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