Neuromancer-Part Five

Manifestos

Manifestos are the work of intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals), artists, and theorists, at the very least of people who see themselves at the leading edge of forward-evolution, progress, and new, fast-moving or fast-arriving developments. Manifestos precede action. Very often the action never arrives, but at least there is the manifesto.

One of the most famous--or infamous--of manifestos is Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, issued in 1848, or one hundred years before George Orwell wrote his dissection of socialism and the socialist's unceasing quest for ultimate power. (In Edgar Allan Poe's story, M. Valdemar's nom de plume is Issachar Marx. Ironically, given the context, one meaning of Issachar is "hired man.") Communism, or scientific socialism, is supposed to be about the future and the "force" of History. It is actually more nearly about the past. Marx's manifesto begins with a demonstrably false proposition regarding human society and historical events. What Marx proposed was actually a new-old class structure, with him on top and everybody else below him--preferably with his boot stamping on their faces forever.

Charles Fort wrote a kind of manifesto in the opening paragraphs of The Book of the Damned (1919). Like the Manifesto of Futurism, it reads as the work of a visionary, either that or a man gripped by fever. Alternatively, it's the work of a crazy person, or as H.G. Wells described Fort's writing, like that of a drunkard. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting by Umberto Boccioni (1910) declares: "That the name of 'madman' with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honor." It also stated: "Nothing is immoral in our eyes," a statement anticipating the moral relativism of the twentieth century. And, like Fort, it argued in favor of continuity among all things, or in a lack of barriers between one thing and another.

Otis Adelbert Kline wrote "Why Weird Tales?" as a kind of manifesto. It came at the first ending of "The Unique Magazine," in the first and only quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924. In The New Weird (2008), editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (not Valdemar) introduced their work with a kind of manifesto. Theirs takes the form, more or less, of a corporate mission statement and is just as obscure. It uses words, but together they have little or no meaning. At least there is poetry in Martinetti's manifesto. By the way, both his surname and Marx's are from the god of war. Five years after Martinetti wrote, in the year that the Great War began, Gustav Holst wrote "Mars, the Bringer of War." A theme from "Mars" is almost repeated in the attack on the Death Star by speedy X-Wing fighters in Star Wars, which was released in 1977, or Year One of the new punk calendar. I will add that The New Weird was published by Tachyon Publications. Tachyons are for speed. And I guess I might as well add that Star Wars was retitled A New Hope. There must always be new things.

I don't know whether there was ever a New Wave manifesto. If there was, Michael Moorcock would seem its logical author. (Like William Gibson in "The Gernsback Continuum" [1981], Michael Moorcock made a connection between fascism and science fiction of the Golden Age in his essay "Starship Stormtroopers," from 1977, or, again, Year One.) I also don't know whether there was ever a punk manifesto, at least at its beginnings. There were, however, post-action punk manifestos. ("Why Weird Tales?" was a kind of post-action manifesto, too.) Again, a proper manifesto comes before the action and as a guide to action. It has to be thought out. It should be the work of a writer, a poet, or an articulate thinker. Punk rock rises to the anger necessary for a proper manifesto, but it seems to me inarticulate. It seems to me that it wasn't and isn't an intellectual or artistic movement. But there are punk songs and punk lyrics that might be interpreted as like a manifesto, for example "Anarchy in the U.K." (1976) or "God Save the Queen" (1977), which closes with these words:

No future
No future
No future for you
No future
No future
No future for me
No future
No future
No future for you
No future
No future for you

Instead of the Soup Nazi, the singer sounds like the Future Nazi: "No future for you!" he cries. His lyrics could almost be sung to "Mars, Bringer of War" by Holst. In any case, they are not the lyrics of science fiction, for they turn from the future and deny the future. They are not hopeful but despairing. They are apocalyptic, as in an irrational and violent disaster-fantasy, a Romantic or Gothic work taken to the extreme, or the climax of an epic weird tale.

That leaves cyberpunk. So was there a pre-action cyberpunk manifesto? According to American science fiction author Bruce Sterling (b. 1954) in an online essay entitled "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" (originally in Interzone #48, June 1991):

"The New Science Fiction" [in Interzone #14, Winter 1985/1986] was the first manifesto of "the cyberpunk movement." The article was an analysis of the SF genre's history and principles; the word "cyberpunk" did not appear in it at all.

Note the emphasis again on newness.

The author of  of "The New Science Fiction" was also Bruce Sterling, writing under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas. His "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" is also something of a manifesto, but it was a post-action manifesto. Like the manifesto of the Italian Futurists, it predicted the artistic decline, demise, or replacement of its own members: "The Nineties will belong to the coming generation, those who grew up in the Eighties." In other words, I guess, Generation X, those who would go on to create the so-called "New Weird."

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Four

The New Romancers

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

--from Manifesto of Futurism by F.T. Marinetti (1909)

It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. [. . .] Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations--impossible 100 years ago--are brought about today. It is in these situations that the new romancers find their great inspiration.

--from "A New Sort of Magazine" by Hugo Gernsback

in Amazing Stories #1 (Apr. 1926)

Science fiction: the work of the new romancers!

And could there be this equation as a result:

New romancer ≈ Neuromancer

Is that where William Gibson got the title for his seminal cyberpunk novel first published in 1984?

The operative word in science fiction is science. It would seem in opposition to romance, and yet science fiction began as a kind of romance. Long before the term scientific romance was applied to stories of this type, what we can call proto-science fiction was the work of artists with a romantic (and conservative) cast. Hugo Gernsback wrote:

Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of "scientifiction." It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread. [Boldface added.]

Gernsback included "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Although Poe's story is proto-science-fictional, it is more nearly a weird tale or horror story. Today we might split genres even more finely and call it a tale of body horror. (The narrator's description of Valdemar's bodily plight reads like the details of a post-mortem medical examination.) But then it was written before there were pulp genres, and so it slides easily from one genre to another along a continuum. In other words, it crosses the boundaries that were constructed only after the twentieth century began, just as the mesmerized Valdemar crosses boundaries between life and death.

Speaking of genres and sub-genres, cyberpunk is supposed to have been a successor to the British New Wave science fiction of the 1960s. The leading New Wave magazine was of course New Worlds, the plural of the new world identified by Hugo Gernsback in his manifesto in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Note the roots of later magazine titles, too: Wonder and Fantastic. Also note that the mathematical symbol that lies between the two expressions shown above, and that signifies their relationship, looks like waves on the ocean. New waves would seem to have thrown cyberpunk upon the shores of science fiction like Odysseus washed up in Scheria, from which seagoing ships of unsurpassed speed sail forth. The Italian Futurists sought speed--the speed of the automobile, "a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot." In science fiction, there is the speed of super-light-speed tachyons, of rocketships driven by anti-acceleration, the warp speed of starships, and the instantaneous speed of psychic communications, jaunting, subspace radio, and the real-world force of gravitation, which bends light and allows travel through time by way of the trusty slingshot effect. The inhabitants of Scheria are the Phaeacians. Like Slans and the other superior men of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, they possess psychic powers--or else their ships do, for their ships understand what they are thinking and know where they want to go. Are they alive? Or is some strange and mysterious science or technology at work here? How have the Phaeacians built machines of such wonder that they can read their minds and respond to their wishes? The Phaeacians must surely be among the first science-fictional people in our literature. Their science is so fantastic that it would seem indistinguishable from magic.

The Italian Futurists issued their manifesto in 1909, at the outset of a century of speed and violence and aggression. Their emphasis was on newness, youth, and the destruction of the past and of all old things. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback offered his own much gentler manifesto in the introductory pages of Amazing Stories. He emphasized newness, too, even if he turned to the works of the past to fill his pages. But there was speed in his magazine as well, exemplified in H.G. Wells' story "The New Accelerator," from 1901. That inaugural issue closes, however, with "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a Gothic tale of death and decay, one told in extremis. It is slow rather than fast, decadent rather than ascendant, focused on ultimate limits and the failings of life and the human body rather than on limitless futures. Unlike the Phaeacians and their ships, the "science" of mesmerism, in operation between two minds and two wills in Poe's tale, is unequal to the task. The whole thing breaks down, ending with a quite literal breakdown in the subject's body. There is no superior man, nor any superior science here. There is only the descent of the weird-fictional character into the most gruesome of endings. Ironically, Valdemar's name is a compound of "power" and "fame."

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Two

Golden Ages & Afterwards

In one way or another, that question--Is science fiction dying?--has come up again and again in the past sixty-six years. The fact that it's still being asked makes the whole thing kind of ridiculous. After all, what else is there that takes sixty-six years--and counting--to die? Science fiction is obviously not dying. It's obviously not in trouble. People keep reading and writing it. I'm sure all of that will go on until there are no more readers in the world, a development that will probably come along at around the same time that the last of the pre-Internet, pre-smartphone generations die out. Science and technology--science-fictional developments manifested in the real world--may finally kill off science fiction.

Science fiction in the classic sense is future-oriented and ascendant. In contrast, weird fiction tends to be decadent and looks to--or obsesses over--the past. The weird-fictional protagonist is bound by the past. His science-fictional counterpart is unbound. There are no limits for him. He may achieve godlike powers. He may jaunt among the stars.

If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in the 1950s, then did it afterwards decay, like uranium into lead? In the 1960s there was New Wave science fiction and by the 1980s cyberpunk. There were still hard science fiction and adventure science fiction, but I have the impression that those sub-genres were seen as old-fashioned and possibly looked down upon by the cool people in science fiction. The place to be as a science fiction writer--the leading edge of the whole project--was in a different kind of writing in which elements of weird fiction, horror, Gothics (my new word), and so on were injected into science fiction. I don't say that to state a fact, only to hypothesize or to apply an interpretation.

I have been using examples from the work of J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). We read his stories for our weird fiction/science fiction book club in April of this year (2026). Ballard is supposed to have been an author of the British New Wave. He is in fact considered a science fiction author. But stories such as the Poesque "Now: Zero" (Science Fantasy, Dec. 1959), the romantic/mythological fantasy "The Garden of Time" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Feb. 1962), and the Kafkaesque  story "The Concentration City" (New Worlds Science Fiction, Jan. 1957) are as much--or more--weird-fictional than they are science-fictional. In particular, "The Concentration City" reminds me not only of stories by Franz Kafka (the protagonist is named Franz--ironically "free")* but also of 1984 by George Orwell (1949) and the short story "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942), less so "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941), both by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

One of the primary differences between science fiction and weird fiction is that the science-fictional hero is or becomes powerful and triumphant--very often he is nearly perfect--whereas the weird-fictional protagonist is weak, flawed, cursed, insane, or otherwise mortal and human. You can hardly call him a hero. While you might identify with or aspire to be the science-fictional hero, you should be careful about his weird-fictional counterpart, for he often fails and is usually humiliated and defeated. Sometimes he even perishes.

I can think of two obvious examples of American science fiction authors who introduced New Wave or weird-fictional elements into their stories. They are Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) and Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024). I regret not having observed the passing of Barry Malzberg in 2024, but I didn't know until this year that he had died. By the way, he wrote a book called The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties. Unfortunately, it was published in 1982, before Neuromancer by William Gibson came along in that most appropriate of years, 1984.

To be continued . . .

-----

*Update (June 11, 2026): I have been watching videos from the 1980s this evening and have learned that there was a post-punk band called Josef K, named of course for the protagonist of Kafka's novel The Trial (1925). I have never read The Trial, but the movie version from 1962 has its Gothic and surrealistic elements. The publication of The Trial was arranged by Kafka's literary agent and friend Max Brod (1884-1968), who had a story, "Death Is a Temporary Indisposition," in the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales. Ian Curtis of Joy Division was inspired to write "Colony" by reading Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony." For those who would like to read only about Weird Tales, its authors, and its stories, well, good luck trying to separate these things from all of culture.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part One

Introduction

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 . . .

-----

*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

The New Weird Anthology-Part Three

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

I am looking at the authors whose work appeared in the 2008 anthology The New Weird, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. This list is in chronological order by the date of composition or publication of their individual works. Michael Moorcock, who wrote his story in 1979, comes first. He is first in other ways, too.

"Crossing into Cambodia: A Story of the Third World War" (1979)

by Michael Moorcock

Born in London in 1939, Michael Moorcock is the oldest writer represented here. He came to fame as the editor (1964-1971, 1976-1996) of the British New Wave science fiction magazine New Worlds. Note the modifiers: New and New. There, I think, is the impulse: to ride a new wave, to discover new worlds, to make and forge something new, something the world has never seen before. This is the impulse of the young writer, artist, and thinker. It's also the impulse of the political progressive, radical, or revolutionary. In the world of arts and ideas, the impulse towards newness has yielded, since World War II, neorealism in Italian cinema, nouvelle vague in its French counterpart, bossa nova in Brazilian popular music, and British and American new wave music of the 1970s and '80s. Neo-, nouvelle, nova, new. 

In the world of arts and ideas, an impulse to newness is usually innocuous. In fact it often reinvigorates old forms. It is in politics--or when politics crosses over into the world of arts and ideas--that the burning desire to make something new becomes so dangerous. In striving for newness, in attempting to make a new society by throwing off the old one, by starting over again at year zero, the people behind so-called progressive political systems have murdered, starved, tortured, and imprisoned countless millions of their fellow human beings. What is claimed to be new--misery, poverty, murder, oppression--is actually as old as time. In any case, it's no coincidence that the authors of what is called "the New Weird" tend towards political progressivism. So is their aim to politicize weird fiction and fantasy? I believe so, judging from Mr. VanderMeer's introduction to The New Weird. Michael Moorcock, their progenitor, is an anarchist, pragmatist, Marxist, and socialist. He makes that clear in his writings. The authors of "the New Weird," politicized or even radicalized as they may be, would seem to follow in his footsteps. The sub-genre itself seems to exist in a direct line of descent from something he helped create, the original British New Wave. So what again is new about "the New Weird"?

If science fiction is discontinuous from other genres [an idea I haven't discussed just yet], then there was, at least in its early years, the possibility that something new could be brought into the world. New scientific discoveries and new technological developments allowed for newness in the arts. That newness seems to have worn out in the immediate postwar era, though. In his editorship of New Worlds, Mr. Moorcock wrote and encouraged the writing of a new kind of soft, sociological, political, and philosophical science fiction that departed from the conventional hard, scientific, technological, and action-oriented science fiction of the 1920s through the 1950s. In addition, the New Wave was about making science fiction more literary. I can't argue with any of that, and I have enjoyed science fiction from the 1960s and '70s written under the influence of the New Wave.

Following the pulp era, science fiction certainly needed higher literary standards. One result of the New Wave may be that some more literary authors--Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Walker Percy--have also indulged themselves in writing science fiction, without fear of shame or opprobrium. But conventional science fiction authors have closed in on finer literature from the other direction, too. I don't know whether we're there yet, but there may come a time when science fiction and fantasy are continuous with a higher or finer literature. (Continuity--there's that concept again.) Maybe someday there will even be a Nobel Prize winner among authors of genre fiction. (If Bob Dylan can win the prize, why not someone who writes about talking squids from outer space?) I believe attaining a higher literary quality or a merging of genre fiction with finer literature was also a goal of "the New Weird."

According to the Wikipedia article on him, Michael Moorcock has written in reaction to or unfavorably of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert A. Heinlein, and many other authors considered to be conservative or reactionary. For a more in-depth discussion of this topic, read Mr. Moorcock's essay "Starship Stormtroopers" (1977; 1984). There's a lot of the typical leftist claptrap in "Starship Stormtroopers," but don't let that stop you: it's an interesting, engaging, informative, and well-written work. Reading it also helps to illuminate the issue at hand, for Michael Moorcock and the New Wave seem to have shared with the authors of "the New Weird" a desire to throw off the past and to dismiss or discard the writers and works of the past.

So, it seems to me that the inspiration and model for "the New Weird" of today (actually yesterday, as its eponymous anthology was published nearly two decades ago--more on that in a minute) is the New Wave of the 1960s and '70s. These supposedly new sub-genres or sub-sub-genres are of the same essence (1):

• Both are in reaction to older and supposedly more conservative authors, conventions, styles, forms, etc., each in its respective sub-genre, New Wave in science fiction and "the New Weird" in weird fiction. That reaction is often extremely fierce, angry, and dismissive. In fact, the fierceness, anger, and dismissiveness of current authors towards their predecessors seems to be an identifying feature of supposedly new literary movements.

• Both strive to make something new of old genres, but that impulse to newness may not be exclusively or even most importantly towards artistic, literary, or aesthetic innovation. The impulse to newness may actually be more powerfully driven by leftwing political philosophies of various stripes: Marxism, socialism, progressivism, anarchism, nihilism, the New Left (there's that word New again), critical theory, political correctness, multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, radical environmentalism, the cult of global warming, etc.

• Both strive also towards higher literary standards and towards a confounding of categorization, a crossing over, bending, or merging of genres, ultimately perhaps a convergence of genre fiction with mainstream literature.

So, New Wave did all of that to science fiction, but that began more than sixty years ago. It may have been new then, but it can't be new now. The impulse to newness makes us need something new new. So maybe what New Wave did to science fiction in the 1960s and '70s can be done to weird fiction today [or eighteen years ago, when the anthology was published]. Maybe an old genre or sub-genre can be remade as a politically progressive new sub-genre called "the New Weird" in which the authors, conventions, styles, and forms of the past are overthrown, dismissed, discarded, or even forgotten. In the process maybe literary standards can be raised as well. Maybe that's where Michael Moorcock came in, and maybe that's why he was represented in The New Weird, for what he did with the New Wave in Britain appears to be the model for what Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer tried to do with "the New Weird" in America and elsewhere. In other words, they may have tried to make something "new" by simply copying something that was done before, in fact nearly fifty years before. (2) If that was their plan, they should have made quicker work of it: the New Wave in science fiction lasted a couple of decades before supposedly being overtaken by cyberpunk. (3) If the publication of the VanderMeers' anthology marked the beginning of "the New Weird" as a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre (or maybe what they wanted was to make it a supergenre), then it was already approaching obsolescence when it was still hot off the press, for we live in an era--a progressive, science-fictional era--in which anything done a year or even a month ago is already old hat. And on top of all that, the VanderMeers lost their showcase for their ideas, in the form of Weird Tales, just as Mr. Moorcock had in New Worlds, in their case in 2012 when Marvin Kaye gained control of the magazine. In the world of today, what's an editor attempting a revolution to do when he loses his or her magazine?

Note

(1) Even the names are of these two sub-genres are similar. It's as if the proponents of this supposedly new thing stood on the edge of a chasm, shouted "New Wave," and heard back the echo "New Weird." One problem is that "the New Weird" is such an awkward construction. At least wave is a noun. Put new in front of it and it rolls pretty trippingly from the tongue. Beyond that, everyone knows what a new wave is and everyone wants to ride it. Ask anyone what is "the New Weird" and you're likely to get back a blank stare. No one seems to know. Actually, I think I know: "the New Weird" is [or was] hype. And not very successful hype. It was an attempt to make something new by copying something old that was once new, i.e., new more than four decades before. It appears to me to have been something that has been tried so often before: an attempt by an intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) of whatever merit to make a name and a place for himself in the world and in the history of ideas. This striving for notice is especially prominent in democratic societies, those in which every man is responsible for his own status but in which all men are made equal and reduced to the same level. Leftists claim to love democracy, but it is in a democracy that they are most frustrated in their desire to rise above everyone else.

(2) First in print in 1926--100 years ago this month--Amazing Stories was the first science fiction magazine in America. The term science fiction hadn't even been invented yet when it first appeared on the newsstand. Thirty-eight years later--in 1964--Michael Moorcock assumed the editorship of New Worlds. In other words, the New Wave was older in 2017 (when I wrote) than was magazine science fiction as a whole when Mr. Moorcock arrived at New Worlds. Even cyberpunk is getting pretty long in the tooth. Remind me again, what exactly is new about all of this?

(3) You might date the beginnings of cyberpunk to the arrival of William Gibson's Gothic science fiction novel Neuromancer in 1984. Cyberpunk is supposed to have grown out of the New Wave. Because of that, I'm not sure anyone can say that the New Wave actually came to an end. (Beginnings and endings, firsts and lasts, are always hard to fix.) In any case, note that the first two stories in The New Weird are also from 1984. It may have been that what is called "the New Weird" was really just a continuation of the New Wave, mixed with other genres, including cyberpunk, then shaken, stirred, and given a new name. In other words, the so-called "New Weird" wasn't new at all. By the way, notice the pun: Neuromancer ≈ New Romancer. And remember the name of the protagonist from the very loose movie adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel: Neo from The Matrix (1999). Newness. Always newness.

New Worlds, August 1967, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock and with a cover design by Eduardo Paolozzi. Even Marxists know that sex sells.

Text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Crossing the Boundaries of Genre

Until now, this entry and the next existed only in draft form, and they were pretty spare. Publishing these entries now is part of my program of turning drafts long held in suspended animation into a final form.

* * *

So I'm working with the idea that genre fiction, or the pulp genres, proliferated after World War I, partly because of market forces, and then proliferated again--when?--in the 1960s? The 1970s? Definitely by the 1980s and '90s. That later proliferation seems to have had more to do with the needs and ambitions of the authors, critics, analysts, and scholars of the pulp genres than on anything to do with readers and fans. During the pulp era, pulp fiction and pulp magazines were looked down upon as trash. After the pulp era (perhaps in bouts or in a pervading fog of nostalgia), there were those who tried to elevate it and attach it (or reattach it) to mainstream fiction or literature.

Critic Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) looked at our literature in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; 1966). His is an all-explanatory theory. Two quotes early in the book give away his thesis:

[. . . ] the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror (Dell/Delta, 1966, p. 26)

and:

It is the Gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers [. . .]. (p. 28)

Both terror (or horror) and the Gothic, or Gothics (my new word, to stay away from "the Gothic" as a parallel construction of the cacophonous "the Weird"), can be considered genres of the pulp-fiction type. Dr. Fiedler covered genre fiction in his book and even mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, even if it was only by his surname. He covered other American authors in greater depth, many of whom wrote before genre fiction became separated from mainstream fiction. Leslie Fiedler also wrote science fiction, as did mainstream novelists after him, including Walker Percy (Love in the Ruins, post-apocalypse, 1971), Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, dystopia/post-apocalypse, 2003), and Cormac McCarthy (The Road, post-apocalypse, 2006). I don't know whether the New Wave was the first "new" sub-genre within science fiction--i.e., the first following the end of the Golden Age in 1950, or the first post-pulp sub-genre--but it was named by a critic, P. Schuyler Miller, in 1961, or only a year after Dr. Fiedler's book was published, as well as at the beginning of a decade of nostalgia, reconsideration, and reevaluation.

* * *

I have said that the proliferation of genres after the 1960s was less commercial than during the pulp-fiction era. That's true in its way, but the 1950s and '60s were also an era of consumerism in America. (Read the old MAD magazine to see one satire after another of advertising, consumerism, etc. Is it only a coincidence that a TV show about the advertising business of the 1960s was called Mad Men?) Commercial brandnames proliferated, too. How many products, packages, jingles, and slogans from that time have become lodged in our brains? The point is that writers, fans, and readers in America have been conditioned since childhood to think in commercial terms, in terms of brandnames and towards buying and consuming branded products. People don't talk about eating pizza or drinking soft drinks. They talk about specific brands of each--and of every other product, seller, and service there is. Countless numbers are like walking, talking advertisements for their favorite brands. Without their knowing it, they have been recruited by giant corporations into doing their bidding. And when it comes to branded, commercial products and services (including apps), Americans' powers of discernment are immense and cut exceedingly fine. In short, the proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in fiction can be seen as like a proliferation of branded products and services, each with its own unique and highly differentiated qualities. I have encountered a term in my research for this series. It's niche marketing. That seems to be what has happened in genre fiction.

* * *

Isaac Asimov asserted that the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in 1950 when it became no longer possible for a fan of science fiction to read everything that was published in his field in every given month. For the fan and reader, science fiction had grown out of control. You could say that the reader could no longer dominate in his reading. Well, if that's true for the reader, why couldn't the same thing be said of the science fiction writer? If an ambitious writer could no longer dominate in his field, what was he or she to do? One solution was to dominate (or to imagine that one could dominate) within a chosen sub-genre or sub-sub-genre. A writer could say to himself or herself, "I might not be [or can't be] the most accomplished, admired, or influential writer of science fiction, but I can dominate in my field of dark-urban-gothic-horror-science-fantasy." And that's where we are, for every author now lets us know immediately in what sub-genre or sub-sub-genre he or she self-consciously operates. And not only is the sub-genre or sub-sub-genre a brandname, the author's name has become a brandname as well. And on top of that, many authors package themselves as like commercial products. Each has his or her own distinctive, unchanging, recognizable look: hair (or none), clothing, tattoos, piercings, accessories, and so on, like a superhero or a member of KISS. Genre authors may claim higher ambitions, but the words, the look, and the manner are all commercial. They're selling themselves and their works as branded products.

* * *

One of the claims of "the New Weird" is that it crosses genres. Here is a sentence from Wikipedia:

Non-conformity to strict genre definitions is a commonly recognized facet of new weird fiction. 

The problem is that nobody ever said you can't cross boundaries between genres. If there are boundaries, they exist only in the mind of the author, critic, fan, or reader. I would add that only the person lacking in imagination limits himself or herself in his or her writing. If you're a conformist, you probably shouldn't be a writer. A writer should set himself or herself free to write whatever he or she likes and to break through every perceived boundary and barrier. Earlier writers didn't limit themselves, because there weren't any genres, but also because there weren't any limits. Before there were genres and the self-imposed limitations of genre writing, there was, for example, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838), which is a sea adventure, a travelogue, a horror story, a weird tale, and ultimately a strange, visionary, apocalyptic, and uncategorizable work. For another example, there was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843), which is a Christmas story, a ghost story (including aspects of horror), a humorous work, and a work of realism, including social realism. In its looking into the future, it can even be taken as a proto-science-fictional work, or a work of alternate futures. Those two stories and countless others like them cross boundaries. Does that make them "New Weird"? No, but I'm not sure that anyone would claim such a thing. Burn, strawman, burn.

Now I'll go back to Charles Fort.

As I wrote the other day, Fort was a monist. He believed in the continuity of all things and railed against those who promulgated discontinuity, specifically scientists and science-minded people. The title of his first book, The Book of the Damned (1919), refers to recorded facts or occurrences--he called them data--that were damned and excluded by science. He wanted his data to be included in the whole of knowledge. He wanted continuity.

The proliferation of pulp genres--or the genrefication of fiction as I have called it--began at around the same time that Fort published his book, that is, in 1919. (That was also the same year that J.C. Henneberger landed in Indianapolis and began moving towards his publication of Weird Tales.) Before there were pulp genres, there was just fiction, or literature. In other words, there was continuity. The proliferation of genres introduced discontinuity to the point that science fiction and fantasy in particular are now broken up into dozens of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres. Call that an artifice, a construct. Lay the credit--or the blame--on scholars, critics, analysts, and academically or theoretically minded authors. If writers of "the New Weird"--others, too, including Walker Percy, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy--have crossed boundaries among various genres, or from genre fiction to mainstream literature and back again, then they are only going back to the way things were before. In other words, they are making things continuous again, even if some may still cling to their favored genre labels or brandnames. I will add that "the way things were before" is the opposite of "new."

Like Karl Marx, another monist and haunter of the British Library, Charles Fort proposed an all-explanatory theory of nature and history. Leslie Fiedler seems to have done the same kind of thing regarding our literature in Love and Death in the American Novel. I very much admire Dr. Fiedler's book. Marx and Fort have their ardent admirers. (Leslie Fiedler was a Marxist by the way. Another by-the-way: like Dr. Fiedler, Charles Fort wrote science fiction.) There are those who seek to bend the world and its people to their theories, even if it's only in the smallest way. (Too often, it's in the biggest and bloodiest way. I'm looking at you, Karl.) There are those who would also propose all-explanatory theories. (Conspiracy theories are often all-explanatory. The basic Fortean concept is a kind of conspiracy theory, and a lot of conspiracy theories have grown from his data.) It seems to me that "the New Weird" is a theory and not really a thing. I can't say that it's an a priori-type of a theory, but maybe it's close. In any case, "the New Weird" seems to me a kind of brand-making and an attempt by its promoters to gain status and prestige for themselves as discoverers and theorizers of something they claim to be new. (You don't discover things that you invent.) Despite the desire so many people have for new things, there really isn't anything new under the sun. That includes, I think, the so-called "New Weird."

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Again

In 2017, when I wrote my forthcoming series on the so-called "New Weird," I was less skeptical than I am now about the whole thing. I think I was more willing to accept and write about the concept of "the New Weird" on its creators' terms than on my own. (I have since gone back and placed that phrase in what people call "scare quotes." Take that, all of you "New Weird" people.) Then, in early 2023, I looked more deeply into the meaning and origins of weird, culminating in an entry called "Weird vs. 'The Weird,'" dated February 2, 2023. (Click here.) In that series, I found that the word and concept weird seem to have begun as a noun and not an adjective, that weird, related to fate but not the same thing as fate, was originally a personification--Wyrd or Weird--of the workings upon us of life and the nature or conditions of our existence, of something above us and outside of us, of something beyond our knowledge, comprehension, or control. In short, weird and an awareness of weird predated fiction and literature.

Now to apply the process of calculatus eliminatus to find out some of the things that Weird or weird is not:

Weird is not quite the same as fate, even if the concepts are related.

Weird is not a person, nor a spirit or a goddess, nor a being of any kind.

Weird is not necessarily supernatural. With that being the case, a weird tale is not necessarily a fantasy. In other words, a work of straight or conventional fiction can be a weird tale and vice versa, although weird is obviously emphasized in weird fiction.

Weird is not necessarily punishment, nor judgment, nor retribution, nor law (like doom).

Weird is not a force, least of all the so-called "force" of history. Our lives turn, twist, and bend in unexpected, awful (or awesome), often cruel and seemingly arbitrary, but always necessary ways. We are not to know why. It is not in our ken.

We don't know what are the ways and workings of Weird. We are not to know why she does the things that she does.

Weird is not evil nor ignorant. It does no good at all to rail against her. We must accept her ways, for her decisions are unassailable, even if we cannot understand them. This is just how life is.

Weird surrounds us. We don't surround her. We don't and can't theorize about non-personified weird. Weird is a nonintellectual topic. We don't sense the presence of or apprehend weird through reason, at least of a later type. Weird and an awareness of weird predate reason and every written language.

Weird cannot be circumscribed. It is not an object, a mass, or a quantity. There is no "the Weird." The definite article does not apply.

Weird began as a noun. Only later did it become an adjective. I think that happened for want of a hyphen. That might be a little facetious, but . . . .

In Macbeth (ca. 1606) are the Weird (or Weyward) Sisters. They are of a type, I think, the type being the weird-woman of Scottish tales and Scottish literature. The three sisters in Macbeth are not weird in the way we think of as weird, as in, "I saw a weird guy at the store today." They are weird because they speak the weirds of Macbeth and Banquo. (Weird-woman is like milkman, weird and milk both being nouns. One is delivered by a woman, the other by a man.) There are other weird-women in Scottish literature. I encountered one late last year in "The Two Drovers" by Sir Walter Scott (1827-1828). In any case, if the term, type, and concept weird-woman had been hyphenated, we might have avoided the premature conversion of weird from a noun into an adjective, and our understanding of weird might have been better long ago and better now. That understanding would not have been derailed. In other words, a weird tale is not essentially about weird things. It's about the workings of weird upon the world and the lives of men. Only after understanding that is it acceptable, in my opinion, for us to use weird as an adjective. I'll add that it can be a really useful adjective.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, there were those who tried to create something they called "the New Weird." I suspect those people were and are progressive in their worldview. They must believe that there can be new things. I think they were also trying to engage themselves in a critical and analytical exercise. I think they were attempting to make of themselves great discoverers, creators, or theorizers, equals to the great men and women of the past. What they failed to understand is that there is nothing new under the sun. They also failed to understand that cultural developments don't start from the top. A person can't decree from whatever high perch or post he imagines himself to occupy that a new form or genre shall come into being. Culture does not come from authority. It is naturally occurring and organic. It grows from below. It is more nearly evolutionary than revolutionary. Culture is not an a priori or gnostic system of thought.

One of the proponents of "the New Weird," China Miéville, is a Marxist. Marx, like Hegel before him, Darwin in his own time, and Charles Fort afterwards, believed that he had discovered an all-explanatory theory of nature and history. (1) We should not underestimate the powerful draw that such a thing represents to the modern and post-modern scholar, academic, theorizer, or intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual), for if he can discover a theory of everything, then he can make of himself a great man, greater of course than what he is in his current not-so-great life. (2) All-explanatory theories, or even theories that try to explain smaller things, usually fail, for life and history continue to confound us. We're not quite smart enough to impose our theories and structures upon them. Facts come before theories. It's not the other way around.

"The New Weird" isn't new anymore, but even when it was supposedly "new," it wasn't, for it seems to me that the idea was based on an old-new thing, namely the British New Wave in science fiction of the 1960s and '70s. [Reading Jeff VanderMeer's introduction to The New Weird (2008) confirms as much.] The construction is the same: "the" plus "new" plus a word that begins with "w," in this case weird, converted from its previous use as an adjective back into a noun again after however many decades and centuries. (At least there's that, even if "the weird" is a clunky and aesthetically unpleasing phrase and sound.) In short, the phrase "the New Weird" is, to me, in obvious imitation of "the New Wave," which was, truth be told, in imitation of the "new wave," or nouvelle vague, of French cinema of the 1950s. (Bossa nova, not quite literally a new wave, is of the same period. The French group Nouvelle Vague, which often performs in the bossa nova style, is of about the same age as "the New Weird.") I think the proponents of "the New Weird" were trying to hitch their wagon to a star--the star of the New Wave--even if that star had faded by the turn of the millennium. What was supposed to be new wasn't new after all. It's older still now.

In summary: "the New Weird" isn't and wasn't new; the definite article doesn't apply; and, although weird is more properly a noun rather than an adjective, the proponents of "the New Weird" used it in the wrong way, applying it, I assume, to a body of fiction of a certain type or sub-genre governed by a theory [or mission statement--see Mr. VanderMeer's introduction] rather than to the weird of pre-modern times governed not at all by men. They tried to throw a rope around it. What they didn't realize is that Weird is not roped.

Notes

(1) Marx considered history to be a science. One of his names for his system of belief was "scientific socialism," as opposed to "utopian socialism," which might also be called, by a stretch, "romantic socialism." Never mind that Marxism is also utopian and romantic, or irrational, in theory and in practice. I would add that Marxism is a kind of horror story for our age.

Update (Apr. 8, 2026): I have two ideas to add. One comes from someone else. The other comes from my own little brain.

First: This morning I read an essay called "Jane Fonda, 'Hail Caesar,' and the False God of History" by Grayson Quay. It's on the website American Greatness and is dated today. Mr. Quay covers a lot of ground in his essay. I'll pick out just one idea for quoting here:

For Marx, the end of history would come when the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie and established a classless society. He called the force that made this outcome inevitable "science" rather than "fate," but the effect was the same.

I hadn't thought of it that way before, but Marx must have believed that what he called History is actually the workings of fate, for both are irresistible and inevitable. By this idea, according to Marx it is the weird of the world to become a worker's paradise. The difference is that History is a material force and subject to intellectual understanding, with Marx himself as its sole interpreter and theorizer--only he could speak the weird of humanity--whereas fate and weird are non-material and beyond understanding. In the parlance of Marxism, I guess, they would be considered reactionary or obscurantist.

Second: We hear again and again about this thing or that "changing the course of history." The assumptions in that expression are that "history" has a course--a predetermined and previously unalterable course--and that somehow in defiance of "history," that course can be changed by a special kind of person, action, or event. (In science-fictional terms, would "changing the course of history" create an alternate future history or parallel universe in which the "true," unaltered course of history proceeds?) The implication is that what people call "history" is a force and that we are carried along by this force beyond our control. That may be a vaguely Marxist idea, but maybe it and Marxism come from the same place, i.e., the belief that "history" is a force that operates outside of us and is beyond our understanding or control. Is it too much to propose that there isn't any such thing as history? 

Another overused expression these days is "making history," an expression applied to every little thing there is. "I am the first transgender person of color to stand at the highest point in Kansas, and so I have made history." Again, I think, there is the implication that "history" is an independent, objective thing that exists outside of our own minds and lives. Whether we observe it, record it, interpret it, or theorize on it, it nonetheless exists.

(2) I first saw this kind of thing for myself when I went with a group of aspiring young life scientists to a library in St. Louis and watched them gaze with awe and reverence upon a tome, shielded in a glass case, by Charles Darwin. I had the sense that they desired to make of themselves something extraordinary, if only they could, by discovering a theory or concept equal to his.

"Macbeth and the Three Witches" by Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839). On January 10, 2026, I posted "Catholic & Cosmic Horror" and closed my posting with two images, one by Giotto, the other by Margaret Brundage. Both depicted swirling, spiraling, undulating flights of the human form, just as in this painting.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Old Gods Return

"Can you believe, child, that there are gods of old who still live? Old gods, and powers that have survived the passing of their worshippers?"

--From The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (Paperback Library, 1970, p. 204)

Francis Stevens, aka Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948), wrote the first serial by a woman to appear in Weird Tales magazine. (I'm pretty sure that Laurie McClintock was not a woman but a man.) All of those early serials were two-parters and so was hers. It is entitled "Sunfire," and it was in the issues of July/August and September 1923. "Sunfire" was the cover story for the July/August issue, making it the first cover story by a woman writer in "The Unique Magazine." The October issue also had a cover story by a woman, "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton" by Effie W. Fifield (1857-1937). As it so happened, both women were born in Minnesota.

* * *

In 2004, academic Gary C. Hoppenstand asserted that Francis Stevens invented what he called dark fantasy. The title of his introductory essay, "The Woman Who Invented Dark Fantasy" in Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), says it all. I disagree with him. From March 10 to May 13, 2015, I wrote a long series on Gertrude Barrows Bennett and her stories. In that series, I made what I believe to be a strong case that she was not the inventor of dark fantasy, which is, to be clear, an ill-defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction. I believe saying that she was is an attempt to put something there that isn't there at all. It seems to me a lot of theorizing done after the fact, or an attempt to make the facts fit the hypothesis instead of the other way around. Beyond that, to say that this or that author "invented" a literary genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre is not to understand cultural or historical processes, which are, necessarily, evolutionary rather than discrete. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. That was a discrete, technological event. He knew when he invented it that he had invented it. Did Francis Stevens ever use the term "dark fantasy"? Did she ever make any claims to inventing a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre that wasn't named until late in the twentieth century and has still not been adequately defined? The answer is of course no. "Dark fantasy" is of our time and not of hers. If anybody "invented" it, that happened long after she was gone. Anyway, to read what I wrote about Francis Stevens, aka Gertrude Barrows Bennett, click on the menu item on the right.

* * *

I write again today about Francis Stevens because of a couple of essays I have read recently regarding a man named Jonathan Cahn and his book The Return of the Gods, published in 2022. I have nothing to say about him or any validity or invalidity of his ideas. I would just like to point out that Mr. Cahn believes that there has been a revival--a literal revival, I think he means--of what he calls a Dark Trinity. This Dark Trinity is made up of three ancient--that is, pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, and very pagan--gods, Baal the Possessor, Asherah the Enchantress, and Moloch the Destroyer. The names are ancient. The epithets may be his. Differ with Mr. Cahn if you like. But it's clear to me that these ancient, hateful, and seductive gods have returned in one guise or another, most especially, I think, Moloch, to whom ancient pagans sacrificed their children. Look around us today and see the sacrifices we make of our own children, in the forms of abortion, transgenderism, drag, grooming, pedophilia, sexual mutilation, the use of puberty blockers, chemical castration, masking in schools, parks, beaches, and playgrounds, lockdowns, injections that are called "vaccinations," child trafficking, child pornography, the child sex trade, the sexualization of children, the politico-sexual indoctrination, abuse, mistreatment, and exploitation of children by parents, teachers, children's book authors, librarians, medical doctors, people in government, business, media, and entertainment . . . on and on it goes. If there is anything that will bring down upon us the direst of wrath and vengeance, it is this.

* * *

One of the problems with claiming that Francis Stevens invented dark fantasy is that there isn't any set definition of that term. Another is that dark fantasy was not so named until late in the twentieth century, either by Charles L. Grant (1942-2006) or Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994). (That suggests that it did not exist until then.) Those two obstacles would seem insurmountable for any theorist: it doesn't matter how hard he might hypothesize or theorize, the academic cannot get his fine ideas over those two enormous humps. He doesn't have the power, no matter how many degrees he might have, no matter his position, reputation, influence, or prestige. It just isn't there.

* * *

Genres, forms, styles, and trends in popular culture may be recognized, described, and named. For example, according to Wikipedia, the term film noir was first applied to Hollywood movies of a certain type by Italian-French film critic Nino Frank (1904-1988) in 1946. The period during which film noir flourished began in about 1940 and ended in the mid to late 1950s. In other words, film noir was recognized as a style--and that style was named--contemporaneously to the making of the movies themselves. For another example closer to home, the New Wave in science fiction was described and named by various writers and critics in the period 1961 to 1968. That naming, too, was contemporaneous with the coming of the New Wave. Like the term dark fantasy, though, New Wave "has never been defined with any precision" according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The Encyclopedia doesn't have an entry at all on what is called dark fantasy, and the term dark fantasy isn't used at all in its entry on Francis Stevens except in reference to Dr. Hoppenstand's collection of her stories. So far he stands alone, albeit with an assist from Wikipedia, that purveyor of things that are and are not true.

So film noir and the science fiction New Wave were recognized, named, and described by writers and critics contemporaneously to the making of movies and stories in their respective styles or genres. If Francis Stevens was the inventor of what is called dark fantasy, then it obviously was not. "But there weren't any critics back then," you might say. "Pulp fiction was not studied or taken seriously," you might claim. And yet H.P. Lovecraft, a reader in vast realms, wrote and in 1927 published his seminal survey "Supernatural Horror in Literature." The word dark is throughout Lovecraft's essay. It's clear that he recognized a dark cast in historical and what was then contemporary fantasy fiction. But he didn't employ the word fantasy, using phantasy instead, in a different sense of the word, and nowhere in his essay does the name Francis Stevens appear. So if Francis Stevens invented dark fantasy, H.P. Lovecraft failed to see it, but we do. How smart we are.

I have one last example. Here in the twenty-first century, some people started to call a certain type of music from the 1970s and '80s "yacht rock." In other words, use of the term "yacht rock" was not contemporaneous with the music that is called yacht rock. It was applied only after the fact, an example of facts being forced to fit the hypothesis. Consider this idea: Francis Stevens as the inventor of dark fantasy is the "yacht rock" of criticism in fantasy fiction. And as you sail upon your yacht, listening to your music, be on the lookout for Fonzie jumping over a shark.

* * *

Gertrude Barrows Bennett was born in the late nineteenth century, in fact just one year after the publication of Friedrich Nietzsche's work The Gay Science (1882), in which he famously (or infamously) wrote: "God is dead." Nietzsche didn't kill God of course. He was more nearly acting like Dr. McCoy, observing as Dr. McCoy so often does, "He's dead, Jim." Except that maybe Nietzsche was a little more sanguine in his attitude about the death at hand than was the ship's doctor on board the Enterprise.

Anyway, if the one God was dead, then that would leave room for the old gods to come back. Perhaps they had lain sleeping, waiting for when the stars would be right for their return. Francis Stevens had one of her characters say, "Can you believe, child, that there are gods of old who still live?" "Believe it," Jonathan Cahn seems to be saying. And again, Gertrude Barrows Bennett seems to have foreseen what we would come to, in the same way that Mary W. Shelley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jakob Burckhardt, Fyodor Dostoevsky, C.S. Lewis, and so many other conservative thinkers and writers foresaw. Progressives may have their grand plans and fine ambitions for all of us and for our shared future. But they never work. Always there are horrors and horrors.

* * *

I began this year writing about the Fates and their three Nordic counterparts, including Wyrd or Weird. I speculated that Weird came back out from under God during the nineteenth century, once God had weakened in the hearts of men. (Men weaken, God never.) Imagine: a word and a concept that was almost lost came back, and from the word and concept came a new-old genre of fiction, the subject, along with its authors and artists, of this blog. Thankfully Weird was never a god and never malicious.

* * *

Paganism came back in the nineteenth century, too, including in materialistic or atheistic systems of belief that burned and still burn like holy fires in the hearts of their adherents. Marxism, more generally socialism, is chief among these materialistic or atheistic systems, even if it has been transmuted into critical theory, DEI, transgenderism, identity politics, the culture of victimhood, and so on.

* * *

I believe that Gertrude Barrows Bennett was a believer, possibly a Roman Catholic. And not only was she a believer, she appears to have been firm in her faith. Her faith seems to have filled her heart and to have illuminated her works. I don't sense a woman struggling with her beliefs. Instead, she seems to have been entirely forthright and genuine and to have written with an ease that comes from complete conviction. In her story "Serapion," she had one character say to another: "[Y]ou seem different from any living man. You look like--I have seen the picture of a man with that light on his face." That man was nailed to a cross, the speaker remembers. Last year, when one of the Moloch State's great abominations was finally overturned by the Supreme Court--and by what we might see as divine intervention--I saw a news commentator on television. She is Shannon Bream, and she was positively glowing as she talked about what had just happened. She had "that light" upon her face. It came from within her, but it also came from the source of all light and all love. I will never forget that look. And I will always hold it as a bit of evidence in favor of the God that so many, including the followers of the old gods today, hate so much. In fact, isn't their hatred itself also evidence in favor of the one whom they hate?

* * *

You can believe in the old gods in a literal or a metaphorical sense. I'm not sure that it matters very much either way. If dark fantasy is the story of their return, then it seems to me that the authors of dark fantasy are in favor of their return. It hardly seems possible or logical that the inventor of a very dark genre would have had an opposing eternal light within her, that she--Gertrude Barrows Bennett, aka Francis Stevens--would be in favor of their return and against her one God when she was so obviously a believer. But maybe it took a believer to sense that the old gods were returning and to prescribe what we might need to defeat them again, to force them into exile again. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), also a product of the nineteenth century, was supposed to have been a non-believer, a materialist and an atheist, but even he sent his old god Cthulhu back into exile. Even he was kindly enough towards humanity to spare us. And what of the readers and lovers of dark fantasy today? Are they so kindly? I'm not so sure. It seems to me that the world is so overfull of people who are themselves overfull of hatred for themselves and for all of humanity that they would just as soon see us all punished forever. Either that or destroyed forever. It is for people like them that dark fantasy is made, and--if it is in fact a genre or sub-genre of fantasy fiction--why it was not named or described until late in the twentieth century, just in time for our twenty-first. As Jesus Jones sang, the world started to wake up from history with the tearing down of the Iron Curtain. But we wouldn't have it. We wanted horrors, and so we have them. They are more subtle in our century than in the last, but they are horrors nonetheless.

A depiction of Moloch, god--or one of the gods--of the twenty-first-century Society-State and of worshippers of the Society-State.

The Triumph Of Christianity Over Paganism by Gustave Doré (1868?). Will this day come again?

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley