Neuromancer-Part One

Beginning with my blog entry of April 6, 2026, I have brought back some writing that has been until now only in draft form. That writing was from 2017, and it involved all kinds of things, as you have seen. I have written mostly about the so-called "New Weird," but I have also brought in, among other things, Charles Fort, the subject of continuity and what I call the genrification of fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, digital British temptress Amelia, and British music of the 1970s and '80s. I have also brought in William Gibson and his 1984 science fiction novel--or Gothic romance--Neuromancer.

Many years ago, I had planned to write a series on Neuromancer. I thought I might have had an original idea about it and its place in the history of science fiction. We should always remember, though, that there aren't that many original ideas left in the world. Mostly what we do is rehash what others have done before us, even if we don't know about them and their work. But in the interest of further cleaning up my draft essays from the past, I give you the first few paragraphs of part one of this series on Neuromancer, originally from 2015. The rest of today's entry, plus the remaining parts of this series, will be original material from 2026, even if it and they are based on ideas from the past.

* * *

A few months ago [on October 23, 2014], in an article called "Fantasy Killed the SF Star," I posed a question: Just what happened between 1979 and Gary Numan's "Cars," and 1996, when The Prodigy issued their song "Breathe"? One video is futuristic and science-fiction-like. The other is horrifying and filled with images of decay. Now I have an answer to that question.

Neuromancer happened.

That's kind of a flippant answer, but it bears some consideration. Neuromancer by William Gibson was published in 1984 [a fitting year for what amounts to a vision of dystopia]. Critics love the book, and it has proved extraordinarily popular. The New York Times called it "freshly imagined, compellingly detailed and chilling." The Chicago Sun-Times was less restrained: "Unforgettable," the reviewer wrote. "The richness of Gibson's work is incredible!" Other reviewers used the same kind of language, describing it "remarkably well-visualized," "rich, detailed, and vivid," "exceptional texture and vision," "fully realized," and so on. Then comes that word from the Washington Post: "kaleidoscopic, picaresque, flashy, and decadent." 

Emphasis added.

So: decadent science fiction? Is such a thing possible?

[And now my draft ends and new writing begins.]

My reason for asking that question is that we think of science fiction as being clean and pure, strong and lively, always forward-looking and future-oriented, always reaching towards and exceeding limits. Science fiction, then, is ascendant. If there are genres of descent or decadence, then surely weird fiction must be among them, for weird fiction is about the past and about limits imposed by God, law, doom, fate, and weird, also by family, culture, curse, guilt, custom, and tradition. In weird fiction, we are bound by the past and, like Jay Gatsby and friends, ceaselessly borne back into it, carried by this great flowing river without banks to our ocean of origin. In contrast, we look to the future with great hope and positivity. We believe that science and technology will solve all of our problems and make everything better. In the future we will be free and happy and unbound. Life will be good. Science fiction gives us an unfailing instrument by which we can beat against the current, a piece of technology to carry us forever forward.*

Or at least that those were the promises of science fiction during its first several decades.

The so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction is supposed to have ended in about 1950, at the beginning of the decade in which, coincidentally or not, pulp magazines also came to an end. (The last pulp magazine is supposed to have been the Western title Ranch Romances, which rode off into the sunset like Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder at the end of Blazing Saddles, and in the same year, 1974.) In the late 1950s and certainly by the early 1960s, there came a feeling that science fiction was dying. In fact, in 1960, science fiction fan Earl Kemp published a fanzine called Who Killed Science Fiction? Just because somebody asked that question doesn't mean that science fiction had died, or was dying, or soon would die. But something had obviously changed by the time Kemp wrote. Maybe he was a canary in the coal mine of his favorite fiction.

If science fiction was dying or already dead by 1960, then a new development seems to have come along just in time to save it. On December 4, 2022, in this space, I wrote:

The term New Wave as applied to British science fiction of the early 1960s was apparently an invention. According to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it was first used by P. Schuyler Miller "in his regular book-review column 'The Reference Library'" in the November 1961 issue of Analog. Miller is supposed to have been inspired by the French filmmakers' New Wave [originally Nouvelle Vague], but there may also have been inspiration in the title of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. 

I have been writing these past few weeks about the New Wave and New Worlds. If it's true that the New Wave saved--or at least reinvigorated or renewed--science fiction, then its British authors would seem to have done for American science fiction what the singers and musicians of the British Invasion did for American popular music and rock-and-roll at around the same time. And then they--the singers and musicians--did it again with punk, New Wave, and so on in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And then Neuromancer hit.**

To be continued . . .

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*To the politically minded person, science is progress and progress is a science.

**Since beginning this series, I have learned about British New Wave cinema from the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. I don't know who named it or when, but New Wave is obviously a translation of the French Nouvelle Vague of the same period. According to Wikipedia, "There is considerable overlap between the New Wave and the angry young men" of British theater, and, I would add, of fiction. And if there were angry young men and new waves in cinema and mainstream literature, why would they not have crossed over into science fiction? The title of one British New Wave film, Hell Is a City (1960) makes me think of the conclusion of a totally unrelated story, "The Concentration City" by J.G. Ballard, which was first published in New Worlds Science Fiction, the New Wave science fiction magazine, in January 1957. Hell Is a City is set in Manchester, and New Wave cinema is supposed to have drawn attention to ordinary working-class life in northern England. There are and were, of course, plenty of bands that originated in Manchester, including Joy Division, its successor New Order, and The Smiths. They have been part of my writing lately, too. I'll close with a disclaimer: I am not British and never have been. I don't have any natural or native feel for British culture and society. All I know is what I read and see and what I'm capable of thinking about. My understanding of these things is necessarily incomplete, if not inadequate. So, a note to all British readers: please feel free to comment on everything about which I have written in these several series and to make corrections, explanations, and clarifications. I welcome your input.

