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.
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| 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
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