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New Weird; because weird just doesn't do it for you anymore

Started by Superfluous Crow, March 23, 2009, 05:58:23 PM

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LD

Oh, for the record, I was not saying that all women authors write romance-lit or sex-lit; just that with more women purchasing "fantastic romances" and interested in "space romances" that there are more romance authors making the transition into fantasy.

Fantasy has always had authors like Leigh Brackett and CL Moore (??) who wrote standard "male-oriented" adventure pieces.

Then there were Ursula K. LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley who both wrote more straightforward fantasy. And of course Leigh Eddings helped David Eddings on all his pieces. And then there is the indomitable Margaret Weis... although her new "mistress of dragons" series borders on softcore lesbian issues at times... If I recall correctly, it is generally more restrained than some of Turtledove and Chris Bunch's pieces.

LD

Quote from: SteerpikeIt's OK. Right now I'm taking a student directed seminar on science fiction and the city (our blog - somewhere on it I actually have a very small story posted) and another class on near-future dystopias; other than tehse two courses I've never encountered science fiction there during my 4 year undergraduate. Awesomely, though, the library has all of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, which I've been renewing for nearly a year now, heh.
Ah, well that's better than My University provided.
Although our library bizzarely had about 6-8 literary criticism books on HP Lovecraft- everything from the deCamp biography to the American Libraries collection, to other literary criticisms on his work, and other collectiosn of his work.

I'll have to check out KJ Bishop I suppose then. And you might be right about Moorcock.

Hm. Pullman might take ideas from Christianity but at least that's more inventive than the standard Tolkeinesque mythos. Maybe he is the neo-Lovecraft? Just not quite as good in creating worlds? I don't know and am not really too qualified to comment on him. I only read "The Golden Compass" and that was a long time ago.

Llum

Then you got the newly created part, and missed out on all the christianity bits :p

LD

That sounds very interesting about your class steerpike. What is your reading list? I have to admit, I'm intrigued.


One of my dreams is to one day teach a community college class on literature of Utopias, Dystopias.

My design for the class was as follows:

1. 1984... George Orwell
- The classic dystopia. Straightforward. Introduction to the course.

2. Brave New World... Aldous Huxley
- The utopia/dystopia. More challenging.
Discuss: Feasibility, Philosophy, Being Human.

3. Future Perfect... AE VanVogt   (In the Essential AE Van Vogt)
- A controlled future and love and being human.

BOOK REPORT ASSIGNED. Choose A book from the list provided.

4. That Hideous Strength... CS Lewis
- Technology, Science, and Humanity
- The most chilling and challenging of all the reads

SUPPLEMENTARY READS / ACCEPTABLE BOOK REPORTS

Heart of Darkness... Joseph Conrad
Utopia... St. Augustine
The Republic... Plato
Dante's Inferno... Dante Aligheri
We.... Zamyatin


Steerpike

My student directed seminar reading list:

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
The City and the Stars - Arthur C. Clarke
The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G. Ballard
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Patchwork Girl - Shelley Jackson
Perdido Street Station - China Mieville

Dystopian Lit Course:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K. Dick
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Watchmen - Alan Moore
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

LD

Thanks. There are a lot of interesting reads on that list that I will have to look into!
~LD

Kindling

Going off on the earlier mentioned tangent about sex, I wonder if anyone else shares my opinion that it seems very hard to write sex well?

I suppose your definition of "well" might influence the answer... What I mean is, without it seeming either, well, somehow forced, or only there for the purposes of titillation.
If sex is not the focus of the story, then it seems to me that writing a sex scene at all is a bit pointless, especially when doing so tastefully seems to be a problem for so many authors (I know I couldn't do it)
And even when it is used as a plot element, although I suppose not so much if it's a central one, it's really only necessary for the reader to know that it's happened or is happening. Carnal details are, often, un-called-for.

Just my opinion, and I'm not saying I'm against sex in books, like Steerpike said, there's sex in a lot of good books, just that it seems to be something that's very difficult to write about well.
all hail the reapers of hope

Steerpike

I totally agree, Kindling.  I think the difficulties around sex really speak to something... odd about western culture.  I agree that its difficult to write sex scenes, but I wonder why.  I think some of the hang ups come from a sense of invading privacy.  You see the same thing in a lot of films (see my Who Watched the Watchmen rant).

For example, how easy is it to write an action scene?  I find it impossibly easy.  Writing about carnage and gunfights and people getting their brains blown out seems to me distubringly easy to do; I could do it pretty much unflinchingly.  In real life, sex is far more commonplace, far more socially legitimate, and usually far, far more important to most people than fighting/war/"action."

The old "gratuitous" arguement always kind of rubbed me the wrong way, and after hearing George R.R. Martin speak at a book signing for A Feast For Crows I always think of his answer... he said that if he "gratuitous" meant "not essential to the plot," and if according to that definition he cut out everything gratuitous from A Song of Ice and Fire then he'd be left with like 50 page books rather than 500-1000 page books.  Youd lose the feasts and fights and the atmosphere and the colloquial dialogue and it'd all just be summary.  And you'd lose the sex, or at least any description of the sex.  So once you start adding back in the "gratuitous" (that is to say, enjoyable parts), after you've added the feasts and the duels and the rest of it back into A Song of Ice and Fire, why stop at the sex?  Sex is so important for the development of most characters; even if the character is celibate then sex still plays an important role in a sense.  In a work that strives to present detailed and developed characters it seems difficult to me not to include sex.

SDragon

Quote from: Light DragonUnpopular in the sense that people are not copying the style in the market and writing new and original works in the same manner and fashion. There are many Tolkien want-to-bes, how many Carroll or Baum want-to-bes are there? How many Alice in Wonderland or Oz emulators (other than Wicked) have you seen?


I would like to say, for the record, that if i thought I was capable of producing consistently good Carrollian fantasy, I probably would be writing it exclusively.
[spoiler=My Projects]
Xiluh
Fiendspawn
Opening The Dark SRD
Diceless Universal Game System (DUGS)
[/spoiler][spoiler=Merits I Have Earned]
divine power
last poster in the dragons den for over 24 hours award
Commandant-General of the Honor Guard in Service of Nonsensical Awards.
operating system
stealer of limetom's sanity
top of the tavern award


[/spoiler][spoiler=Books I Own]
D&D/d20:
PHB 3.5
DMG 3.5
MM 3.5
MM2
MM5
Ebberon Campaign Setting
Legends of the Samurai
Aztecs: Empire of the Dying Sun
Encyclopaedia Divine: Shamans
D20 Modern

GURPS:

GURPS Lite 3e

Other Systems:

Marvel Universe RPG
MURPG Guide to the X-Men
MURPG Guide to the Hulk and the Avengers
Battle-Scarred Veterans Go Hiking
Champions Worldwide

MISC:

Dungeon Master for Dummies
Dragon Magazine, issues #340, #341, and #343[/spoiler][spoiler=The Ninth Cabbage]  \@/
[/spoiler][spoiler=AKA]
SDragon1984
SDragon1984- the S is for Penguin
Ona'Envalya
Corn
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Walrus
SpaceCowboy
Elfy
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LK
Halfling Fritos
Rorschach Fritos
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Before you accept advice from this post, remember that the poster has 0 ranks in knowledge (the hell I'm talking about)

Steerpike

So after beginning writing the paper I mentioned earlier ("Taxonomy of the Weird") I realized the topic was far too broad for proper treatment in an 8-12 page paper... I still may post my China Mieville here when I've finished it.

Here, however, is my first (ranting) draft of what was going to be my introduction:

Taxonomy of the Weird

Beowulf, one of the oldest surviving written works in the English language, involved a superhuman warrior slaying a demonic monstrosity, its troll-like mother, and finally a dragon.  Hundreds of years later, in 1610, Shakespeare was penning The Tempest, a play whose cast includes a magician, a sprite, and an evil witch.  A little over a century later Jonathan Swift was writing one of the first proper novels, Gulliver's Travels, in which the protagonist journeys through a series of surreal and fanciful vistas, encountering immortals, giants, and tyrannical, intelligent horses.  In another hundred years Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a novel describing the reanimation of a human corpse and its subsequent struggles, was enjoying enormous popular success, with translations into French and dramatic adaptations already flourishing.  A hundred years after that the magazine Weird Tales was first published, dedicated to the publication of works of what we now call fantasy, science fiction, and horror but which in the twenties was described more commonly as 'weird fiction.'

All of the above works contain central supernatural, magical, or speculative technological elements (or, as I will term these elements, weirdness), and up until Weird Tales all are also unquestionably considered part of the literary canon.  Yet in the twentieth century a strange rift seems to have emerged in the literary community.  With the development of genre categories '" fantasy, science fiction, horror, and also mystery, romance, and historical fiction, etc '" the presence of the weird is abruptly abjected from the literary canon.  A new category arises, 'literature,' that seems to exist on the same spectrum as works that might once have been called weird stories (if they were called anything other than simply 'fiction') and which now are called fantasy, science fiction, and horror.  Weird fiction and literary fiction quite suddenly become distanced; if something contains weirdness, it cannot not be considered literature, with the tenuous exception of so-called magical realism, in which weird elements are ruthlessly subordinated to the needs of plot or allegory.  Many authors, in a gambit to increase the perceived literary value of their fiction, frantically deny that their books have anything in common with science fiction or fantasy: Margaret Atwood, for example, refuses to admit that Oryx and Crake, a novel about the artificial creation of a race of posthumans with the ability to photosynthesize (among other things) who live on a post-apocalyptic earth, is science fiction.  Even more absurdly, works that clearly have much more in common with present day fantasy and science fiction than with present day 'literature' (including Beowulf, The Tempest, Gulliver's Travels, and Frankenstein) are nonetheless still doggedly labelled 'literature,' since their literary credibility is already too well entrenched for those works to be displaced into the decidedly non-canonical realms of weird fiction.  In bookstores these classics are shelved not with the winners of Hugos, Nebulas, and Bram Stokers, but with Gillers, Pulitzers, and Bookers, even though if they were written today they would meet the criteria of the former but never the latter.  Occasionally a strange grey area of overlap is discernable '" for example, the works of Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne are sometimes acknowledged both as weird and as literary '" but by and large the divisions are remarkably sacrosanct.

Why has this paradigm shift occurred?  It clearly has nothing to do with the popularity of weird texts: The Lord of the Rings has remained continuously in print since its publication in 1955, and the Harry Potter series has sold more than four hundred million copies,  with the last book in the series selling more than eight million copies in the first twenty-four hours.   Purely economic motives or dynamics of changing popular taste can thus be completely discounted: weird fiction still sells, and sells extremely well, but it has lost its literary credibility.  This disparagement of the weird prevalent in academic circles can be attributed to the development of genre and the peculiar taxonomy of the weird and of fiction more generally, in which previously permeable boundaries are suddenly made rigid, classifications enforced, and the criteria for literary merit subsequently revaluated.  If weird texts are treated critically at all they are often prefaced with a kind of embarrassed acknowledgement of the tension between the weird and the literary: as Lucie Armitt writes in Theorising the Fantastic, 'it is traditional for the first page of an academic study of literary fantasy to gesture the reader in with a (direct or indirect) apology' (1).  The question then becomes: how do genres emerge, and once they have been codified, how do they change the way we assign literary merit?  How has the canon evolved, and why are its criteria so inconsistent and contradictory with regard to the weird?  Can genre boundaries change, collapse, dissolve, or merge?  Should they be abandoned altogether?  Should the literary canon?  Many of these questions cannot be suitably answered in full here, but in tracing the taxonomy of weird fiction and its particular relationship with 'literature' they can begin to be unravelled.a

LD

I enjoyed the piece. I can see where you ran into the problem of length. You seem to be trying to cover all possible weird fiction that has been published, and it appears that each work referenced may necessitate a separate paragraph (or several).

And then this part "he question then becomes: how do genres emerge, and once they have been codified, how do they change the way we assign literary merit? How has the canon evolved, and why are its criteria so inconsistent and contradictory with regard to the weird? Can genre boundaries change, collapse, dissolve, or merge? Should they be abandoned altogether? Should the literary canon?"
Raises an entirely new line of questioning. there are a lot of ideas in your piece, just like there are a lot of ideas in VanderMeer's piece.

Good luck though if you ever decide to get a Ph.d and turn that into your thesis!

Also good luck on trying to narrow your topic.


Superfluous Crow

I think i've stumbled across a book that could be classified as New Weird even if it is in the slightly pulp-ish end of the spectrum. The Translated Man by Chris Braak (can be bought as a PDF over lulu) utilizes a dystopian fantasy city reminescent of New Crobuzon. The story is quite far from classic fantasy and involves some references to society and its faults although perhaps not on as deep a level as Mieville. Also includes some neat ideas like the Architecture War, "Knockers" who can project their (super-)hearing, and 12 different heretic sciences (although only half of them are mentioned). The writing is pretty decent, although i have seen better. But this is his first novel, and the story is pretty good. Makes me think of a combination of Perdido Street Station and the Haunting of Alaizabel Cray.
Currently...
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Watching: Farscape and Arrested Development


LD

>>Baudrillard, Jean. 'Simulacra and Science Fiction.' Trans. Arthur B. Evans. URL April 23, 3009.

3009? :o :! Seems like a citation out of Dresden Codak!

--
Surprised you did not mention the word-mashups (I forget the technical term) that are common to steampunk and neo-victorian work and which I recall, Mieville used a bit (But I am rusty on my Mieville). Although that may have been venturing too far afield. But it is interesting linguistically that those words, just like the 'mongrelization' of the New Crobuzon Remade and the genres and literary influences of Mieville are all combined.

I am not so certain I buy the assertion that the Weaver has to overcome anything. I did not see much self-consciousness until the Weaver needed to confront the Slake Moth. It seems you mentioned this in passing in the introduction, but it could have used some development, I think.

The discussion on the fRemade taking "ownership" of their condition and mongrelization is fairly interesting.

The story may also have benefitted from a discussion of Mieville's own mongrelization? You touch on this a bit, with his mongrel background exposure to Egypt.

Perhaps part of the story behind the "new weird" that is not really touched on in their dicussions is particularly how the genre itself is the crossroads; of fantasy, of literature, of supernatural, of old and new ideas.

That being said, on another topic... Mieville's concept of the Remade is one of the more disappointing things in his series. I never understood how it is necessarily a good use of the resources of the society or how it is actually a punishment when you replace someone's arm with a crab's arm... I suppose because the arm is useless and awkward that explains why it is a punishment; but some of the punishments actually seem more like augmentations that could be useful to harm enemies.

For the record, I personally did not pity the Remade. Still, I thought it was a waste of city funds, completely unnecessary and the terror of the remade did not work because there seemed to be hundreds of remade- it seemed more sadistic than anything else. Much more efficient would have been to have killed them all. In that sense, I pitied the city's government, for waste and sadism. Then again, that lack of understanding of Mieville's socialist worldview could be why I am writing Gloria :!

Quotetransmuted by the eclectic thaumaturgy of Miéville's wordcraft into the single, sprawling pastiche of The (New) Weird.
This was your process of connecting the essay to a larger issue, correct? I think it would have been useful to mention new weird somewhere earlier... but considering the class for which you wrote this piece; I think everyone knows Mieville is New Weird so it is fair to get away with. :) But if you publish it elsewhere, you may want to drop that reference into the introduction.

Some more musing... What you wrote made me think about how mongrelization might be one theme in the story, but also there appears to be the theme of "fixing"... for the better or for the worse. Fixing the Remade for their crimes; then fixing their souls through Jack's leadership. Fixing the garuda wings; fixing the Crisis Engine; fixing Lin at the end, who is forever broken. The weaver "fixing" the world to its liking. The fixing concept seems to also bleed through a bit in the Scar.

This was a bit shorter than I was expecting for a final essay, but I did enjoy reading it.

--
Thank you for posting this!
~LD.