[After writing the note above, I thought of the song and video "Life in a Northern Town" by the Dream Academy, from 1985. The video was filmed in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, not very far north of Manchester. That was more than forty years ago. I wonder if that time and place and way of life are equally as lost as that of the London of "West End Girls."]

Original text copyright 2015, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Amelia Calling

In "Reactions & Reactionaries-Part Two," from May 3, 2026, I  wrote:

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.

I have done some more thinking since then. Call the following an example of the Wikipedia-zation of research. Take the phone off the hook. This is going to take awhile.

Once Amelia escaped from her creators in January of this year, images of her proliferated on the Internet. These included videos, illustrations, and memes. In at least one of these images, Amelia wears a Joy Division t-shirt. I have written before about Joy Division and related topics. You can read what I wrote in the following two entries:

"Joy Connection" (Sept. 1, 2024)

"Joy Connection Revisited" (Nov. 13, 2025)

These have proved to be among the most popular of my postings in the past few years, if the number of visits to a posting is a measure of its popularity. I'm not sure why they are popular, but I like that they are. It's good to stick your finger in the eye of powerful people, including the entirely too powerful people who promote the cult of global warming. Maybe some of you like that idea, too. There will be more of that here, beginning in mere seconds and mere sentences.

I wonder about the significance of Amelia in her Joy Division t-shirt. I'm not British and never have been, but if I had to guess about any significance, it would be that there is something very British--if not uniquely British--about that group. If that's the case, then it's fitting (no pun intended) that Amelia the digital British rebel would wear the t-shirt of a uniquely British band. Maybe the t-shirt thoroughly identifies her as a Briton.

Another Amelia meme shows her lighting her cigarette from a flaming picture of the current prime minister, Keir Starmer. This was after a real-life woman, also in January, lit hers from a photo of the late Iranian leader, who proceeded in February to go up in flames. (Instead of a voodoo doll, hers was a voodoo photo.) Whenever I hear the prime minister's name, I think of Starker from the TV show Get Smart. But Mr. Starmer is no shtarker. On the contrary, he always seems to have a scared look on his face. He should have, for he's in over his head, I think. (He's more like a hapless No. 2 in The Prisoner. I hope there are plenty of prisoners on his island who continue to get his goat.) If he were an American, Two-tier Kier would be a Baby Boomer. Maybe he is in his native land, too. Like H.G. Wells, he's a Fabian socialist. As we know, there are only two kinds of socialists, the evil kind and the stupid kind. I don't think he's evil.

When I wrote about Joy Division in 2024, I made note of the fact that people have associated the group with fascism. I'm sure those same kinds of people will say that Amelia is also fascistic and that she is being used by fascists for their fascistic purposes. As we know, too, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist--no argument, debate, or analysis required. Amelia's wearing of a Joy Division t-shirt would seem to confirm her fascism.

Joy Division's first chart hit was "Love Will Tear Us Apart," which was released in June 1980, after lead singer Ian Curtis had killed himself the month before. If I interpret a quotation I found on Wikipedia correctly, drummer Stephen Morris said that the band was inspired in the composition of their song not only by Frank Sinatra and the American group Sparks but also by the song "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" by Sarah Brightman of all things. The video for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was shot in a dark, decaying place. The video for "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" is bright and science-fictional. The reference in the title of the latter is of course to Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, from 1959. People who see fascists everywhere, even under their own beds, believe that Heinlein was a fascist and Starship Troopers a really fascisticky book. This must be further evidence that Joy Division were fascistic. (1)

Joy Division is considered a post-punk or punk-inspired band. I can't go into punk music here. I don't know enough about it and there isn't enough space. I have already taken up enough in today's entry and will take up a lot more, as you will see. (I could split it, but I would like for all of what I write to be together.) But to me, punk is part anger, and it seems to me that it is descended in part from the Angry Young Men of 1950s British literature. I could be wrong about that. Let me know if I am and how I might better interpret these things. (2)

Keir Starmer was born in 1962, or about the time that the decade of the Angry Young Men ended and that of the unrelated or not-closely-related or maybe-closely-related decade of British New Wave science fiction began. Mr. Starmer seems weak and hesitant to me. Nonetheless, he seems to share in the Angry-Young-Man desire to tear down traditional British society and culture, only in a somewhat slow Fabian way rather than in a fast-motion radical way. He may not be capable of that himself, but he can import people who are, and that's probably good enough for him and his fellow-travelers. If his country falls after he dies--Mr. Starmer is an atheist after all--what does he care? Anyway, what he and people like him fail to understand is the same thing that the Mensheviks failed to understand about the Bolsheviks, which is that less ruthless people will forever fall prey to their more ruthless counterparts. Put another way, once the revolution is accomplished, the man-of-words- or man-of-ideas-type revolutionary is always the first to be stood up against the wall. The ruthless man-of-action-type revolutionary always wins out. The radical always shoots the comparative moderate. In this example, the Green will prevail in the Europeans' perceived Red-Green Alliance, and I don't mean Green of the radical environmentalist type, even if the two Greens are now forming alliances. (3)

Tearing down and overthrowing tradition is of course part of the socialistic or progressive program. But there are those who don't really care about building anything new in its place. Their anger and desire to destroy are everything that they have. Maybe some of the early punk rockers were like that. Angry people can tear down or undermine things in a fierce and angry way. They can also do it in a funny and angry way. The point is that prominent people who were once angry and destructive, or angry and funny, or angry and musically creative have since become what powerful people call fascists if only because they want to preserve their country for their own countrymen and culture. John Cleese appears to be in that category. So does Morrissey. I'm sure there are others. (4) J.K. Rowling isn't in the (extremely) angry or (at all) destructive category, but she has been called a fascist, too.

You don't have to be famous to be labeled a fascist, though. All you have to be is a lover of your own country and culture. (5) All you have to want is not to be deprived of your rights; to have your reputation or livelihood ruined; or to be oppressed, silenced, impoverished, imprisoned, attacked, molested, raped, stabbed, or murdered by the State or its imported myrmidons. If you were anti-establishment in 1976, you might have stomped on, torn up, or defaced the Union Jack. If you are anti-establishment fifty years later, you wave it. That or St. George's flag.

Maybe what we need is for great numbers of Americans continuously and systematically to discomfit, oppose, and offend the British government on behalf of its own people, whom it has silenced and subjugated, and who risk imprisonment just for speaking their minds--or the truth. (6)

We ought to overthrow those who want to overthrow everything--here, in the British Isles, in the rest of the English-speaking world--for the real revolution of the twenty-first century is against the revolutionaries who have finally reached the highest levels of power after so much striving. They used to be on the other side of things, or imagine that they were. Maybe they romanticized themselves that way. Maybe they were once angry young men, filled with punk-era fury. Now they seem tired, but not too tired to oppress the common people who disagree with them. I have read that we live in a post-democratic era in which the people get to vote, and yet their votes mean nothing. Any change cannot be permitted if the governing elite are to retain their power, prestige, and status.

Maybe what we need is a new punk music, a new punk culture, a new punk society, more powerfully anti-establishment than it was fifty years ago. Amelia is calling.

One last thing: Joy Division and New Order have finally made it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, such as it is. Their induction has been announced in the month that I write, April 2026, the same month in which King Charles III has made his happy visit to our shores. Joy Division was formed fifty years ago, in June 1976, so Happy Anniversary, Joy Division!

Notes
(Including two notes that are essays in themselves.)

(1) According to music journalist Jon Savage, Ian Curtis was interested in "romantic and science-fiction literature." One of the songs on the Joy Division album Closer (1980) is called "The Atrocity Exhibition" after J.G. Ballard's experimental novel of the same name published ten years before. Five of its chapters were first in New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock. The title story "The Atrocity Exhibition" was originally in New Worlds in September 1966, so sixty years ago. Mr. Moorcock's essay in that issue was "Why So Conservative?" That's an intriguing title, given today's topic. Unfortunately, I can't read it in any source available to me.

Anyway, on the other side of things, record producer Martin Hannett described the Joy Division sound as "dancing music with Gothic overtones." And now I think: could there have been a Gothic/science-fictional convergence in Anglo-American culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Could New Wave-type science fiction, with its Gothic, Romantic, or weird-fictional tone, themes, imagery, protagonists, and so on have been a forerunner to such a convergence? If there was such a convergence, it seems to have happened not only in literature but also in music. Whatever might have happened, a new sub-genre of science fiction emerged at that time. Named after a short story by Bruce Bethke (1983), exemplified by a novel by William Gibson (1984), and popularized by Gardner Dozois, it is of course cyberpunk, and so now we're back to punk music . . .

I have noticed how romantic much of the British music of the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s is, for example "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)" by A Flock of Seagulls (1982), "Thieves Like Us" by New Order (1984), "Be Near Me" by ABC (1985), and "I Melt with You" by Modern English (1982), even if the last alludes to nuclear war. (In the video, singer Robbie Grey wears a Nazi-like hat. One of the members of Depeche Mode wears a similar hat in a video for "New Life.") Now I find that there was supposedly a reaction to punk music among musicians and singers called the New Romantics. (I try not to put much stock in what I have called genrefication, either in literature or music.) Their name echoes that of Mr. Gibson's Neuromancer, or vice versa. Spandau Ballet and Roxy Music are associated with the New Romantics. Like Joy Division, the name Spandau Ballet is connected to Nazis and concentration camps. Meanwhile, Bryan Ferry got himself into trouble talking about Nazis. Both he and Tony Hadley, lead singer of Spandau Ballet, are conservative. I guess all of that makes them fascistic, too.

I tell you, once you make a start in the Wikipedia-ziation of your research, you'll find that there is no end. And once you start calling people fascists, there's no end to that, either, because nobody is ever going to agree with you on everything, and like I said in a previous paragraph, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist.

(2) There are lots of confluences between punk music and things about which I have written lately, including 1976 as "year zero" in punk music, as well as anarchistic, nihilistic, leftist, and utopian strains in that music and culture. Remember that Michael Moorcock wrote an essay called "Starship Stormtroopers," dated 1977. If it had been a punk song instead of an essay on science fiction, "Starship Stormtroopers" would have come to us from Year One.

(3) At a march of the religion of pieces in East London late last year, a young leftwing British numbskull said to one of the marchers, "We're on the same side, bro." The man, dressed all in black, including a mask, replied, "No we're not," and marched on.

(4) I don't know anything about the politics of Pet Shop Boys, if they have any politics, but their song and video "West End Girls," from the mid-1980s, seem impossible now. That world from only forty years ago has disappeared as if it never existed. The video seems to have come from another planet. Any of the concerns of the pre-invasion 1980s--the concerns of British singers, musicians, and fans; of all of those East End boys and West End girls; moreover of every young Briton of the past, including of the punk scene--have been completely wiped away, displaced by new concerns, that is if young people are aware enough to have them, which is what Amelia and her appeal are all about, I think. Maybe the young people of today have been called to action against the betrayals of the older generations. And, yes, Boomers, you're among the older generations now, and, yes, many of you have betrayed young people in the worst way.

The music of the past is still young and new. The records and photos and videos from those times are like the figures on Keats' Grecian urn:

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

Ian Curtis and the voices and images of all who lived on will be "for ever young" and they will be forever for the young. In contrast, the image of pudgy leftist Boomer Anthony Albanese in a Joy Division t-shirt is comical, ironic, and cringe, all at the same time, especially considering that he is now powerful, now part of the establishment, now an oppressor. Amelia wears it much better. She may be made only of electrons, but she represents real human beings. She represents youth. For older people to wear youth like a costume is an offense. In the language of the left, it's an act of cultural appropriation. Wearing youth like a costume is an especial offense considering that the establishment is against youth, for it wants to take away young people's freedoms. In 1981, Triumph, a Canadian band, sang, in the voice of the listener, "I'm young now, I'm wild now, I want to be free." A half generation before, The Monkees, an American band, sang their part: "We must be what we're goin' to be/And what we have to be is free," and: "(In this generation)/We gotta be free." Both songs link youth to a yearning to be free. Young people will forever sing such songs, and too many older people will forever do their best to deny them. When you're a traitor to youth, you don't get to claim youth. Take off your Joy Division t-shirt. It's not for you. Once you begin oppressing, brutalizing, exploiting, mutilating, raping, and murdering babies, children, and young people, or once you countenance those things, you have given up on your youth. You have thrown it behind you in rags. You are undeserving of everything that rightfully belongs to the young.

By the way, some people describe Amelia as "goth." That fits in with what I have been writing about and will write about in terms of Gothic and Romantic reactions. Look for more of that in the series to follow.

Update: After I wrote this entry, above and below, the United Kingdom had its local elections. Labour was pretty much slaughtered. Amelia made another appearance a couple of days after that. In a video, she has Prime Minister Shtarker dressed up like a British schoolgirl and delivers him to the type of men who have preyed upon British schoolgirls for many years now, the same type of men who are protected--if not encouraged in their predations--by the British establishment at its various levels. I don't like AI anything, but sometimes it can be useful.

I write these things and Americans talk about them not because we are against the British people but because we are for them. They--you--have given us so much and have so much more to offer the world, not least of which is your music. We do not wish you to be destroyed or for you to destroy yourselves. We want you to turn back another invasion from the Continent. We want you not to make a shameful conquest of yourselves. We want your history, culture, and nation to be preserved and to thrive. We want you here with us instead of our standing alone in the world. We want you not to become Airstrip One or a new caliphate.

(5) If you think that culture is a Nazi codeword, please get a grip, and I don't mean on your revolver.

(6) Update: Now I find that the U.S. government is setting up a website for just that purpose. We'll see how it goes.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

More Catching Up

Author, biologist, teacher, and chronically wrong prognosticator Paul Ehrlich died on March 13, 2026. That was Friday the Thirteenth. Dr. Ehrlich famously predicted that we were all going to die due to overpopulation and shortages of resources, which are really the same thing I guess. Unfortunately, scads of people believed the predictions he made in The Population Bomb, published in 1968. These included lots of otherwise intelligent people, including authors of science fiction. Even Earl Butz, definitely no liberal, leftist, or progressive, believed him.* I admit that I believed him, too, but that was when I was in high school many years later and overpopulation was part of the received and accepted narrative of the 1970s and '80s. In short, I didn't know any better.

Among the results of a belief in overpopulation were the Star Trek episode "The Mark of Gideon," broadcast on January 17, 1969, and the movie Soylent Green, released on April 19, 1973, which was just three months after Roe v. Wade was decided. We should note that Soylent Green was based on Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room!, first published in 1966, and so overpopulation was on people's minds for at least a few years before Dr. Ehrlich wrote.

Update No. 1: I wrote this entry in early to mid April 2026. In late April, I read stories by J.G. Ballard for our weird fiction/science fiction book club. One of those is called "Billenium," and it was published in New Worlds Science Fiction in November 1961. It's about life in a vastly overpopulated city of the future, and so overpopulation as a science-fictional issue dates from as early as 1961.

To continue . . .

Paul Ehrlich died of cancer, in other words, by an overpopulation of certain cells within his own body. I guess he was right in a way about overpopulation. Here is a quote from him that employs the cancer/overpopulation metaphor: "As I've said many times, 'perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.'" What a nice thought: human beings--you and I and everyone we know and love--are as a cancer upon the earth.

Update No. 2: J.G. Ballard used a cancer metaphor in his story "Chronopolis," published in New Worlds in June 1960. One of his characters, a time policemen named Stacey, says: 

"Time! Only by synchronizing every activity, every footstep forward or backward, every meal, bus-halt and telephone call, could the organism support itself. Like the cells in your body, which proliferate into mortal cancers if allowed to grow in freedom, every individual here had to subserve the overriding needs of the city or fatal bottlenecks threw it into total chaos. [. . .]"

If allowed to grow in freedom. That seems to be the real heartburn of the people who support zero-population growth or reductions in the human population, for like totalitarians everywhere, they despise human freedom. To them, freedom is chaotic--and there must be order.

To continue again . . .

There are still lots of people who believe that Ehrlich was essentially right, even if they might admit that he was wrong in his particulars. Still others were not especially charitable when it came to his death. Like them, I'm not sure that he deserved much charity. He was, after all, anti-human. To put it in comic-book movie terms, he was Thanos. In other words, he was against us, and like one of the principal authors of the so-called "New Weird," he wanted us to be diminished. Anyway, I have the quote above from an essay written by Aubrey Harris on the website The American Spectator and published on March 18, 2026. She concluded her essay, entitled "The Horrific Legacy of Paul Ehrlich" (here), with these words:

And so, Ehrlich doesn't get a generous obituary willing to overlook his few faults. His legacy wasn't that he was horribly wrong about his apocalyptic predictions, but that those predictions gave intellectual legitimacy and a "scientific" basis for killing hundreds of millions of innocent babies and the forced sterilization of so many helpless women--facts that never persuaded him to back down on those predictions or his radical political prescriptions.

