The weird: a dis/orientation

Abstract

that it contained a reflection on 'the pseudo-scientific story': 'In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to a logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.' 3 The proffered definition was close to the formulations being tried out by Hugo Gernsback, who developed the term 'scientifiction' in his new journal Amazing Stories in 1926, simplified to 'science fiction' three years later. Both Gernsback's Amazing and Henneberger's Weird Tales appealed to the same literary forebears: Poe, Verne and Wells. Gernsback reprinted and serialised their stories, whilst readers of Weird Tales early on demanded 'more pseudo-scientific stories and more H. G. Wells stories.' 4 Poe worked to evoke atmospheres that he explicitly called 'weird'; Wells incorporated these elements into his self-conscious development of the 'scientific romance' in the 1890s (the epithet 'weird' occurs several times in The Time Machine, for instance, the Morlocks described as 'weird and horrible') 5. Weird Tales was not science fiction, however, and never became so. It was also not just a continuation of the late Victorian Gothic revival, but a mutation of it: something on the way to modern horror, which had not quite coalesced. The magazine promised on its front page 'A Wealth of Startling Thrill-Tales' and crossed into the territory of 'weird menace' typical of the so-called 'shudder pulps' that mixed up hard-boiled detective fiction, way-out Westerns and sadistic sexual torture. 6

Being Moved by Nature in the Anthropocene: On the Limits of the Ecological Sublime

“…Grief, distress, and guilt complicate and enrich the sublime: these are all emotions directed at the strange involvement of our daily actions in phenomena that our culture has taught us to construe as "natural" in the sense of external to the human. In contemporary literature, this unsettling strangeness looms large in works belonging to a strand of "New Weird" fiction (see Luckhurst, 2017)-for example, the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer (2014bVanderMeer ( , 2014aVanderMeer ( , 2014c. The trilogy, which comprises Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, focuses on an area in Florida marked by unprecedented changes to the ecosystem due to a mysterious contamination, possibly of extraterrestrial origin.…”

“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

“…The rampant seaweed reconfigures the ecophobic trope of monstrous tropical fecundity to imagine the loathsome vegetation as clogging and obstructing the technics and vehicles of maritime capitalism, thus resisting the rigid abstraction of nature. The Weird here thrives on "a truly Darwinian traumatism", manifesting in the "disgust at formless, structureless, primordial ooze, the slime dynamics that invoke the arche-origins of life itself, a chaos of protozoan mass that dissolves all boundary" (Luckhurst 2017(Luckhurst , p. 1054.…”

‘Age of Lovecraft’?—Anthropocene Monsters in (New) Weird Narrative

“…The uncanny is related to the weird as a register that responds to encounters with the unknown, but more specifically negotiates the unsettling experience of recognising something unfamiliar as familiar or something familiar as unfamiliar, through for 53 instance repetition or doubling (Freud 1966(Freud [1919: 220). 9 Roger Luckhurst notes that in contrast to the uncanny, the weird "veers away to invoke a dread that is irreducible, that cannot be reductively interpreted, translated or returned" (Luckhurst 2017(Luckhurst : 1052. Fisher accordingly emphasises the weird's intrusive, external 'wrongness' in opposition to the familiar, internal strangeness of the uncanny (2016: 10).…”

“…It can be difficult to distinguish these registers from one another, and-as will become clear from the cases further down-the weird frequently dances between them. In fact, the weird is often categorised by its refusal to fit neatly into categories, it "seeks crabbed, difficult prose, transgressive or evasive content, genre slippage and elusive authors as emblems of aesthetic resistance to the market" (Luckhurst 2017(Luckhurst : 1046. This weird hybridity has developed since (and no doubt through) Lovecraft's storyworld, but is perhaps more manifest in the new weird than in the old.…”

“…The new weird does not necessarily require cosmic horror, it involves a reaction to and movement away from traditional fantasy, and typically favours a distinctly urban or modern setting (VanderMeer/VanderMeer 2008: xvi). As both Luckhurst (2017) and Brad Tabas (2015) have noted, the emphasis on forbidden zones and threshold spaces where time and space themselves are warped and weirded, is shared by both old and new weird, but the perceived agency of the environment changes.…”