More on the "New Weird"-Part One

Before it was an adjective, weird was a noun. In their use of the label, proponents of the "New Weird" have made a return to the past. That's fitting for weird fiction, for I believe that weird fiction is indeed about the past. In contrast, the future is in the province of science fiction. The present, meanwhile, is up for grabs. Anyway, to see a word used as a noun that we normally think of as an adjective is jarring. At least one commenter on the Internet has referred to the "New Weird" as the "New Weird fiction." If the "New Weird" is a revolution, we're not there yet, even after twenty years.

One of the defining characteristics of the "New Weird" is supposed to be a mixing of genres. What we too often forget is that genrefication (my new word) is a pretty recent development in fiction. Before the Great War, popular fiction was published in magazines, afterwards reprinted in hardbound books, intended for a general readership. If the advent of specialty magazine titles is an indicator of the separation of general-interest fiction into individual genres, then 1919 was the year it all began, as long as we consider the first title listed below as an early outlier.

Specialty or Genre Fiction Magazines, 1915-1926, a Selection

• October 15, 1915--Detective Story Magazine (Street & Smith) began in print

• January 1919--Der Orchideengarten (Dreiländerverlag)

• March 1, 1919--The Thrill Book (Street & Smith)

• September 5, 1919--Western Story Magazine (Street & Smith)

• April 1920--Black Mask (Pro-Distributors Publishing Company)

• October 1, 1922--Detective Tales (Rural Publishing Company)

• March 1923--Weird Tales (Rural Publishing Corp.)

• April 1926--Amazing Stories (Experimenter Publishing Company)

Crime, detective, and mystery stories were probably considered a genre unto themselves before the war. So, too, were ghost stories. But what about stories of fantasy and science (or pseudoscience) such as the Lost Worlds romances of H. Rider Haggard or the interplanetary adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs? These and countless other works written before the Great War defy categorization, probably because they came before there were narrow categories of fiction. So, unless someone can put forth a compelling argument to the contrary, I think we have to consider a mixing of genres to be another return to the past for the authors and proponents of the "New Weird." In other words, "new" does not mean new.

The phrase "the new weird" was first used in print in reference to the work of British writer China Miéville (b. 1972). Mr. Miéville is an accomplished author of dozens of novels and short stories. He has expressed what I think of as a very laudable goal of writing stories in every genre. I wish him every success in that effort. He is also a Marxist, and as we know, Marxism is essentially a reactionary belief system. It, too, seeks a return to the past. In this case, the sought-after past is in the Lost Worlds of the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, before the rise of the middle class and their perceived usurpation of the power, status, and prerogatives of the aristocratic élite, of which people like Marx have believed themselves to be a part. Marxism, like Progressivism in general, is made up of very old ideas, discredited by experience, that purport to be something new.

It's worth noting here that William Morris (1834-1896), a forerunner to a great deal of twentieth-century fantasy, was also socialist (though maybe not a Marxist--I'm not sure about that part) who sought a return to the Medieval past. He was associated with Pre-Raphaelite artists and a leader in the very Medievalist Arts and Crafts movement. L. Sprague de Camp devoted a chapter of his book Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Arkham House, 1976) to Morris and considered him a pioneer in that genre. We think of the stories of Robert E. Howard, originally in Weird Tales, as exemplars of heroic fantasy. Howard wasn't a socialist, though. His desire to return to the past had nothing to do with politics but instead with his primitivism and his emotional and romantic yearnings.

As an aside, I should add that William Morris wrote a utopian novel in which the protagonist wakes up into a new world of the future. It's called News from Nowhere and it was published in 1890 as a response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888). By the way, Utopia is literally "nowhere" or "no place," and Erewhon, the title of Samuel Butler's utopian-Lost Worlds novel of 1872, is an anagram of that same word, nowhere. A reminder to socialists and progressives everywhere: Utopia is not possible. It can be accomplished exactly nowhere, so stop trying.

So, the use of the word weird as a noun is not new, the mixing of genres is not new, and any Marxist or progressive background to fiction is not new. It may be called the "New Weird," but is there really very much about it that's new?

To be continued . . .

The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris (Ballantine, 1969), with cover art by Gervasio Gallardo. This is number three in Ballantine Books' Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter. The title of Morris' novel is echoed in that of Abraham Merritt's story "The Woman of the Wood" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1926) and Ursula K. Le Guin's novella The Word for World Is Forest (1972). 

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley