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 (1961), 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 . . . 

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*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

The New Weird-Part One

From December 2017, updated for 2026. I may have intended this four-part sub-series to have preceded the last one, but you can read them all however you would like.

Weird fiction and fantasy still offer a way out of the materialist dilemma. It is still possible in these genres to tell a story not informed in any way by politics. It looks, though, like the sands are running out. The revolutionaries are on the march, and it looks like they are laying siege to the various genres of fantasy in an attempt to make them into something more nearly Marxist, materialistic, atheistic, or nihilistic. Is or was the so-called "New Weird" such an attempt? I'm not sure. No one seems to know what "the New Weird" is or was or to be able to define it clearly and concisely. That might be the point for those promoting it as something "new." Jeff VanderMeer was one of the theorizers of '"the New Weird," just as his sometime bugaboo H.P. Lovecraft was a leading theorizer of weird fiction--or what we might call "the Old Weird"--in his own time. In any case, in this part of my series of series, I'll quote piece by piece from the Wikipedia article on "the New Weird," with notations omitted.

To begin:

The new weird is a literary genre that began in the 1990s and developed in a series of novels and stories published from 2001 to 2005. The writers involved are mostly novelists who are considered to be parts of the horror or speculative fiction genres but who often cross genre boundaries. Notable authors include China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, K.J. Bishop[,] and Steph Swainston.

You might not know or be familiar with these writers. I know I’m not, for I have read only a little non-fiction (essays and interviews) from them and none of their fiction. I’ll go through them first:

• China Miéville (b. 1972) is an accomplished and award-winning British author of science fiction, fantasy, etc. He is also a Marxist and an adherent to one kind of critical theory or another. I point these things out not to harp on the topic of Marxism but because Mr. Miéville's political beliefs are part of a thread running through "the New Weird" as a theoretical concept. Here is a revealing quote and a quote within a quote from the Wikipedia article on him: "Miéville works to move fantasy away from J.R.R. Tolkien's influence, which for him is stultifying and reactionary. He once described Tolkien as 'the wen on the arse of fantasy literature.'" (The link to the original source of that quote is broken, or the website on which it appeared is gone.) In any case, I'll have more on Mr. Miéville later. Remember that word reactionary, though.

• Jeff VanderMeer (b. 1968) is not only an author of fiction but also an editor, reviewer, essayist, and critic. His wife, Ann VanderMeer, was the editor of Weird Tales from 2007 to 2012. She resigned her position shortly after Nth Dimension Media under editor Marvin Kaye took over the magazine. I have not read anything Ms. VanderMeer herself has written on the tussle she had with Marvin Kaye, but her husband sure wasn't happy with the situation. You can read about the whole thing in my series called "The Weird Tales Controversy" from 2015 (link to part one here). In any case, by appearances, Jeff VanderMeer is at the very least left-leaning. Some of what he has written on the Internet can be taken as anti-human. I can't say for sure what he believes or where he falls on any political spectrum. (Most political spectrums are pretty well useless anyway.) You'll have to puzzle all of that out for yourself. Here is a quote on him, though, again from Wikipedia: "[Mr.] VanderMeer's fiction is noted for eluding genre classifications even as his works bring in themes and elements from genres such as postmodernism, ecofiction, the New Weird[,] and post-apocalyptic fiction." Note, as in the Wikipedia article on "the New Weird," the attempt to separate genres into discrete and discontinuous piles: this goes here, that goes there, but where do we put "the New Weird"? As we have seen, though, the idea of discontinuity among genres isn't very useful and may be illusory--except for perhaps in science fiction.

• K(irsten) J. Bishop (b. 1972) is an Australian author, artist, and blogger. I haven't found an awful lot about her on the Internet except for what she herself has written. One primary source is from the website Strange Horizons, on which she was interviewed by David Lynton in 2004. (1) In that interview, Ms. Bishop refers to China Miéville. Jeff VanderMeer interviewed her for another website, Clarkesworld (2). In none of that do I detect any particular political opinion, belief, or stance. It's worth noting that she does not (or did not in 2008) consider herself a writer of "the New Weird."

• Steph Swainston (b. 1974) is a British author, archaeologist, and scientist. Here is a quote about her, once again, from Wikipedia: "While characterised [sic] by others as a member of the New Weird fantasy literary genre, which aims to reform fantasy literature by transcending its traditional boundaries, Swainston has argued against labeling writers--including herself--within genres, arguing that good fantasy and mainstream literature instead form a continuum." [Emphasis added.]

I have emphasized that last word--continuum--because, like continuity, it gets to a point I have made before and that I want to go on making, namely that the different genres of fantasy are in fact continuous (except for perhaps science fiction)--they can't be separated from each other--moreover that there probably isn't any such thing as a discrete, recognizable, and definable genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of "the New Weird." Here again is a quote from the Wikipedia article of that subject: "The writers involved [in "the New Weird"] are mostly novelists who are considered to be parts of the horror or speculative fiction genres but who often cross genre boundaries."

Of the four writers mentioned here, only Jeff VanderMeer seems to fit into the category of "the New Weird" writer, a category that he seems to have created, perhaps in concert with others. The other writers listed here would seem to defy attempts to categorize them as of "the New Weird." That bears saying again: "the New Weird" appears to be a theoretical, academic, or critical concept--a supposedly new sub-genre (or like I said before, an attempt at a supergenre) that its practitioners say crosses categories and defies labeling, and yet "the New Weird" is a category, a branded product, neatly poured into a container designed, made, and labeled, seemingly by Jeff VanderMeer and his fellow theorizers of the so-called "New Weird."

So why this push for "the New Weird"? I can't say for sure, but I can speculate. (I'm always up for speculation.) One reason for the push is probably just boosterism. "Here I am, everybody, a new writer in a new genre. Please read my books, which subvert all of the conventions of fantasy and all of your expectations of what fantasy is or should be." Never mind that there is, as Ecclesiastes says, nothing new under the sun. Never mind that subversion is just a buzzword and not a serious idea. It's actually pretty sophomoric.

More to the point is, I think, the burning desire of the radical or revolutionary (real or self-imagined) to overthrow the past--to burn down all tradition, convention, and authority, including or especially the authority figures of the past. One writer of "the New Weird" after another expresses his or her dislike or disdain for those authorities. Those writers especially don't like J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. Again and again, they use certain words--conservative, reactionary--to describe conventional fantasy. They want to create something new, not realizing, perhaps, that everything has already been tried and there cannot be anything new, except--significantly for the writers of the one genre, science fiction, which is perhaps discontinuous with other genres of fantasy--what is brought about in the real world by science and technology.

One last point: the radical or revolutionary in the arts, including literature, is often related to the radical or revolutionary in political terms. China Miéville may be the most conventionally radical or revolutionary among the four writers listed above. And yet he still lives and thrives by free-market institutions. I would argue that socialism and Marxism, being means of oppressing and enslaving humanity, are in fact extremely reactionary and as old as time. Human freedom and unalienable rights are actually far more radical ideas.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Here is the URL: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/interview-k-j-bishop/. 

(2) And here is this one: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kjbishop_interview/

Original text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Reactions and Reactionaries-Part Four

From December 2017, updated to 2026.

No natural science can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground. In order to hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist.

--V.I. Lenin, The Significance of Militant Materialism (1922)

In 2011, Marvin Kaye and his partnership Nth Dimension Media acquired the rights or license to publish Weird Tales magazine. The editor, Ann VanderMeer, stayed on, but not for long. She left in August 2012. I don't know what her reaction was to the whole situation, but her husband, Jeff VanderMeer, was obviously upset by it. I can sympathize. On the other hand, if he had wanted Weird Tales to be a certain thing--his thing--he should have acquired the rights or the license himself. Instead, Marvin Kaye took over. Unfortunately, he and Nth Dimension Media published only four issues of their new charge from 2012 to 2019. There weren't any issues at all in the period 2015 to 2018.

Marvin Kaye's acquisition of the Weird Tales, effectively removing it from the VanderMeers' control, can be seen as a counterrevolution, as a reactionary attempt to restore the ancien régime. The Cthulhu Mythos issue, published in Fall 2012, can be seen as a shot through the heart of the attempted revolution against H.P. Lovecraft, his work, and older forms in general, what has been called "the Old Weird." It might also be seen as a move against the dissolution of what the VanderMeers and writers in their circle had seemingly judged to be a cohesive genre, governed by tradition and convention. In the pages of Weird Tales at least, there would be no more radical attempts at remaking "the Old Weird" into the genre-crossing, genre-bending, anything-goes "New Weird." We should note that Marvin Kaye was born less than a year after Lovecraft died, and so there was a kind of continuity in the life, if there is such a thing, of weird fiction.

To her great credit, Ann VanderMeer made sure that Weird Tales was published year after year, for six years anyway, from 2007 to 2012 inclusive. During her tenure, it was an award-winning magazine. The late Mr. Kaye was less successful in those two ways. Is that evidence that a more conservative approach to genre fiction was no longer viable? Was a "New Weird" approach better in commercial or artistic terms? I don't know. But in 2023, the new, new editor of Weird Tales, Jonathan Maberry, put out a Cosmic Horror Issue, and though he used stories by "New Weird"-type authors, that issue fell back on old--even old and moldy--concepts, themes, and conventions (e.g., Vril). Remember here that cosmic horror is a synonym for Lovecraftian horror, and so Lovecraft and "the Old Weird" had come back. I wonder what Ann and Jeff VanderMeer thought of that. I wonder what relationship, if any, they have with Mr. Maberry, who relied on his friends to provide him with content, like Andy Hardy putting on a show. Mr. VanderMeer is not represented in the Cosmic Horror Issue, nor is his name in Mr. Maberry's list of authors who write or wrote cosmic horror stories. I have never read any of Jeff VanderMeer's fiction, so I can't say whether he has written in that sub-genre or not.

Charles Fort's complaint against science was that scientists had set their facts--their data--as separate and discontinuous from all other data. Those other data, then, were excluded. They were damned. Before he wrote The Book of the Damned (1919), Fort wrote science fiction stories, all of which he destroyed. Maybe he became a gadfly of science because of his own struggles with the nascent genre of science fiction. In any case, if scientists and science-minded people are correct in their worldview, and science fiction is the fiction of science, then it would follow that science fiction is discontinuous with all other genres. If science is purely materialistic, then any fiction based on science must also be purely materialistic. No fantasy, ghosts, spirits, or non-material forces of any kind, including psychic powers, allowed. And if V.I. Lenin, a thoroughgoing materialist, was right and the natural sciences must be Marxist in orientation, then from the Marxist point of view, science fiction can't be anything but Marxist.

Unfortunately for the science fiction author oriented towards Marxism, that would mean the end of his genre, for Marxism is demonstrably and has repeatedly been a failure of epic and murderous proportions. What artist--not propagandist but artist--would want any part of that? If writers of "the New Weird" or any other "new" genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre would hope to model their beliefs on Marxism or its offshoots, or perhaps on any codified a priori or gnostic system, then they, too, will fail in artistic or intellectual terms--and almost certainly in commercial terms. Editors, publishers, distributors, and sellers of books work for corporations. The vast majority of readers are middle class, in other words, part of the Marxist's hated bourgeoisie. Why would any of them want to read about how terrible they are or why they should be torn down and cast upon the ash heap of History? On the other hand, there are those who despise themselves and everything they have come from, including their own families, the middle class, Christianity, Western civilization, and the European-style nation-state. Maybe they like reading stories of destruction. Maybe that's why so much genre fiction is dark, depressing, violent, bloody, gory, and nihilistic. Even H.P. Lovecraft, a supposed materialist, spared humanity in "The Call of Cthulhu." He didn't hate us enough to destroy us just yet. And so people keep reading Lovecraft, despite his frequent darkness and pessimism. Meanwhile, "the New Weird" has grown old and gray. Maybe at this point it has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

Anyway, I would wager that any science fiction or other genre or sub-genre based on Marxist, materialistic, or atheistic ideas will wither and die because we as human beings have an undeniable non-material and spiritual aspect. It is a lie to say that we are merely material. Although lies can live, they are mortal, whereas the truth is eternal and imperishable--the truth will out, while lies can live only in the dark, including in the dark heart of the hateful, despairing, and vengeful Marxist.

Red Menace #47, "War-Maker," from a trading card issued by Bowman in 1951. Note the ape with a scimitar, wading in blood. This is not Poe's orangutan. If you're a Marxist, Mao Tse-tung is one of your buddies. You might as well own him. In this picture he has a green face, like Frankenstein's monster or Cthulhu or an alien from space. The unknown artist could not have anticipated the current Red-Green coalition that seeks to tear down Western civilization. Or maybe I should call it a Red-Green-Green coalition.

Text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley