Machen's 1890s fiction did much to establish the terms or basis of the weird tale in the latenineteenth century. Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan (1890) use scientific ideas to rationalise the generating of a weird monster that then exceeds the capacity of science to know it. The predominant scientific worldview wobbles under its inability to cope and a weird version of what really is takes its place. These stories, I argue, find weird crevices in nineteenth-century science and prise the cracks open to imaginatively explore what the implications might be.Weird fiction contests a deterministic, mechanical, positivist worldview. It rejects assumptions that human beings can ultimately comprehend the universe. It makes space for the unknown and unknowable, for realms of existence beyond those of the human and indifferent to human concerns. As we see in the tales discussed here, encountersaccidental or deliberatebetween humans and other dimensions or their occupants can produce awe, wonder, insanity, horror, terror and sometimes briefly an advanced state of knowledge. The weird worldview is forward-looking. Rather than rejecting the current state of scientific knowledge (in favour of fantasy, metaphysics, gothic revenant or supernaturalism), the weird reworks it, arguing that different conceptions of "science" or "knowledge" may do better at describing reality while still allowing rational (rather than superstitious) scope for the unknown and unknowable lying beyond.
"Ripples over the threshold": the weird case of Jekyll and HydeRobert Louis Stevenson's most famous story is not usually claimed for the weirdit is more often recruited to the gothic tradition and sometimes to sf. 1 Yet, James Machin points out, it was received by contemporary readers as "a 'weird story' and a 'weird novelette' with a 'weird hero', but not a Gothic novelette." 2 Traits identified in the novella by critics also mark it as weird even when they don't call it that. In a centenary essay on the multiple narrative voices of Jekyll and Hyde, Ronald R. Thomas remarks that readers "move through [the] secret door" of Enfield's story "into a world where names cannot be named, points cannot be