Reactions and Reactionaries-Part Three

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.

--V.I. Lenin

Although H.P. Lovecraft was a materialist, his reach, especially in his own lifetime, was fairly limited. For example, he never had a hardbound book or collection published while he was alive. (He's lucky--maybe--to have had August Derleth as a friend and admirer, otherwise he might have been forgotten.) On the other hand, two of the most well-known and influential fantasies of the twentieth century, the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, were by distinctly Christian writers. Both men were also of course conservative, especially in the original, non-political or anti-political sense of the word.

If I had to summarize the difference between the Conservative and the Progressive, it might be that the former understands that we as human beings are fallen in our nature, while the latter believes that we and our society are perfectible. Whether you throw in religion, especially Judaism or Christianity, or not, conservatives tend to believe in the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute. Progressives, on the other hand, tend to believe in the relative, the arbitrary, the conditional, what they call "complex" or "nuanced" views of things. They see gray areas where conservatives tend to see only black and white. I have dated the first proliferation of genres to 1919 when the first specialized pulp magazines arrived on the newsstand. Well, British historian Paul Johnson dated the advent of the twentieth century and its moral relativism to 1919 when the Eddington experiment confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Another convergence--or a leaping-off point.

In the quote I used to close a previous entry in this series, Steph Swainston stated her non-belief in evil. Here is a long quote from an interview with China Miéville from The Believer #23, dated April 1, 2005, link here:

Pinochet is very likely to die in his bed surrounded by a grieving family. That's not fair. [Can you hear the whining?] Pinochet should be held to account. Kissinger should not be able to eat pâté de foie gras. You know, the worst thing that seems to have happened to Kissinger in the last few years is that his travel plans have become a little bit more complicated because he's worried about being tried, but the fact is he's likely to die in his bed. This is not a fair, moral world. [More whining.] Sometimes the guilty do get punished and the good do get rewarded, and that's fantastic and I'm always delighted when that happens, but I do want to try to make Bas Lag as socially realistic a world as I can and as morally realistic a world as I can. And the fact that I reject abstract morality doesn't mean that I'm immoral or amoral--I feel very moral--but it means that the morality is concrete and is related to politics rather than being a kind of schema that you slap on top of the world and then judge the world according to. I should say that I feel there is a danger in all this, in that I think there is sometimes a cheap gravitas to be accrued by being cruel to your characters. That there is a certain tendency in some kinds of fiction to say, "Look, I haven't rewarded the good and I haven't punished the bad. This must be gritty, realistic hard fiction." In fact, it can degenerate into a kind of aesthetic sadism. I am mindful that there is a line to be walked between really, really pat and fairytale and trite, and being sadistic and willfully unpleasant to your characters, and I don't want to get into a position of being spiteful to the characters just to appear to be unflinching. [Boldface added.]

Let's give the author credit for the sentiments he expressed in the last part of that quote. Now let's have another look at the first part:

And the fact that I reject abstract morality doesn't mean that I'm immoral or amoral--I feel very moral--but it means that the morality is concrete and is related to politics rather than being a kind of schema that you slap on top of the world and then judge the world according to. [Emphasis added.]

Morality is concrete and is related to politics. I take that to mean that, in Mr. Miéville's view, morality is relative rather than absolute because what is moral and what is not moral is decided not by God, nor by resorting to anything infinite, eternal, or absolute, but by individual human beings, who are by nature--whether he realizes it or not--weak, frail, imperfect, contingent, trapped in time, and sure to die. These people doing the deciding are actors in politics, the politically powerful, ultimately, I suppose, the State. I take it also to mean that morality, being concrete, is material and based on material ends or outcomes rather than on anything abstract or non-material. Is China Miéville being merely coy here? I don't know. There was no pussyfooting by V.I. Lenin, though. On the same topic, he said, "There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience."

Speaking of the founder of Bolshevism, Lenin died in bed. Is that fair or moral by China Miéville's standards? In the one hundred and nine years since Lenin and his followers seized power, tens of millions of people--perhaps 100 million or more--have perished under the system he created. Countless millions more have been imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, exiled, or otherwise tormented or made to suffer in one way or another under that same system. Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, and others under varying brands of communism and socialism have started and waged wars of extraordinary cruelty. (Two points: First, when it comes to developing brandnames, Marxists are as prolific as capitalists. Second, the surname Marx refers to Mars, god of war, and the Communist's flag is the color of blood and fire.) What of that? Why should Henry Kissinger be an especial focus for China Miéville's ire? Does he turn a blind eye to the sins and depredations of his co-religionists? If so, why? What moral system is it exactly that allows for such a thing?

Further questions: Why is the focus of the Leftist always on the ideological opposition? Why is Henry Kissinger a villain but V.I. Lenin is not? Why is it fair that one should die in bed but not the other? In this age of critical theory, we know the answer: it is because criticism against the opposition must be forever fierce and relentless. We on the near side of critical theory are absolved of our sins. You over there must forever be condemned. Remember that critical theory is a product of the Frankfurt School and an extension of Marxism. Although it came from Europe (It Came from Europe--sounds like a monster movie from the 1950s), critical theory developed in this country during the 1960s, the same decade during which academics began looking at and evaluating American popular culture of previous eras, including the pulp fiction-era. Critical theory is now rampant in academia, as is the study and exploitation of popular culture for political and propagandistic ends.