"Overpopulation" is an opinion, interpretation, or value judgment. It is not a scientific fact. But as we have seen almost since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, science is often debased into pseudoscience, very often for political purposes, which are in turn very often murderous and oppressive in their intent and results.

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*Earl Butz (1909-2008) was a fellow Hoosier and a graduate of Purdue University. He served as Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon.

**The American Spectator was founded by another fellow Hoosier, R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr. Though born in Chicago, Mr. Tyrell attended Indiana University. He is also a fellow Irishman. He and my uncle shared first and middle names, but then a lot of Irishmen are named Robert Emmet(t).

Update No. 3 (May 7, 2026): Ted Turner died on May 6, 2026, at age eighty-seven. Among his many issues was overpopulation. He was also an atheist. On May 2, 2026, Boris Johnson (b. 1964) wrote that "falling birth rates aren't a disaster, they're the best bit of global news in a long time." Maybe he learned his population control shtick from his father. Well, at least there was Brexit.

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, a British edition with cover art by British artist Alan Aldridge. Harrison's novel was originally serialized in the British magazine SF Impulse (previously Impulse) in August through October 1966. SF Impulse was associated with New Worlds magazine, about which I have written in these past few weeks and about which I will soon write more.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Catching Up

If I can offer a critique of my just completed sixteen-part series on "the New Weird," I would say that it's overlong, a little repetitive, and not very tightly written in a lot of places. I guess I abandoned it in 2017 because of its many problems. One of its problems is that I haven't read any of the stories in The New Weird, published in 2008. I also admit to a bias against one of its chief authors and one of its chief theorists, the first because of his infantile politics, the second mostly because of his theorizing and his obscure, ponderous, and overly intellectualized and academic prose. But I wanted to provide some content in this blog during these past couple of months, and using some previously unfinished postings seemed like the quickest way to do it. I still have some draft postings, as well as some unfinished series from the past. I hope to get to those soon. My series of four series on "the New Weird" wasn't and isn't very fun. I would like to get back to things that are fun.

* * *

In my series on the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, Number 367 from 2023, I noted how many of the authors in that issue have written for television and how much of their writing is like TV writing, including commercial messages in the form of product placement and the inclusion of brandnames in their stories. What they write is not really prose. It lacks the form, style, approach, objectives, and so on of prose. Their writing is more like a plot summary or a treatment for a proposed TV show. Well, now I know that there is a term for what afflicts writers who think in television terms rather than in terms of prose. It's called "TV brain," and I read about it in two connected essays by Lincoln Michel, posted on the Substack Counter Craft. The two parts are:

• "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind: Thoughts on flipping from 'TV brain' to 'prose brain' when writing fiction" by Lincoln Michel, December 12, 2024, here.

• "What Not Reading Does to Your Writing: More thoughts on 'TV brain prose' and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing" by Lincoln Michel, February 22, 2026, here.

Mr. Michel's essays are just about perfect in describing the problem I saw in the Cosmic Horror Issue and that I have seen in other writing that is now out there in the world. Too many writers have forgotten that they write in prose and not for the screen. Or maybe they have never learned that reading a book is not the same as watching a TV show, or that writing a story is not the same as writing a script. Whatever the source of their problem, they all ought to be horsewhipped. Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. Anyway, here is a quote from Mr. Michel in which he refers to some of his ideas from outside of this quote:

While I won't rehash the debate, one post reminded me of a favorite topic of mine. Namely, the ways that "TV brain" creates a particular kind of bad fiction that's prominent these days. This "TV brain" prose is influenced primarily by narrative visual media--TV, film, TikToks, video game cut scenes, etc.--without engaging in the narrative possibilities and limitations of prose fiction. We live in a visual culture and writers who don't read widely tend to absorb their understanding of narrative from visual media. This is not a critique of film or TV or anything else. The point is that artistic mediums have different possibilities and limitations and if you try to make your novel a series of transcriptions of imagined TV scenes, it will fail at being either good TV or a good novel.

I would really recommend that writers read Lincoln Michel's two essays and that they think on these ideas, after which they should resolve not to write that way ever again. Bad writing is a scourge. No one should want to be a part of it. My short advice to writers: if you want to be a good writer, turn off your TV brain and open your book-mind, better yet your human life-mind.

By the way, Lincoln Michel is an author of genre fiction. The illustration used in his first essay (shown below) is from Science Wonder Stories and was created by Frank R. Paul. Paul will be a minor character in the series to come.

* * *

That was in February. In March I read about the reissue of The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, originally published in 1973 but since suppressed like the original King in Yellow in its serpent-skin binding. I have never read The Camp of the Saints. When I first learned about it years ago, it was an exceedingly rare book. Fortunately that has changed, and Raspail's prophetic, dystopian, and apocalyptic novel is now available again for reading, even if it may be too late for the world--Europe at least--to heed its warnings. But then we don't need a book to tell us what goes on in this world as long as we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

I read about the reissue of The Camp of the Saints in an essay called "The Camp of the Living Dead" by a pseudonymous author, John Carter. Mr. Carter's essay is on the website American Greatness, is dated March 6, 2026, and can be accessed by clicking here. The metaphor of Mr. Carter's title refers to masses of men as like a zombie horde. In his essay is a lot of the imagery that I have used in my own blog. Not that that means anything in particular. We could both be right, or we could both be wrong. I might be biased, but I would wager on the first possibility. Anyway, I would encourage you to read John Carter's essay, and we should perhaps all read The Camp of the Saints, if only as an act of rebellion against the current regime.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

The New Weird-Part Four

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

A final quote from Wikipedia as I wear out this topic:

Part of this genre's [i.e., "the New Weird's"] roots derive from pulp horror authors, whose stories were sometimes described as "weird fiction." The "weird tale" label also evolved from the magazine Weird Tales; the stories therein often combined fantasy elements, existential and physical terror, and science fiction devices.

So is "the New Weird" just "the Old Weird" for a new readership? After all, Weird Tales in its original run was last published in 1954. Very few people alive today can remember when it was still in print. Every version published since then has been either an imitation, a pastiche, a paean, or--perhaps in the case of the Ann VanderMeer version--a reaction to the original. (That would make Marvin Kaye's version a restoration.) It seems likely to me that "the New Weird" is in fact just weird fiction--in more ways than one. What I mean is that weird fiction is a label placed on works that are not easily defined or categorized, specifically because they blend genres or cross over from one genre to another. (My original idea of what makes weird fiction is that it involves some kind of crossing over in its contents, i.e., within the story itself.) As Charles Fort wrote in 1919, that seminal year in the history of American fantasy fiction, the concept of discontinuity--the idea that there are barriers between things--is inadequate and can be a kind of willful blindness or a failure of the imagination. If writers of "the New Weird" are blending genres and breaking down barriers, they are only doing what writers of "the Old Weird" did, partly under the influence of Charles Fort, but more nearly in continuing what had gone on in storytelling and literature since time began. "The New Weird" might be just "the Old Weird" with a "new" label slapped on it, while "the Old Weird" was based on all kinds of stories that came before it in an unbroken--i.e., continuous--line going back to the beginning of time.

One last thing: "the 'weird tale' label" mentioned in the quote above may have been passed on to later generations through Weird Tales, but it was not original to the magazine. I suspect that the label originated in the nineteenth century, certainly no later than the 1880s and 1890s. It was current when Jacob Clark Henneberger (1890-1969) was a boy. If I had to guess, he chose the title for his new magazine for exactly that reason. In other words, Henneberger was looking back in nostalgia and found a valued thing from the past. He went with it rather than repudiating it. The past is where weird fiction came from. To try to make something "new" of it would seem an impossibility, especially considering that weird in its original, best, and truest sense is from a time before the modern world and the written word began.

Coda: I had intended in 2017 to go on with this entry with the following passage:

The past is where weird fiction came from. To try to make something "new" of it would seem an impossibility . . .

Unless weird fiction can make a break with the past. Unless it can be made discontinuous with other genres, forms, conventions, and traditions. And how might that happen? I can think of only one way, and that is for weird fiction to be mixed with science fiction, which may be, as I have suggested, a discontinuity.

That's as far as I got in this entry and in this series, but it's an idea worth considering, but only for a little more before I bring this whole series of series to a close as follows:

There was previously a mixture of weird and science. We call it science fantasy, or weird science, which is a term I like. Science fantasy is supposed to have started in the late 1800s--I have heard that term applied to the works of H. Rider Haggard--and continued into the pulp fiction era. I would consider "The Call of Cthulhu" and several other of H.P. Lovecraft's stories to be science fantasy stories. C.L. Moore wrote stories like that, too. But that was either before or shortly after science fiction was finally named as a genre. We now live in a post-weird fiction/post-science fiction age, at least as far as any golden ages go. Nonetheless, science and technology continue to shape our lives to such an extent that every day in the real world is a new science-fictional day for us. And here's the thing: weird is still in effect, too, because we are human beings. To paraphrase--very loosely--Tom Joad: wherever we go, there will be weird, even unto the stars. Again, science and technology are new every day. As a result, there can be new ideas in science fiction that will nonetheless be built upon our unalterable human nature and the unchanging laws of the universe. With that being the case, weird fiction can possibly be renewed by marrying weird to science. I would read that kind of fiction. But it doesn't need a brandname, label, or marketing concept, nor a gnosis, theory, or manifesto, least of all a corporate mission statement. It can just be a pure, innocent, unadulterated creation of the artist that speaks to the reader and to the human condition, and can thus be made timeless and ever new.

Weird Science #15, Nov.-Dec. 1950, with cover art by Al Feldstein. You can't spell "Weird Science" without "N-E-W."

Original text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

The New Weird-Part Three

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

A third quote from Wikipedia on "the New Weird":

Robin Anne Reid notes that while the definition of the new weird is disputed, "a general consensus uses the term" to describe fictions that "subvert cliches of the fantastic in order to put them to discomfiting, rather than consoling ends." [Boldface added.]

There's that word: subvert, as in the political act of subversion, in which the writer would attempt to make of himself or herself a radical or revolutionary, ready to tear down or overthrow the past. I don't know about you, but I'm skeptical of the possibility of subversion in literature, let alone as a goal for the writer.* Subversion implies that something is being tried that has never or seldom been tried before. It implies that writers of perhaps only middling ability and accomplishment possess great power, i.e., to do something new and to carry out a revolution. It also implies that the the writer is working behind the scenes to his or her own purposes and that he or she will soon surprise you with something. That's called suspense or a plot twist or a surprise ending. These are things writers do to keep you reading. Suspense, plot twists, and surprises work in all brands of fiction, including in the best literature. (A modest example: The Charisma Campaigns by Jack Matthews [1972], which is one of the funniest books I have ever read but which ends in a disaster for its protagonist.) There's nothing special about "the New Weird" in that way. Remember that the word weird is from a root meaning "to bend." So in weird fiction there are twists and bends.

If you think about it, O. Henry (1862-1910) more or less subverted the expectations of his readers and the conventions of the short story. O. Henry's stories were happy, though, or in Robin Anne Reid's words, "consoling." "The New Weird" supposedly deals in "discomfiting" endings. Does that mean that bad things happen in "New Weird" fiction? Or that there is little that happens that is not discomfiting? I don't know. Like I said, I'm not sure of the definition of this supposedly new genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre. I guess I should read some of it to find out. But does anyone really think that fiction that crosses or blends genres, or that defies easy characterization, or in which bad things, including unhappy endings, occur is something new? If so, has this person never read Greek mythology, Shakespearian tragedy, or the stories of Edgar Allan Poe? Has he or she never read Weird Tales in its original incarnation, or stories by the authors who contributed to the magazine, such as Strange Eons by Robert Bloch (1978), a book written by a protégé and friend of H.P. Lovecraft and published five decades ago when Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville were still schoolchildren? In that story, Bloch let Cthulhu loose upon the world in an apocalypse beyond Lovecraft. In the movie Psycho (1960), based on Bloch's book, written before those two men were born, takes the most unexpected of turns when its heroine is . . . well, watch the movie.

Continuing from Wikipedia:

Reid also notes the genre ["the New Weird"] tends to break down the barriers between fantasy, science fiction[,] and supernatural horror. In comparing the new weird to bizarro fiction, Rose O'Keefe of Eraserhead Press claims that "People buy New Weird because they want cutting edge speculative fiction with a literary slant. It's kind of like slipstream with a side of weirdness." [Boldface added.]

It's getting to be an old tune, but I'll sing it again: fantasy fiction in all of its varieties is continuous, not discontinuous. It has been this way since Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote Gothic science fiction (or proto-science fiction), a seeming contradiction, walked the earth. There has always been a blending of and a crossing over from one genre to another. Any barriers between genres that have to be broken down were built recently and not very well. But then maybe the idea of barriers in genre fiction is the convention or tradition against which authors of "the New Weird" are rebelling. (As I have said, maybe they were attempting to create or recreate a supergenre.) Those perceived barriers may be between different genres of fantasy. They may also be between fantasy and what people consider serious or mainstream literature. Where exactly are those barriers, though? In American literature alone, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, Mark Twain, and on and on wrote what can be called fantasy. Their works are also in the canon taught in every high school literature class. So where are the barriers? I will admit that there is a real snobbishness in literary circles towards what people call fantasy, genre fiction, or pulp fiction. But isn't good writing good and bad writing bad, regardless of the form or genre? I guess I'm still not sure what people are getting at when they talk about "the New Weird." And here we are almost at the end of this series.

To be concluded . . . 

-----

*In 2017, in my draft, I wrote: "I don't know about you, but I'm skeptical of the idea of subversion as a possibility in literature." Actually, I can think of a supreme case in which the author subverted the reader's expectations, and that is in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969), which goes from being fictional to being almost shockingly meta-fictional. Reading that book will give you whiplash. The publication of the late Mr. Fowles' novel was contemporaneous with that of New Worlds. Jeff VanderMeer was a baby and China Miéville hadn't even been born yet when it was published in 1969. And yet they and other writers of "the New Weird" claim subversion as something new and one of their hallmarks. I think instead of subversion and subversive as simply buzzwords. Writers like to comfort themselves with words like them, such as fierce, brave, edgy, and so on.

Cover art by Matt Mahurin.

Original text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

The New Weird-Part Two

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

Continuing the quotes from the Wikipedia entry on "the New Weird":

Various definitions have been given of the genre. According to Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer, in their introduction to the anthology The New Weird, the genre is "a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping-off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy."

Now who can argue with that? Not only is it authentic over-intellectualized gibberish, it expresses . . . well almost nothing at all. I'm not the only one who's confused. From Wikipedia:

According to Gardner Dozois . . . the VanderMeers' anthology "ultimately left me just as confused as to what exactly The New Weird consisted of when I went out as I'd been when I went in." [Boldface added.]

Younger writers might point out that Gardner Dozois, born in 1947, was one of an older generation, a generation against which they are rebelling, one that they are still striving to overthrow. (There will be more from Gardner Dozois in the near future.)

And what of this business of generations? Does that have anything to do with any of the "new" this and "reactionary" that? It may be significant that the four writers from part one of this sub-series were all born between 1968 and 1974. They aren't exactly spring chickens, but they're not Baby Boomers, either, or, like the late Marvin Kaye (1938-2021), members of the Silent Generation. (We won't even bring up J.R.R. Tolkien, who was born in 1892, or H.P. Lovecraft, who was born two years prior.) Maybe writers of about their age (in 2008 when The New Weird was published) were reaching the height of their powers as artists and the pinnacle of their influence as published authors, critics, reviewers, and essayists. Maybe they were simply doing what every generation does or wishes to do, for--artists or not--don't we all want for previous generations to step aside and allow us our place in the sun?

But here's something more: China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, K.J. Bishop, and Steph Swainston are all from what is called Generation X. You can't really generalize about a whole generation, which is, after all, a concept and not a real thing. Even if you accept that a generation is a thing, you can't say that this or that is true about a group of people who number in the millions. What is true about Generation X, though? Well, in America, they're a smaller group than the generations before and after them. Knowing that may give Gen-Xers a vague sense of inferiority, grievance, or lack of power, political or otherwise. More than that, though, members of Generation X grew up in a time when tradition seems to have broken down, perhaps the same tradition against which writers of their generation seem to be rebelling. Could Gen-Xers suffer from a special kind of confusion, loss, grief, insecurity, anxiety, depression, or despair? I'm not sure. They were stereotyped as latchkey kids in their youth and as slackers in their young adulthood. Do these things explain the negativity, nihilism, atheism, materialism, depression, despair, and drug use that seem to characterize their generation? I don't know. Again, these are generalizations that can be applied anywhere, at any time, to any sufficiently large group of people. We are all human beings, after all, and all subject to these very human failings, frailties, and more.

However, there is one thing different about the members of Generation X that has not been true of any other generation in American history, for Generation X is actually a half generation (I have called it before the Truncated Generation), the first and only to be split between those born before legalized abortion and those born after. In other words, those born after January 1973 grew up with some eventual awareness that their lives could easily--and legally--have been extinguished in utero by the person whom they supposed should have loved them more than any other. They would have known that millions out of their cohort--their potential brothers and sisters, cousins and classmates, colleagues and coworkers, friends, lovers, and spouses--were missing, and not only that they were missing, but that they had fallen like prey to a cruel and voracious predator, with no one to protect them or defend them when they needed it most. A kind of genocide had been waged upon them by older generations, people of the Silent and Baby Boom generations. (I don't think it's any coincidence that abortion was legalized as Boomer women were reaching their peak years of fertility.) What effect can that knowledge have had on the millions born in the last fifty-three years, especially of the first half-generation--Generation X--who came into the world under those conditions? Is it any wonder that they revel in or are so fascinated by violence, mutilation, dismemberment, blood, brains, guts, gore, and death? That they might hate themselves, wish to harm themselves and mutilate and mar their own bodies? Is it any wonder that they might harbor enmity against the preceding generations that wanted to kill them? (1)

One effect of growing up with the knowledge that you could have been killed when you were at your most helpless and vulnerable--and that millions of your fellows were in fact completely wiped out--might be a common plaint when terrible things happen: Where was God? people ask. Why did he not keep this from happening? I thought he is supposed to love us? In response, people very often conclude that there is and can be no God. I’ll leave you with this quote from Steph Swainston, followed by a final comment:

Evil™, as an adversary in fantasy novels, should be avoided at all costs. I have written three novels without once using the word 'evil', because the people of the Fourlands don't have the religious concept. Ironically, as a result they don't have as much conflict between cultures as we do. (2)

Ms. Swainston is an archaeologist. Presumably she has studied history. Yet she remains naïve (at best) about history, religion, and human nature. Does she not know that people slaughter each other whether they have religion or not? Does she not know that communists in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and elsewhere in the world were and are ostensibly atheistic--i.e., they have no religion--yet have killed countless millions and go on killing as we speak? Does she really believe in a perfect world in which there is no religion and nothing to kill or die for, as in John Lennon's execrable song? As Bugs Bunny would say, what a gullibull, what a nincowpoop.

Notes

(1) Abortion was legalized in 1967 in the United Kingdom and, if I interpret things correctly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Australia. The brain-eating, George Romero-type zombie, splatter films, death metal, and other blood-brains-guts-and-gore-related forms and genres are of about the same vintage as members of Generation X.

By the way, in old cartoon drawings a character who has died would have Xs drawn over his eyes. With that being true, maybe Generation X is an apt designation for a group of people, part of whom perished in and the rest of whom escaped from years-long mass killing. By the way, I covered some of these same points in November-December 2022.

(2) From "Dangerous Offspring: An Interview with Steph Swainston" by Jeff VanderMeer on the website of Clarkesworld, October 2007, at the following link:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/swainston_interview/

Gardner Dozois (1947-2018) put together The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition, which was published in 1998. He was confused by "the New Weird." That, plus his editorship of a book whose title ties "Good" to "Old," might have classified him as part of "the old" against which "the new" was rebelling. Unfortunately for them, people still like to read "the old." Cover art by Ed Emshwiller, from 1959.

In its 25th anniversary issue of October 1974, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction published Philip K. Dick's story "The Pre-Persons." (He wrote it in 1973, no doubt in the aftermath of Roe vs. Wade.) I have never read this story. Only now have I discovered it. (I write this caption on Easter Sunday, 2026, a most appropriate day for today's topic.) The subject is abortion and the story is pro life. With that being the case, I'm surprised we're allowed to read it anymore. I'm surprised that Philip K. Dick's second-place Locus Poll Award (1975) has not been revoked. There are certain things, after all, that cannot be permitted in science fiction opinion in the twenty-first century, one of which is any pro-life work or words. As a radical act of rebellion against a literally ancient belief and practice--Moloch is in the Old Testament, and exposure was a common practice in ancient times--we should all read and distribute "The Pre-Persons."

Here is the author himself on the reaction to his story:

In this, the most recent of the stories in this collection, I incurred the absolute hate of Joanna Russ who wrote me the nastiest letter I've ever received; at one point she said she usually offered to beat up people (she didn't use the word "people") who expressed opinions such as this. I admit that this story amounts to special pleading, and I'm sorry to offend those who disagree with me about abortion on demand. I also got some unsigned hate mail, some of it not from individuals but from organizations promoting abortion on demand. Well, I have always managed to offend people by what I write. Drugs, communism, and now an anti-abortion stand; I really know how to get myself in hot water. Sorry, people. But for the pre-persons' sake I am not sorry. I stand where I stand: "Hier steh' Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," ["Here I stand, I can do no other"] as Martin Luther is supposed to have said. [Boldface added.]

There are of course scads of pro-abortion people who read, write, and comment on science fiction. They will necessarily object to what I have written here. I'll just say: take it up with Philip K. Dick.

Original text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley