have one person in the class who is very down on sf, and resists any suggestion that some of Borges' work, for instance, could be considered sf/f AS WELL AS high modernist or postmodernist or "Literature." It's very frustrating for those of us in the class who are more open-minded about such things. Genres are very limiting, and the stigma attached to some of them is a huge problem, IMO. So, yeah, taking authors who are trying to resist genres, and then trying to separate them into even smaller genres... ^^; I don't see the point.

I think a good case in point would be Margaret Atwood. She writes Oryx and Crake but refuses to call it science fiction. There's absolutely no confusion about the book's category/genre, it has many obvious science fiction elements anyone that read it would call it sci-fi, but I'm sure some people that "never read sci-fi because it's immature crap" probably read Oryx and Crake and loved it.

In the end it would seem she keeps her mainstream audience (or at least gets them to buy the book) but I would suspect that the book gets passed over by many sci-fi fans because it's not labeled as sci-fi.

As far as using terms like slipstream or new weird I like them because they let me know that some other book is simillar to a book that I already enjoyed. But that's only if the terms have some kind of definition, which is maybe what we're trying to decide on here.

i cannot see, as a writer of four books with two more on the way, any reason that this site of "weird fiction" cannot be all-inclusive, rather than separatist. i love "weird fiction," but i consider john irving, stephen king, clford e. simak, and lewis carroll within those borders, as well as almost all sci-fi, and whatever you want to call koontz's stuff. the fact is the reader is going to think his reading is one way and he will believe it until death. we writers have no control over segmentation or criticism. my stuff is considered demonic by the christians yet i consider myself one of the most spiritual people i know. oh well.

Literery taxonomy is fun, isn't it?

I prefer the umbrella term 'speculative fiction' of 'sf' to cover everything from science fiction and fantasy to dark fantasy, horror and all the myriad other smaller labels. 1984 is both horror and science fiction, as is Frankenstein. The Stand'possibly qualifies as science fiction, but uncomfortably - it's more fantasy, I think (all the religious stuff). The Things That Are Not There is horror mixed with detective fiction. My own book (The Spiraling Worm) is a mix of horror, espionage and H. Rider Haggard-style adventure. But they all work as sf.

To me, 'weird' fiction will always be stuff like HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson and Edgar Rice Burroughs - stories of strange dimensions impacting our own, hidden realities and outre entities.

Just my two cents.

I absolutely agree with john_sunseri. Weird fiction is first and foremost a term that is used to describe the works of a justly famous cadre of writers such as Lovecraft, Smith, Leiber, Long, Bloch, and others who, in the early to mid-20th century, wrote for WEIRD TALES, ASTOUNDING, UNKNOWN, etc. Lovecraft himself used the term 'Weird Fiction' when describing those writers who were an immediate inspiration, such as Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Ambrose Birece.

I'd probably start the Weird Fiction tradition with Robert Chambers, Ambrose Birece, or Lord Dunsany (although an argument could perhaps be made to include Poe and Hawthorne), and let it continue into the 70's with the later works by Weird Fiction giants such as Manly Wade Wellman and Fritz Leiber. At about that point the classification mutates a bit more completely into what we now recognize as 'horror'.

As for more contemporary works, well, there is still a WEIRD TALES magazine, and I suppose 80's and 90's tales collected in anthologies like Schiff's WHISPERS could often be classified as being in the Weird tradition, but the most potent, undiluted definition of the term 'Weird Fiction' will remain for me specific writers working from the the late 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th.

Kenton,

You may be a purist, but you're one I'm on the same side of the fence as.

I'm not big on sub-genre classification and taxonomy but those are decent parameters. I am starting to really weary of the term "slipstream" which seems to me to be used as a poachers term for "the stuff that we like that's cool." I think it's one of those words like "sociobiology" that's getting abused as a catch all.

- Barney Dannelke

Barney,

I think that "Weird Fiction" is more of a tradition than a sub-genre, and something that isn't really done anymore (and most often as pastiche when it is attempted, although there may be exceptions) which is why I choose to make the distinction in this case.

I actually had to go look for a definition of "slipstream" because while I've heard it as used as a genre descriptor before, I never really associated it with anything. Now I get it, although I like your "poachers" definition better!

-ken10

I have to admit I probably could be accused of abusing the term Weird Fiction. Personally, I've tagged Borges, Julio Cortazar, Maupassant, Horacio Quiroga and Bruno Schulz as "weird fiction" in my library. And I'd add Franz Kafka and Dino Buzzati if I had any of their works in my library. (It just occurred to me that all of these authors wrote principally in languages other than English. Are there commonly accepted "weird" writers outside the Anglophone world?) It's sort of a personal taxonomy, mainly applied to writers of short stories of an intellectually unsettling nature. (Though they can be unsettling in other ways, as well.)

Certainly the most defensible position is to use the term strictly for the crop of authors surrounding Weird Tales and/or HPL, and authors consciously writing in a similar vein. (Or does a Cthulhu Mythos story written in 2000 fail to qualify as "weird fiction"?) And perhaps some of their immediate antecedents. (Blackwood, Machen, Poe, et al.)

Carlos,

As Barney notes, I am somewhat of a purist in this matter. I think that some of the authors you mention would be better described as simply being avant-garde than as practitioners of the weird tale. Again, I think that there are certain specific literary influences that need to be taken into account in order for a writer to be considered a true writer of weird fiction.

As far as non-Anglo writers, that is a good point. I can't think of one off the top of my head. Even if you open up the field to recent attempts at what we might call "Cthulhu fiction", are there any notable practitioners? There certainly could, and should, be.
This subject bears further examination.

As far as recent stories set in the HPL mythos, or those at least utilizing Weird stylings, again I find these mostly to be pastiches, although there may be some stories that could be used as contenders. Certain works of Ramsey Campbell come to mind, like THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS. Brain Lumley would certainly be included, but even his stories, good as they often are (like FRUITING BODIES), still come across as borderline pastiche to me.

"I think that "Weird Fiction" is more of a tradition than a sub-genre, and something that isn't really done anymore (and most often as pastiche when it is attempted, although there may be exceptions)"

I would recommend the work of Thomas Ligotti. He works in the sort of tradition that you speak of and his writing doesn't come of as being a pastiche. Although, the last I heard, he stopped writing fiction a few years ago, so maybe Weird Fiction as you define it isn't really done anymore.

Ken,

You have a point about avant-garde and pastiche, and I'd definitely have to admit Buzzati, Kafka, Borges, Cortazar, and Schulz probably fall more into avant-garde. Do Quiroga or Maupassant really count as avant-garde, though? What, aside from original language or historical moment, distinguishes "Le Horla" or Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow" from the sort of story that would have turned up in Weird Tales circa 1930?

Bradley mentions Thomas Ligotti, whose writing is very much in the weird tradition. (Although I'd argue with one foot in the avant-garde.) I can also think of Karl Edward Wagner and T.E.D. Klein, though the former died in 1994 and the latter has not been particularly prolific. (Or would they fall under the heading of New Weird?)

I highly recommend S.T. Joshi's The Weird Tale as a reference that might be useful in this discussion. Joshi is, as one might expect, a bit of a traditionalist, but he makes solid arguments.

It looks like a new anthology is coming out in February that might up the ante in the genre-naming sweepstakes. It's called The New Weird, is edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and contains stories by Michael Moorcock (who appears to have thus far escaped mention on this thread), China Miéville, Sarah Monette, Jeffrey Ford, Clive Barker and others.

I've also seen a case made for "Interstitial Fiction," which seems overly academic in tone to me. Conjunctions: 39, a literary periodical put out by Bard College, made a bid for "New Wave Fabulists," which has a nice ring to it.

There is an extent to which each of these genre descriptions has a slightly different focus, so that some authors are included in some but not others. New Weird seems to focus more on the creation of new fantasy worlds that are not influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien or D&D.

For instance, Kelly Link is a slipstream and interstitial fiction writer, but not always considered a New Weird writer. The distinctions, however, seem to me to be very much in the eye of the beholder and not much use in and of themselves in guiding a reader to good and entertaining work.

A great source of weird fiction can be found here: http://bizarrocentral.com/

Dear Weird Fiction Readers,

We're writing to you on behalf of UK specialty publisher, Eibonvale Press, publisher of intelligent modern horror, slipstream, science fiction, magic realism, and the surreal. We are currently hard at work promoting our newest release, the short fiction collection Experiments At 3 Billion A.M. by Alexander Zelenyj. We at Eibonvale Press feel that the unclassifiable, genre-bending nature of the book exemplifies the literary focus of the Weird Fiction discussion group and we would be very grateful if you would consider visiting our websites to learn more and possibly help spread word of the release. I have included our official press release for the book and relevant links below, by way of providing a more thorough description of its stylistic and thematic contents.

Thank you so much everybody. We hope you enjoy your visit to our websites! Take care,

Eibonvale Press
eibonvalecanada@gmail.com
www.eibonvalepress.co.uk

Windblown wildernesses; celestial fire; women from the moon; inexplicable phenomena in sleeping counties and visions of blood amid mazes of urban sprawl; tales culled from subterranean depths, from the A.M. darkness and from stolen afternoons of nostalgic sunlight and weeping rains…

Eibonvale Press is pleased to announce the release of Experiments At 3 Billion A.M. by Canadian author Alexander Zelenyj, a colossal collection of forty short stories covering ten years of the author’s work. Zelenyj’s haunting and surreal stories range widely in style, stretching from lyrical flights of fantasy to gritty and painful realism to unsettling horror and the grotesque – from subtle slipstream with only the faintest sense of the otherworldly to vivid space fiction and magic realism and even light-hearted homages to the colourful and gleeful world of the pulps. Always unexpected, these stories remain bound together by a tone of universal sadness and gentleness, and an overarching sense of wonder. This lavish 664-page collection represents the most ambitious release yet from Eibonvale Press - the book is available in three different formats – a Regular Edition and Limited Edition Hardcover with different cover artwork by David Rix, as well as a Trade Paperback with alternate cover artwork. For more information visit www.eibonvalepress.co.uk.

Alexander Zelenyj’s fiction has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including FreeFall, Front & Centre, Double Dare Press, The Windsor Review, Revelation, Amazing Journeys, Jupiter, Euphony Journal, Simulacrum, Inscape, Underground Voices, and the Rose & Thorn. He is the author of the short novel, Black Sunshine, published by Fourth Horseman Press, and is a member of the Horror Writers Association. He lives in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, prefers basements, and experiments in the wee hours. For more author information visit www.alexanderzelenyj.com.

Here’s what reviewers are saying about the book:

“...The tales in Experiments at 3 Billion A.M. are masterpieces of subtlety and suggestion, electric with emotional power, brimming with inventiveness, enigmatic, inconclusive and delicately drawn, touching, without being sentimental, evocative and often deeply unsettling and shocking. This then is that rare achievement, great writing and great story telling.”
- The Future Fire: Social Political & Speculative Cyber-Fiction

“Zelenyj is an incredibly talented writer who works the full spectrum of speculative fiction with ease and the ability to blur out any genre lines you may care to draw. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream and relentless re-combination, Zelenyj does it all with a narrative clarity that makes for fast, enjoyable reading.”
- The Agony Column

"Mr. Zelenyj has an eloquent style of writing that gives each story a unique dark flavor and his vivid imagination brings the characters to life for the reader and takes them places they would never expect to go. Each story has its own dark place - some with brutal toothy malevolence while others are shadows full of emotional pain."
- Monster Librarian

"This is some of the best slipstream fiction I have read for a while...Zelenyj mixes his genres with the hand of an expert producing some really emotive pieces, sometimes melancholy, sometimes hopeful but always interesting.”
- Sci-Fi Online

Weird fiction is work in the tradition of:

Lord Dunsany
H.P.Lovecraft
Edgar Allan Poe
Ambrose Bierce
M.R.James
Arthur Machen
Algernon Blackwood
Clark Ashton Smith and
Robert E. Howard

(That's about the most concise definition I can give.)

Fantagraphics to publish Crockett Johnson's Barnaby

http://www.fantagraphics.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Fantagraphics-...