Still more questions: Why should China Miéville as a Marxist author write fantasies about anything that is non-material in its nature or being? Is it because he understands the limits of materialism and would rather not work within the constraints imposed by his own belief system? Or is it because he is secretly (or not so secretly) something more than a mere materialist? Put another way, why does any author who claims to be a materialist write anything other than science fiction of the strictest and most materialistic kind? Maybe Mr. Miéville isn't so strict in his views after all. Maybe he can allow for the non-material to operate in his works. (I assume here that there are non-material things in his works.) Then again, maybe he's up to something else: maybe he and certain other writers of the so-called "New Weird" are (or were) trying to expand materialism, atheism, and Marxism into genres where they had previously gained little traction. Maybe that is what was "new" about "the New Weird": a weird fiction--or more broadly, a literature of fantasy--previously dominated by conservatives, non-materialists, even Christians, now taken over by the political opposition. Maybe "the New Weird" and related movements and trends are the train carrying the revolutionary across an old and war-torn land, its final stop, the frontier and the Finland Station.

An anti-commie cover of the men's magazine For Men Only, published in May and perfect for May. Year and cover artist unknown. I don't know about you, but I think being an anti-commie is way more fun than being a commie. 

Original text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Reactions and Reactionaries-Part Two

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

[Jeff VanderMeer]: Do you believe in the existence of Evil?

[Steph Swainston]: Certainly not. 'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like.

--From "Dangerous Offspring: An Interview with Steph Swainston"

by Jeff VanderMeer, Clarkesworld, October 2007.

In Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s (1983), British historian Paul Johnson set the beginning of the twentieth century in the year 1919 and a single event: the Eddington experiment, which confirmed a prediction made in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity regarding the deflection of light caused by gravity. The late Mr. Johnson's thesis is that relativity passed from physics into other realms of thought and practice--that Einsteinian relativity became transformed into moral relativism--and thereby the central idea of the 20th century was formed. Just as there are no fixed points of reference in space-time, there are now no fixed morals, i.e., no moral absolutes. What is moral for one person might be considered immoral by another, but it doesn't matter. All viewpoints are equal. All morals are relative, or they don't exist at all, and so every kind of depravity and atrocity is permitted. To put it another way, "'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like."

Here is a much longer quote, a passage, from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (1942). It opens Chapter VII. The devil Screwtape addresses his nephew:

My dear Wormwood,

I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient [i.e., the human being on whom Wormwood is working] in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [i.e., God]. The "Life Force," the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey our orders. I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that "devils" are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

In emphasis: 

Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves.

If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight.

If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

In the Preface to The Screwtape Letters, the author put things more succinctly:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race [i.e., the human race] can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. 

Disbelieving in the devil--and by extension evil--as a moral, intellectual, and spiritual pitfall is older than that. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former communist (i.e., a materialist and a believer in "Forces") and a convert to Christianity (i.e., a believer in God and the spirit), traced it to the previous century. In "The Devil," in Life magazine, he wrote:

Baudelaire, that old flower of evil, was right: "The Devil's cleverest wile is to make men believe that he does not exist."

Baudelaire was of course Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and a composer of weird poems. I feel certain that Baudelaire had merely put into words an age-old insight among men.

The point in all of this is that any author, including authors of the so-called "New Weird," who disbelieves in evil; who believes instead in "Forces," including History; or who operates either as a materialist or a "magician," has fallen for wiles. He or she has been duped: supposedly smart and well-educated people, falling for the oldest trick in the book.

* * *

Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.

--1984 by George Orwell (Ch. 8) 

Authors of "the New Weird" appear to be--or state outright--that they are against what they call "reactionary" authors of the past. Two or three meet their special ire: J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and then take your pick: Robert A. Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis. (There seems to be less ire directed towards Lewis. Perhaps newer authors see him as gentle and non-threatening. But maybe he was fiercer than he appeared. I wonder what they might make of Flannery O'Connor.) Reactionary is sometimes a useful and descriptive word. But in the mouth of the radical or revolutionary leftist or Marxist, it is a pejorative, and one of the worst, though not as bad as "Nazi" or "Fascist."

