It's odd seeing late comers to a party trying to refine that party, no?

I pose that question in my title because that perhaps best explains my puzzlement at seeing several blog articles over the past week or so trying to define what is/was the "New Weird" and trying to identify who writes that.  I suppose I should just supply links to the offending blogs before commencing with a dressdown, so here are the offenders:

Sensawunda (parts one and two)

The World in the Satin Bag


Literary Musings

Now onto the eviscerations.

After reading these four posts, I was left wondering "are these three blind men grabbing elephant parts and trying to make sense of it?" and "why the hell are they talking about an informal "movement" that mostly died off a half-decade or so ago?"  I remember when the actual term "New Weird" began to be discussed wildly, way back in 2002/2003.  It never was a formal movement; just try to name any of the particulars associated with it who ever had a full definition for the work.  If anything, such a term deals as much with conflicts and arguments rather than anything that could be ascertained with any sort of definitive stance.  Some people formerly associated with it pretty much despise the term today, while others have gone from outright objection to being placed under that shredded umbrella to being resigned to being associated with the term.  It seems to me that it is ridiculous for those who didn't witness those arguments or at least researched what was going down during the turn of the century to proclaim with any degree of certainty that authors X and/or Y are parts of the New Weird without at least acknowledging the controversies surrounding their association.

Added to that is the inclusion of some rather odd choices, such as writers (Mervyn Peake in particular) who had been dead for three decades before ever the term "New Weird" was bandied about.  The historical inaccuracies are a bit odd, to say the least.  Just wish more time, care, and research had been taken before some of the assertions made in those linked articles had been made.

That's not to say there aren't some interesting postulations there.  Discussing elements that may be common in the associated New Weird acts is something that is worthwhile.  I just don't know if this is anything more than placing a cart before a horse, considering that the very term "New Weird" perhaps needs to be defined better than what I have seen in those articles.  As someone who is ambivalent to the very term (I often put it in scare quotes) due to the lack of anything common about them in a way that perhaps the chronologically-oriented American Golden Age SF or the Anglo-American New Wave scenes are, I just don't know if there is anything that really can be said other than "the New Weird was a term loosely tied to several American and British writers around the turn of the 21st centuries whose multivariate influences shared a few commonalities in terms of interaction with previous literary and cultural movements."  I am hesitant to call it a "movement," much less a coherent one.  I certainly do not think it is a valid term for the new writers of the past five years or so; too many variations in story, theme, and literary style and influence.

Perhaps others will disagree.  Maybe some will come up with something more than hastily tossed-together authors whose associations lack much in the way of either rhyme or reason.  But until more cogent arguments can be made for the "New Weird" being anything more than an informal series of connections that never coalesced into anything resembling a real literary "movement," I just can't help but to reject the arguments presented in the linked posts above.

Edit:  It was kindly pointed to me that in discussing this, that I failed to mention the anthology The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.  Although I had mentioned it in the Twitter discussion that preceded this post, it is a major, major brain fart on my part that I did not note that this anthology does contain not just samples of what usually is accepted as being NW, but it contains an introduction, found online, that discusses the term itself.  So perhaps I should be ready to accept what I might dish out as well?

As for my thoughts on the anthology, I did review it a couple of years ago.  Enjoyed it, agreed with most of the points made, just hesitant on a few others.  But yeah, leaving that out is rather bad and I'd rather just tack on an addendum/mea culpa than edit it in and pretend nothing had been left out unintentionally.