Weirdin’ It Up The New Old Fashioned Way
Kathryn Cramer is playing host to an archive of discussion about the genre currently labeled ‘New Weird’. I find myself agreeing most with Jonathan Strahan when he says:
Much like the new space opera (a term invented by a bunch of critics to cover the fact that they got distracted by cyberpunk and didn’t notice that no-one had stopped writing the other stuff), the new weird/new wave fabulist/slipstream whatever seems to be a pretty happy and healthy outgrowth of some things that came before which would probably be much better off if left unlabelled and left to grow in the dark where they belong.
Seriously. I find none of this so-labelled ‘new’ spec lit to be substantially different from a great deal of classic genre fiction. Already I’ve seen people go back and label classic stories ‘retro slipstream’ and other eyebrow raising claims. The fact of the matter is that fantasy, science fiction and horror have never had any limits beyond what commercial interests foisted on them. People have been writing whacked out mixtures of realism and wildasserry since they figured out that observation and frank reporting wasn’t the be all and end all of what these funny little squiggles called words could do.
That said, the archive is long, fascinating, very funny, and quite entertaining. Worth a read even to those only mildly interested.