To some people, I suppose, reactionary also means old. Maybe any difference doesn't matter to the person who is trying to tear down the past. After all, the goal is to start with zero. That means everything has to go onto the ash heap of History if we are to have a better and happier world. Taking away starting-at-zero as a goal, we are permitted to hold onto some things from the past. We can't get rid of Marx, after all. He's the granddaddy of all of our ideas. But just how old does something have to be before the people defending it are called "reactionary"? Rousseau is from the eighteenth century, but his ideas are considered fresh, while the younger U.S. Constitution is called outdated. We have to continue to believe in the perfectibility of man and society, as well as in the State as the expression of the general will of the people, but the rights to speak freely, to question, to dissent--these and more are problematic, if not disposable. Poverty, oppression, and political murder are as old as time, but they are to be respected under Marxism. Look at how leftists in America and their media lapdogs (or maybe it's the other way around) see Cuba right now. (I write in April. Maybe by May, Cuba will be free. May 1st would make a nice day for it. Update: It hasn't turned out that way, but it will happen soon, I think.) Meanwhile, newer and far more radical ideas--Christianity, unalienable rights, human freedom, including economic freedom--must be suppressed if not extinguished. We have to get rid of old-old things, but we have to raise up and hold on to new-old things, for example, ideas from "the New Left," policies and institutions from "the New Deal" and "the New Society," as well as the British New Wave as a model of the so-called "New Weird." The youngest of these "new" things (except for "the New Weird") is now more than sixty years old. So are many of the authors of "the New Weird."

I harp on Marxism because China Miéville, born in 1972 and one of the originators of "the New Weird," is a Marxist, necessarily a materialist. Marxism is, I think, an attempt to bring back the glory days of feudalism, before there was a middle class (the Marxist bourgeoisie) to usurp the power of the monarch (our current or aspirational State) and the aristocracy (our current élite or clerisy). Feudalism is old, old. It goes back at least to the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire. If it isn't literally ancient, it is very nearly so. And Marxists want it back.* Karl Marx was like a Scooby-Doo villain. His scheme would have worked--he would have been recognized as a great man, an Übermensch, and would have been able to lie around all day, doing as he pleased, lazing in luxury and wealth while Beulah peeled him a grape--if it hadn't been for those meddling bourgeoisie.

Even if feudalism is only new-old, systems and practices of political murder, oppression, impoverishment, and slavery are old-old--they go back many thousands of years. If you hate old things--if you consider yourself a progressive, radical, or revolutionary--why would you want to go back to them? Isn't that actually reactionary? Isn't the truly radical idea the Christian idea that we are free and equal because God made us so? (I remember the motto of the old Indianapolis Star: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.") That there are moral absolutes established not by men but by God and no moral relatives at all? That the State is not an absolute authority on anything? If these things are true--if tyranny is as old as time but freedom is ever new and radical--then who again is the real reactionary? Who wants to overthrow the radical revolutions of Christianity and human freedom and return to the glorious past when the State or king was a kind of god and an aristocracy ruled over the benighted masses?

* * *

I'll close part two of this sub-series with the words of a socialist on the subject of socialists. From The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937):

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible--the really disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

And:

To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. I remember my sensations of horror on first attending an I.L.P. branch meeting in London. (It might have been rather different in the North, where the bourgeoisie are less thickly scattered.) Are these mingy little beasts, I thought, the champions of the working class? For every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority.

Finally:

But is it? Sometimes I look at a Socialist--the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation--and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. [. . .] The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred--a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred--against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.**

Now I will observe that China Miéville is one of the bourgeoisie--he, like his mother, is a writer and a teacher--and that he is related in one way or another to British barons, so in that way he is aristocrat-adjacent. The people who edit, publish, distribute, sell, and read his books are also of the bourgeoisie. As for Jeff VanderMeer, he, too, emanates from the middle class, as does probably every other supposedly liberal, leftist, socialist, Marxist, Labour- or Democrat- or Green-oriented, progressive, radical, or revolutionary writer, editor, academic, scholar, or critic, whether of "the New Weird" or not.

Silly.

-----

*Sacrifices made to Moloch are older still. Marxists and their fellow-travelers want those back, too. Abortion and infanticide are two examples. Transgenderism is another. Whitaker Chambers began to turn away from communism when the party demanded that his wife have an abortion, for it understood that if she were to have a child, he and she both would have loyalty to something other than the party. Marxists see the family as a threat to their belief system. They want only to destroy it. Marxism is, after all, a jealous god.

**I'm glad that George Orwell was a socialist, and that he was a Briton. If he had not been a socialist, socialists would have dismissed him as a reactionary. If he were alive today, they would cancel him, just as people on the left have tried to cancel J.K. Rowling, who is no conservative at all except that she understands that a man can't be a woman. And Britain needs Orwell more than we do. He can speak to the people of the United Kingdom as one of their countrymen. If he had been an American, they would easily have shut him out. They need to hear him, though, and heed the warnings that he provided them in his writings, especially in 1984 (1949), which was, as we know, not intended as an instruction book.

By the way, earlier this year a British video game character named Amelia escaped from her creators to become a tempter of young men away from the State that wants to prevail over them. (If the society created by the overarching and controlling state is Eden, then let there be no Eve.) In that way, Amelia plays the same role as Julia in 1984, LUH 3417 in THX 1138 (1971), and I-330 in We (1924). There have since become German, Dutch, and other versions of Amelia. I wish them all success, even if they have faded from the news. (Stay tuned for more on Amelia, as well as Joy Division and Starship Troopers.)

A Signet edition of 1984 by George Orwell, with cover art by Alan Harmon.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Reactions and Reactionaries-Part One

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

I have written these past few weeks about the so-called "New Weird," which may or may not have been new (in 2008) and the practitioners of which may or may not have been doing something innovative in their writing. One thing they seem to have in common is their dislike or disdain for convention or tradition, especially for well-accepted and well-liked writers of the past. China Miéville, for example, dislikes J.R.R. Tolkien for his conservatism, evidently also for his Catholicism. (I guess you can take the British Marxist out of the Church of England, but you can never take the Church of England out of the British Marxist.) Here is Mr. Miéville on Tolkien: "His was a profoundly backward-looking reaction, based on a rural idyll that never existed--feudalism lite." (1) I won't go very far into the idea that socialism is the proper successor to feudalism, with the State assuming the role of the king (and God), the intellectual élite taking the place of the aristocracy and clergy, the people being kept in their place as serfs, and of course no usurping middle class in sight. I just want to give you an idea of how a writer of "the New Weird" feels about an old-time fantasist.

China Miéville's near contemporary Jeff VanderMeer had a few things to say on H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Tales previous to and following the end of his wife's tenure as editor of that magazine. You could have read his essay "Moving Past Lovecraft" on the website Weird Fiction Review, dated September 1, 2012, but it's no longer available there. Too bad. The upshot of Mr. VanderMeer's essay is that Lovecraft is dead and gone and that it's time for something new. I agree with some of the things he wrote. (For example, like him, I don't think Lovecraft should be at the center of weird fiction as if he were Azathoth at the center of Ultimate Chaos. There are other writers and other ideas.) But the author gives too much away with his hackneyed language of the left. Talk about needing something new: we all need a break from this old and tired way of writing and thinking . . .

Observe that: a) Lovecraft; b) Weird Tales magazine under editors other than Ann VanderMeer; and c) weird fiction not approved by Mr. VanderMeer are characterized by worn-out leftist pejoratives: conservative, non-progressive, nostalgia, nostalgic, the dead past, cannibalistic, narrowness, etc. In contrast, a) Jeff and Ann VanderMeer; b) writers of their circle; and c) everything they like are described in approving terms, all equally worn out by writers on the left: inclusiveness, progressive, innovative, transgressive, diverse, etc. I understand that Mr. VanderMeer composed his essay in the heat of the moment. Maybe things have cooled off in the many years since. Maybe that's why we can no longer read his essay.

So, if you're keeping track, China Miéville's dragon-for-the-slaying is J.R.R. Tolkien, while Jeff VanderMeer's is or was H.P. Lovecraft. Their fellow supposedly "New Weird" author K.J. Bishop is a little more positive: in an interview from the website Strange Horizons, from October 18, 2004 (here), she admitted, "I was a Lord of the Rings fan, and I have plenty of regard for Tolkien still." She also seemed to recognize that "the New Weird" may not have been so new after all:

Other kinds of fantasy have always been written; the picaresque has been around for ages, as have folk tales about ordinary people to whom strange things happen, and to me the "New Weird" is coming out of those traditions. The elements of decadence and horror are there in the Arabian Nights and the Brothers Grimm. I think that what appear to be evolutions in the writing are really changes in public taste and what gets published. [Boldface added.]

Maybe Ms. Bishop doesn't quite fit in "the New Weird" category after all.

Next is British author Steph Swainston on Tolkien:

The Brontës had a contribution to make to fantasy literature--their Great Glass Town. Sometimes I wish the fantasy genre had grown from Great Glass Town instead of Middle Earth. But they were ahead of their time, and Charlotte Brontë knew better than to go public with such a private world, even though her brother Branwell pushed her to do it and I suspect Thackeray would have loved it. I like to use variety--and as little repetition of words as possible. It amazes me that so much fantasy writing is leaden and conservative, still influenced by Tolkien's use of a solemn, "epic" style. Anything can happen in fantasy, so why use such stilted prose? [Boldface added.] (2)

That's not so harsh; Ms. Swainston may have made a legitimate point about Tolkien's style. But here again is that critical, if not pejorative, term, conservative. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the Brontës or William Makepeace Thackeray could be called liberal or progressive.

Here is a more informative quote from Steph Swainston:

[Jeff VanderMeer]: Do you believe in the existence of Evil?

[Steph Swainston]: Certainly not. 'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like.

More on that topic next.

Notes

(1) From "Tolkien-Middle Earth Meets Middle England" by China Miéville in Socialist Review on line, January 2002, at the following URL:

http://socialistreview.org.uk/259/tolkien-middle-earth-meets-middle-england

(2) From "Dangerous Offspring: An Interview with Steph Swainston" by Jeff VanderMeer, Clarkesworld, October 2007, here.

A map drawn by Branwell Brontë of the Brontë family's Glass Town world. The map above is somewhat similar to those showing Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age and J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth in that there is a bulging continent on the north and a great gulf on the south.

Original text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

The New Weird Anthology-Part Four

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

My original program in 2017 was to go one by one through the authors in The New Weird anthology (2008). I didn't get very far in that very long list. Maybe that's one of the reasons I hit pause on this series. Very quickly, though:

M. John Harrison (British, born 1945) was an associate of Michael Moorcock at New Worlds magazine. He appears to have taken the lead on the formulation of "the New Weird."

Clive Barker (British, born 1952) is a prolific and very well-known author of all kinds of works.

Simon Ings (British, born 1965) has collaborated with M. John Harrison.

Kathe Koja (American, born 1960).

Thomas Ligotti (American, born 1953) is an atheist, socialist, and anti-natalist. Despite his evident leftism or progressivism, Mr. Ligotti seems to me a fairly traditional kind of writer and not one to want to throw off the past. I could be wrong.

K.J. Bishop (Australian, born 1972).

Jeffrey Ford (American, born 1955).

China Miéville (British, born 1972), is supposed to have been one of the lead proponents of the so-called "New Weird." He is of course a Marxist. He also holds a Ph.D. That places him on the academic/scholarly side of things instead of on the "self-taught" side.

Jeffrey Thomas (American, born 1957).

Brian Evenson (American, born 1966). He also holds a Ph.D., in his case in literature and critical theory, and so he is not "self-taught," either, as the writers of "the Old Weird" were.

Jay Lake (American, 1964-2014). It's never too late to send condolences, I hope, and so I send them to his family and friends.

Leena Krohn (Finnish, born 1947).

Steph Swainston (British, born 1974). From an interview on the website Clarkesworld: "I prefer not to draw lines between good fantasy and good mainstream literature, but see the whole thing as a continuum." Emphasis added.

Alistair Rennie (Scottish, b. ?) is also a musician.

These are the rest of the authors in the first two sections of The New Weird. As you can see, they are a mix of Baby Boomers and Generation X (with one pre-Boomer, and only if those categories apply in the rest of the world). The youngest of them is now past fifty years old.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

The New Weird Anthology-Part Three

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

I am looking at the authors whose work appeared in the 2008 anthology The New Weird, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. This list is in chronological order by the date of composition or publication of their individual works. Michael Moorcock, who wrote his story in 1979, comes first. He is first in other ways, too.

"Crossing into Cambodia: A Story of the Third World War" (1979) by Michael Moorcock

Born in London in 1939, Michael Moorcock is the oldest writer represented here. He came to fame as the editor (1964-1971, 1976-1996) of the British New Wave science fiction magazine New Worlds. Note the modifiers: New and New. There, I think, is the impulse: to ride a new wave, to discover new worlds, to make and forge something new, something the world has never seen before. This is the impulse of the young writer, artist, and thinker. It's also the impulse of the political progressive, radical, or revolutionary. In the world of arts and ideas, the impulse towards newness has yielded, since World War II, neorealism in Italian cinema, nouvelle vague in its French counterpart, bossa nova in Brazilian popular music, and British and American new wave music of the 1970s and '80s. Neo-, nouvelle, nova, new. 

In the world of arts and ideas, an impulse to newness is usually innocuous. In fact it often reinvigorates old forms. It is in politics--or when politics crosses over into the world of arts and ideas--that the burning desire to make something new becomes so dangerous. In striving for newness, in attempting to make a new society by throwing off the old one, by starting over again at year zero, the people behind so-called progressive political systems have murdered, starved, tortured, and imprisoned countless millions of their fellow human beings. What is claimed to be new--misery, poverty, murder, oppression--is actually as old as time. In any case, it's no coincidence that the authors of what is called "the New Weird" tend towards political progressivism. So is their aim to politicize weird fiction and fantasy? I believe so, judging from Mr. VanderMeer's introduction to The New Weird. Michael Moorcock, their progenitor, is an anarchist, pragmatist, Marxist, and socialist. He makes that clear in his writings. The authors of "the New Weird," politicized or even radicalized as they may be, would seem to follow in his footsteps. The sub-genre itself seems to exist in a direct line of descent from something he helped create, the original British New Wave. So what again is new about "the New Weird"?

If science fiction is discontinuous from other genres [an idea I haven't discussed just yet], then there was, at least in its early years, the possibility that something new could be brought into the world. New scientific discoveries and new technological developments allowed for newness in the arts. That newness seems to have worn out in the immediate postwar era, though. In his editorship of New Worlds, Mr. Moorcock wrote and encouraged the writing of a new kind of soft, sociological, political, and philosophical science fiction that departed from the conventional hard, scientific, technological, and action-oriented science fiction of the 1920s through the 1950s. In addition, the New Wave was about making science fiction more literary. I can't argue with any of that, and I have enjoyed science fiction from the 1960s and '70s written under the influence of the New Wave.

Following the pulp era, science fiction certainly needed higher literary standards. One result of the New Wave may be that some more literary authors--Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Walker Percy--have also indulged themselves in writing science fiction, without fear of shame or opprobrium. But conventional science fiction authors have closed in on finer literature from the other direction, too. I don't know whether we're there yet, but there may come a time when science fiction and fantasy are continuous with a higher or finer literature. (Continuity--there's that concept again.) Maybe someday there will even be a Nobel Prize winner among authors of genre fiction. (If Bob Dylan can win the prize, why not someone who writes about talking squids from outer space?) I believe attaining a higher literary quality or a merging of genre fiction with finer literature was also a goal of "the New Weird."

According to the Wikipedia article on him, Michael Moorcock has written in reaction to or unfavorably of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert A. Heinlein, and many other authors considered to be conservative or reactionary. For a more in-depth discussion of this topic, read Mr. Moorcock's essay "Starship Stormtroopers" (1977; 1984). There's a lot of the typical leftist claptrap in "Starship Stormtroopers," but don't let that stop you: it's an interesting, engaging, informative, and well-written work. Reading it also helps to illuminate the issue at hand, for Michael Moorcock and the New Wave seem to have shared with the authors of "the New Weird" a desire to throw off the past and to dismiss or discard the writers and works of the past.

So, it seems to me that the inspiration and model for "the New Weird" of today (actually yesterday, as its eponymous anthology was published nearly two decades ago--more on that in a minute) is the New Wave of the 1960s and '70s. These supposedly new sub-genres or sub-sub-genres are of the same essence (1):

• Both are in reaction to older and supposedly more conservative authors, conventions, styles, forms, etc., each in its respective sub-genre, New Wave in science fiction and "the New Weird" in weird fiction. That reaction is often extremely fierce, angry, and dismissive. In fact, the fierceness, anger, and dismissiveness of current authors towards their predecessors seems to be an identifying feature of supposedly new literary movements.

• Both strive to make something new of old genres, but that impulse to newness may not be exclusively or even most importantly towards artistic, literary, or aesthetic innovation. The impulse to newness may actually be more powerfully driven by leftwing political philosophies of various stripes: Marxism, socialism, progressivism, anarchism, nihilism, the New Left (there's that word New again), critical theory, political correctness, multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, radical environmentalism, the cult of global warming, etc.

• Both strive also towards higher literary standards and towards a confounding of categorization, a crossing over, bending, or merging of genres, ultimately perhaps a convergence of genre fiction with mainstream literature.

So, New Wave did all of that to science fiction, but that began more than sixty years ago. It may have been new then, but it can't be new now. The impulse to newness makes us need something new new. So maybe what New Wave did to science fiction in the 1960s and '70s can be done to weird fiction today [or eighteen years ago, when the anthology was published]. Maybe an old genre or sub-genre can be remade as a politically progressive new sub-genre called "the New Weird" in which the authors, conventions, styles, and forms of the past are overthrown, dismissed, discarded, or even forgotten. In the process maybe literary standards can be raised as well. Maybe that's where Michael Moorcock came in, and maybe that's why he was represented in The New Weird, for what he did with the New Wave in Britain appears to be the model for what Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer tried to do with "the New Weird" in America and elsewhere. In other words, they may have tried to make something "new" by simply copying something that was done before, in fact nearly fifty years before. (2) If that was their plan, they should have made quicker work of it: the New Wave in science fiction lasted a couple of decades before supposedly being overtaken by cyberpunk. (3) If the publication of the VanderMeers' anthology marked the beginning of "the New Weird" as a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre (or maybe what they wanted was to make it a supergenre), then it was already approaching obsolescence when it was still hot off the press, for we live in an era--a progressive, science-fictional era--in which anything done a year or even a month ago is already old hat. And on top of all that, the VanderMeers lost their showcase for their ideas, in the form of Weird Tales, just as Mr. Moorcock had in New Worlds, in their case in 2012 when Marvin Kaye gained control of the magazine. In the world of today, what's an editor attempting a revolution to do when he loses his or her magazine?

Note

(1) Even the names are of these two sub-genres are similar. It's as if the proponents of this supposedly new thing stood on the edge of a chasm, shouted "New Wave," and heard back the echo "New Weird." One problem is that "the New Weird" is such an awkward construction. At least wave is a noun. Put new in front of it and it rolls pretty trippingly from the tongue. Beyond that, everyone knows what a new wave is and everyone wants to ride it. Ask anyone what is "the New Weird" and you're likely to get back a blank stare. No one seems to know. Actually, I think I know: "the New Weird" is [or was] hype. And not very successful hype. It was an attempt to make something new by copying something old that was once new, i.e., new more than four decades before. It appears to me to have been something that has been tried so often before: an attempt by an intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) of whatever merit to make a name and a place for himself in the world and in the history of ideas. This striving for notice is especially prominent in democratic societies, those in which every man is responsible for his own status but in which all men are made equal and reduced to the same level. Leftists claim to love democracy, but it is in a democracy that they are most frustrated in their desire to rise above everyone else.

(2) First in print in 1926--100 years ago this month--Amazing Stories was the first science fiction magazine in America. The term science fiction hadn't even been invented yet when it first appeared on the newsstand. Thirty-eight years later--in 1964--Michael Moorcock assumed the editorship of New Worlds. In other words, the New Wave was older in 2017 (when I wrote) than was magazine science fiction as a whole when Mr. Moorcock arrived at New Worlds. Even cyberpunk is getting pretty long in the tooth. Remind me again, what exactly is new about all of this?

(3) You might date the beginnings of cyberpunk to the arrival of William Gibson's Gothic science fiction novel Neuromancer in 1984. Cyberpunk is supposed to have grown out of the New Wave. Because of that, I'm not sure anyone can say that the New Wave actually came to an end. (Beginnings and endings, firsts and lasts, are always hard to state.) In any case, note that the first two stories in The New Weird are also from 1984. It may have been that what is called "the New Weird" was really just a continuation of the New Wave, mixed with other genres, including cyberpunk, then shaken, stirred, and given a new name. In other words, the so-called "New Weird" wasn't new at all. By the way, notice the pun: Neuromancer ≈ New Romancer. And remember the name of the protagonist from the very loose movie adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel: Neo from The Matrix (1999). Newness. Always newness.

New Worlds, August 1967, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock and with a cover design by Eduardo Paolozzi. Even Marxists know that sex sells.

Text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

The New Weird Anthology-Part Two

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

The New Weird is an anthology of fiction and essays published in 2008 by Tachyon Publications and edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. There are in this book fifteen stories, plus a seven-part round-robin story, eleven essays, a list of recommended reading, and biographical notes on the contributors. Eleven of the fifteen stories were published previously. A twelfth, "Crossing into Cambodia: A Story of the Third World War" by Michael Moorcock, was originally published in 1979. evidently written in 1979 but not published until in this book. [See the comment below. Thank you, Mr. Trepniak for the correction.] The point here is to get at what is called "the New Weird." I'm not convinced there is such a thing, but I'm only just beginning. Already, in reading about Michael Moorcock, the first writer on the list to follow, I'm starting to see into the phylogeny of this supposedly new sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy. ["The New Weird" is obviously not new anymore in 2026, but then it may never have been new.]

I asked a friend what is "the New Weird." He said that it's weird fiction that departs from the supposed racism, sexism, misogyny, etc., of a previous era. I take that to mean that it is specifically a reaction to H.P. Lovecraft. In reading about "the New Weird," I have also gotten the idea that it's a general reaction to the conservatism of twentieth-century fantasy in the work not only of Lovecraft but also of J.R.R. Tolkien, and to a lesser extent, C.S. Lewis.

I have already written at length about the inherent conservatism in fantasy vs. the implicit progressivism of science fiction. They are, after all, genres about opposites: fantasy is about the past, while science fiction is about the future. Of course, racism, sexism, misogyny, etc., are not necessary parts of weird fiction. Yes, there are weird fiction stories that include these things, but they don't have to be in there in order for it to be proper weird fiction. If you doubt, that, read, for example, the stories of C.L. Moore. To go more deeply, though, I suppose that to readers and writers of certain political persuasions, anything that is conservative is necessarily racist, sexist, and so on. I guess the idea is that if we're going to rid weird fiction of these things, the past must be overthrown and weird fiction remade, hence "the New Weird."

I don't think Lovecraft goes very easily into the same basket as Tolkien and Lewis. Although he was a Tory, Lovecraft's conservatism seems to me a kind of default position, sometimes an affectation, perhaps also a psychological response to the facts of his childhood. It's worth pointing out, too, that Lovecraft loosened up as he aged. He even had nice things to say about socialism, as so many people did in the 1930s. By socialism, I mean both types--those two angry bedfellows known as international and national socialism, that, although they may hate each other, also can't live without each other.

Lovecraft was also a materialist and an atheist. He would seem to have philosophical sympathizers among today's readers and writers of fantasy, especially of "the New Weird." Tolkien and Lewis on the other hand were devout Christians. It seems to me that their conservatism came more naturally to them than Lovecraft's and that it was less a reaction to loneliness and alienation than it was a choice, certainly in the case of the ex-atheist Lewis, who consciously and joyously converted to a new faith.

Jim Morrison was onto something when he sang, "Women seem wicked/When you're unwanted." Replace "women" with "black people," "brown people," "foreigners," "Jewish people," etc., and you might have a better idea of where Lovecraft's fear of and hostility towards these groups came from. People who perceive themselves at the bottom of the ladder are always looking to get one rung up. They often do that by trying to push another guy down. Those who feel inferior often try to boost themselves by talking down someone else. In any case, I would like to write about the authors represented in The New Weird in chronological order by their work. In writing about the first author, I believe I'll get pretty quickly to the origins and essence of this supposedly new sub-genre (or sub-sub-genre or . . .)

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

The New Weird Anthology-Part One

The New Weird anthology (2008) is now nearly two decades old. I began writing this series in 2017, nine years after it was first published. I wrote, then, halfway through the eighteen years that separate us from its initial publication. You could say that I'm beating a dead horse. I would say that I'm beating a dead horse. But I'm not the only one to call it dead. In his introduction to the anthology, co-editor Jeff VanderMeer admitted: "New Weird is dead." And yet he put out an anthology. And yet here I am writing about it. It's not even one of the walking dead, and yet I'm writing about it.

One of the problems in all of this is that I don't have a copy of the book, I have never had a copy of it, I have never read it, nor have I read any of its stories or essays, except for the introduction. So how well qualified am I to write on this topic? Maybe I can claim to write about the penumbrae of "the New Weird" rather than about the thing itself, if it exists. Call it an excuse.

That introduction, by the way, is available on line at the following URL:

https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/blog/2009/06/28/the-new-weird-anthology-notes-and-introduction

I'll list below its content and authors, adapted from The FictionMags Index.

Mr. VanderMeer's introduction includes a lot of listing, namedropping, and insider information. The lists are of the authors' names and their works. As I've said before, lists are not writing. They're lists. But there is some writing hidden in there, too, including the admission that "the New Weird" explicitly followed "the New Wave" of British science fiction of the 1960s and '70s.

Mr. VanderMeer was more accepting of H.P. Lovecraft in his introduction than I have seen in at least one of his other essays. It's not clear to me that "the New Weird" was meant to take the place of any "Old Weird," with Lovecraft in a leading position among "the Old." I'm not sure why anybody would even see any necessity in that. But like all authors of younger generations, those of "the New Weird" wanted a place at the table, even if it meant pushing out the older ones. And now here it is eighteen years later and those young authors are no longer young. In fact, I would guess that most are now middle-aged or older. (Sadly, terribly, one has died.) It happens to all of us, as long as we make it alive through youth. I wonder if middle age has given them any new perspective. I wonder what they might think now of the so-called "New Weird" and the effort they seem to have made to create something that had never existed before. A new story can be new. It's a lot harder to swing a new movement or a new genre. Beyond that, people generally don't get younger, stronger, and more energetic as the years go by. Revolutions are hard to sustain when your knee hurts, your sugar is too high, and you're on meds.

One more thing about the introduction to The New Weird: about three-fourths of the way through, there is a "working definition" of "the New Weird." It reads like a corporate mission statement, developed by a corporate committee. As I've said, genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres, as wells the authors who write in them, have too often become in our time branded commercial products. It's no wonder that the authors of "the New Weird" would operate by a corporate mission statement, which seems to me to be written in the special language of corporate gobbledygook.

* * *

The New Weird (2008) edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer; published by Tachyon Publications; xviii + 414 pp.

Cover art by Mike Libby.

Contents

"The New Weird: 'It's Alive?'"--Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer

[The New Weird is divided into four sections.]

Stimuli [Fiction]

• "The Luck in the Head" by M. John Harrison (1984)
• "In the Hills, the Cities" by Clive Barker (1984)
• "Crossing into Cambodia: A Story of the Third World War" by Michael Moorcock (1979)
• "The Braining of Mother Lamprey" by Simon Ings (1990)
• "The Neglected Garden" by Kathe Koja (1991)
• "A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing" by Thomas Ligotti (1997)

Evidence [Fiction]

• "Jack" by China Miéville (2005)
• "Immolation" by Jeffrey Thomas (2000)
• "The Lizard of Ooze" by Jay Lake (2005)
• "Watson's Boy" by Brian Evenson (2000)
• "The Art of Dying" by K. J. Bishop (1997)
• "At Reparata" by Jeffrey Ford (1999)
• "Letters from Tainaron"--An excerpt from the short novel Tainaron by Leena Krohn (2008), translated by Hildi Hawkins
• "The Ride of the Gabbleratchet" by Steph Swainston (2008)
• "The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines" by Alistair Rennie (2008)

Discussion [Essays]

• "New Weird Discussions: The Creation of a Term" by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer
• "'New Weird': I Think We're the Scene" by Michael Cisco
• "Tracking Phantoms" by Darja Malcolm-Clarke
• "Whose Words You Wear" by K. J. Bishop

European Editor Perspectives on the New Weird:

• "Creating the New Weird to Work for Us" by Martin Šust
• "The New Weird Treachery" by Michael Hăulică
• "There is No New Weird" by Hannes Riffel
• "Blurring the Lines" by Jukka Halme
• "The Uncleaned Kettle" by Konrad Walewski

Laboratory [A Seven-Part Round-Robin Story]

• "Festival Lives: The New Weird Round Robin" essay by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer
• Festival Lives, View 1: Death in a Dirty Dhoti by Paul Di Filippo
• Festival Lives, View 2: Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered by Cat Rambo
• Festival Lives, View 3: All God's Chillun Got Wings by Sarah Monette
• Festival Lives, View 4: Locust-Mind by Daniel Abraham
• Festival Lives, View 5: Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes by Felix Gilman
• Festival Lives, View 6: Golden Lads All Must . . . by Hal Duncan
• Festival Lives, View 7: Forfend the Heavens' Rending by Conrad Williams

Appendices

• "Recommended Reading" by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer
• "Biographical Notes"

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley