Valuing agents provocateurs

Been busy the past week with getting my department caught up (almost there!), so I neglected linking to this bit on M. John Harrison's blog:

Meanwhile, Larry at OfBlog has a quote from Richard Morgan with which I agree very wholeheartedly, although I’d add that despite their subject matter many “mainstream” novelists, from Nemirovksy to Eggers, have less a bleak view of life than a subtle one, which tends to take in its ups & downs. A knack that many “mainstream” readers have also cultivated, using ordinary life as a model. Good luck to Richard with his arguments for a realistically human view of humanity. I’ve been making them for many years & no one in f/sf has paid the slightest attention.

It's this last part that Morgan responds to first (as would I, if I had something to say there at almost 2 AM other than "thanks for linking to my post that copy/pastes Morgan's excellent points!". Maybe later...):

Kind of you, Mike – thanks.

I think you underestimate the impact of the arguments you spent so much time making, though. Attention was duly paid, and ploughed in – and the fruits of it are there hanging low for all to see in the orchards of Farmers Banks, Mieville, Robson, Hand et al. I have in fact grown the odd row of strawberries from it myself – the Altered Carbon harvest would have been a good deal thinner on the ground without fertiliser out of sacks marked The Centauri Device, Viriconium and The Ice Monkey…..

And that (as well as MJH's following comment which links into another post of his), is what made me stop and think for a little bit (dangerous when again I've been awake for 19 hours and will have to be awake in a little over 5 hours) about the value of being an agent provocateur. Generally, such people are not viewed with extreme kindness by many, in part because in a legal sense, they don't play fair with the ethical side of the law. But when it comes to long-held assumptions about certain things, whether it be how a story ought to function or how the authors and readers mix, mingle, and produce bastard interpretations willy-nilly of the resulting textual interpretations, aren't these agents provocateurs valuable because they make us stop and question if what we are doing is kosher, or if instead there might be another way to look at matters and that we damn well better at least consider it before our brains start to rot from a lack of mental exertion to question the whys of the universe around us?

Much has been made in certain circles this week about China Miéville's latest comments on Tolkien, where he praises five specific things about Tolkien's works. Some people are hyping the praise that Miéville gives to the dead old white guy that he once called "the wen on the arse of fantasy," but when I read it, I found it to be fulfilling another part of being that provocateur - the challenging of assumptions and getting others to react in such a way as to draw out their "true" feelings. Just as his 2000 article (since pulled, I believe) that contained the "wen on the arse of fantasy" quote antagonized and led many devout pro-Tolkien people to pour out all sorts of invectives against Miéville in support of "their guy," if this latest comment isn't an about-face (entirely possible, I'll admit, but I doubt it), then what does it say about those who suddenly want to use Miéville's comments to support their assertions in regards to Tolkien and those who model their writings on his Middle Earth setting?

Every so often, an author or blogger (even someone as obscure as myself) will say something that will spark a reaction. Usually, it leads to a vociferous rejection of that author/blogger's point of view, but isn't that very reaction just the sort of thing that is needed to generate some sort of dialogue in a literary mode that some fear might be too complacent and dependent upon formulae? The usual fate of a prophet or a voice crying in the wilderness is a short life and violent death. But don't their followers tend to take strength from the violent reactions and build toward something worthwhile to consider, at least on occasion?

Gotta love these agents that do what their name means - driving the action forward and making for some lively fun.

P.S. If any of this is fuzzy or unclear in wording, blame the sleep and I'll edit in the evening if possible.

M. John Harrison, A Storm of Wings

In the dark tidal reaches of one of those unnamed rivers which spring from the mountains behind Cladich, on a small domed island in the shallows before the sea, fallen masonry of a great age glows faintly under the eye of an uncomfortable moon. A tower once stood here in the shadow of the estuarine cliffs, made too long ago for anyone to remember, in a way no one left can understand, from a single obsidian monolith fully two hundred feet in length. For ten thousand years wind and water scoured its southern face, finding no weakness; and at night a yellow light might be discerned in its topmost window, coming and going as if someone there passed before a flame. Who brought it to this rainy country, where in winter the gales drive the white water up the Minch and fishermen from Lendalfoot shun the inshore ground, and for what purpose, is unclear. Now it lies in five pieces. The edges of the stone are neither shattered nor worn, but melted like candle wax. The causeway that once gave access here - from a beach on the west bank where lumps of volcanic glass are scattered on the sand - is drowned now, and all that comes up it from the water is a strange lax vegetation, a sprawl of giant sea hemlock which for some reason has forsaken the mild and beneficial brine of the estuary to colonise the beach, spread its pale and pulpy stems over the shattered tower, and clutch at a stand of dead, white pines. (p. 111)

M. John Harrison's second Viriconium novel, A Storm of Wings, begins with a lyrical, unsettling introduction that serves to displace the reader from the setting, or rather from what the reader might have imagined Viriconium to be based on the first novel, The Pastel City. This is a place of "unnamed rivers," of towers made too long ago for any to remember their names or purposes, of drowned causeways approaching beaches littered with volcanic glass, where "strange lax vegetation" grows, spreading up and over the "shattered tower." There is a sense of ruin here, but underlying is the feeling that something alien exists here.

The basic elements that Harrison introduced in The Pastel City - tegeus-Cromis, Tomb the Dwarf, the war between the Old and Young Queen, the Reborn Men - all these have been reimagined here. Viriconium is no longer just (as if it ever were a single entity!) a city existing among the ruins of a greater city. It is not a Rome haunted by its own dead remains, but instead something more, something more strange and bleak. The introduction, "The Moon Looking Down," contains references to an invasion of metallic locusts from the stars that fly in from behind the moon and land in Viriconium, sowing discord and madness:

In this time, in the Time of the Locust, when we have nothing to ourselves but the hollowness within us, in the Time of Bone, when we have nothing to do but wait, nothing human moves here. Nothing human has moved here for eighty years. Fire, were it brought here, would be pale and dim, hard to kindle. Passion would fade here on a whisper. Something in the tower's fall has poisoned the air here, and drained the landscape of its power. White and sickly and infinitely slow, the hemlock creeps out of the water to run sad rubbery fingers over the rubbish in the fallen rooms. The collapse of the tower seems complete, the defeat of artifice accomplished.

Yet in the Time of the Locust are we not counselled to patience? Eighty years have passed since tegeus-Cromis broke the yoke of Canna Moidart, since the Chemosit fell and the Reborn Men came among us; and in the deeps of this autumn night, under the aegis of an old and bitter geology, we witness here in events astronomical and enigmatic an intersection crucial to both the earth and the precarious foothold on it of the adolescent Evening Cultures. "Wait! Things are. Things happen. Only wait!" The estuarine cliffs impend, black, expectant; the air is full of frost and anticipation... (pp. 111-112)

Harrison's prose is excellent here. Consider the rhythm and cadence of each sentence, as he describes ruin and the defeat of human artifice. It is 80 years in the "future," but there is this sense that something is unfolding, something that is omnious, something that will not be explained in full. Things will be repeated, or rather certain patterns will re-emerge in a new setting to create even newer forms, for tegeus-Cromis, Tomb, the Reborn Men, and others will see their roles reprised, but in a dream-place where semantic relationships have shifted.

It is usually around the second or third chapter of A Storm of Wings that many readers run into a wall of their own creation. Expecting a serial story that builds upon the opening tale, they are confronted by a tale that is non-linear, that doesn't follow the "rules" and expectations derived from reading The Pastel City. Perhaps it is here, when the Sign of the Locust is introduced, that the towel is tossed and mayhap the book as well:

The Sign of the Locust is unlike any other religion invented in Viriconium. Its outward forms and observances - its liturgies and rituals, its theurgic or metaphysical speculations, its daily processionals - seem less an attempt by men to express an essentially human invention than the effort of some raw and independent Idea - a theophneustia, existing without recourse to brain or blood: a Muse or demiurge - to express itself. It wears its congregation like a disguise: we did not so much create the Sign of the Locust as invite it into ourselves, and now it dons us nightly like a cloak and domino to go abroad in the world. (p. 125)

Ritual is a powerful thing, but when the object being ritualized breaks those ties and becomes independent of itself, can such a thing be "tamed" or even understood? In reading this passage, I felt a growing unease about my own ability to process what is going on. Realizing that I had to abandon treating this story as something to deduce or to piece together, I began focusing on the mood being established, on trying to imagine a place that isn't a set place, but rather a condition, one in which "human" points of view might be the intrusive, domineering ones that need to be irradicated:

"The world is not as we perceive it," maintained the early converts, "but infinitely more surprising. We must cultivate a diverse view." This mild (even naive) truism, however, was to give way rapidly - via a series of secret and bloody heretical splits - to a more radical assertion. A wave of murders, mystifying to the population at large, swept the city. It was during this confused period that the Sign itself first came to light, that simple yet tortuous adaptation of the fortune-teller's MANTIS symbol which, cut in steel or silver, swings at the neck of each adherent. Ostlers and merchant princesses, soldiers and shopkeepers, astrologers and vagabonds, were discovered sprawled stiffly in the gutters and plazas, strangled in an unknown fashion and their bodies tattooed with symbolical patterns, as the entire council of the Sign, elected by secret ballot from the members of the original cabal, tore itself apart in a grotesque metaphysical dispute. A dreadful sense of immanence beset the city. "Life is a blasphemy," announced the Sign. "Procreation is a blasphemy, for it replicates and fosters the human view of the universe." (p. 126)

It was at this point that I really became "hooked" with the story. Not that I cared overmuch to know the origins of the Locusts or why they had come to Viriconium, but rather because I wanted to see if Harrison would explore further the notion of "life is a blasphemy" in this tale. He did, and passages such as this clinched the deal for me:

Under a sky like a glass mantle, at an intersection in the disintegrating ground plan of the city, two insects performed a dance in the suicidal light. Disease had maimed them, their eyes were like rotting melons yet vivid heraldic insignia flared along their blue and green flanks like the lights of deep-sea fishes. Stiff and quivering, with curled abdomens and spread wings, moving one damaged limb at a time, they had the air of being painted on one of Elmo Buffin's sails, or tattooed in glowing inks on an upper arm. Clouds of coloured vapour streamed through the galleries which curled over them in a flaking mineral wave. Balancing on their rear legs they curled themselves backwards into the annular symbols of some organic alphabet; they dragged themselves between the bone-like pillars of the colonnades, following the veins of serpentine and obsidian as if they were cooling streams; they tore with their forelimbs at the masks they wore - perhaps to obtain relief, for part of the function of these was to enable them to perceive the world they found themselves marooned in. (p. 234)

I chose this passage late in the novel not because it bears great import for the novel's plot resolution (if anything, the plot is but a reprisal of the first under different means), but because it illustrates the power of Harrison's prose, of his ability to create evocative similies, such as "their eyes were like rotting melons," that stir up vivid images that complement the weird, distorted timescape, where the Locusts' mind-plague has shaken human understanding of what constitutes reality, while simultaneously this plague has caused all sorts of mass violence and psychosis as a result of certain "natural" or "sacred" bounds being crossed. But it is that little bit, where two of the Locusts are wounded, dragging themselves along the city streets, before finally ripping at the masks that enable them to perceive this strange, alien world that they are seeking perhaps to "tame" for their own concept of "reality," it is here where the true power of Harrison's narrative lies.

A good fantasy does not need an impressive list of imagined dates, nor should it require things being spelled out in laborious detail. A good fantasy can and often does traffic in the Unknown, in those haunted recesses of our minds where we cast all the things that we cannot comprehend, in hopes that something will percolate there that can be imbibed and thus utilized. In A Storm of Wings, Harrison taps into that Unknown, weaving a beautiful, shimmering, aethereal tapestry out of strangeness, insanity, and repetition that I believe is a vast improvement over his solid The Pastel City. While it certainly isn't a story for those who want the plot to be deducible or explicated, for those who love the strange, the unknown, the threatening, A Storm of Wings likely will be just the book for them.

M. John Harrison on Urban Fantasy

I was browsing through MJH's blog just now when I saw an interesting entry from March 14:

Urban fantasy: the domestication of a few images & behavioural tics which were barely unacceptable in the first place. It was a frisson obtained not so much by glamourising or romanticising the disordered (though it did both) as by denying or correcting the trait paradigms of some common dysfunctional behaviours. It cleaned up what it claimed to be representing & always drew its conclusions from a safe space outside dysfunctionality. A normative manouevre, defining a “good” dysfunctionality (he’s an anorexic self-harming killer elf but he’s our anorexic self-harming killer elf), urban fantasy was often described as having an edge. As a result, by the late 80s, “edgy” had become the publishing synonym for “young adult”. Later, even in publishing, it came to have the same meaning as “bland”.

There have been quite a few discussions of this mutated "urban fantasy" lately, but this one sums up much of my own unease with it. I don't care too much for tame representations of the dangerous. MJH doesn't quite come out and say it, but "sell out" has been used to represent this muting, emasculating, taming of the wild, unsettled, dangerous elements, all in the name of making it palatable and thus marketable for those, like Michael Palin's timid accountant character in a Monty Python sketch who wanted to be a lion tamer, just so they could have a "little bit of danger" (but never too much!) in their lives.

Dangerous/unacceptable>toned-down "edgy">ubiquitous>bland>ripe for mockery

I think we're fast approaching the "ripe for mockery" stage, at least in regards to the cover art. Thoughts?

M. John Harrison, The Pastel City

Some seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say that none of them lasted for less than a millennium, none for more than ten; that each extracted such secrets and obtained such comforts as its nature (and the nature of the universe) enabled it to find; and that each fell back from the universe in confusion, dwindled, and died.

The last of them left its name written in the stars, but no one who came later could read it. More important, perhaps, it built enduringly despite its failing strength - leaving certain technologies that, for good or ill, retained their properties of operation for well over a thousand years. And more important still, it was the last of the Afternoon cultures, and was followed by Evening, and by Viriconium. (p. 3)

With these two opening paragraphs, M. John Harrison might as well have stuck out both hands and shot a double bird, saying "Fuck you!" to those who wanted their fantasies to contain copious references to an imagined "history" that would shape everything to follow. After having endured reading several epic fantasies over the years where it seemed that the author was bent on explicating his/her imagined "past" at the expense of creating an interesting, well-written, meaningful story, Harrison's bold declaration in those two paragraphs that he wouldn't delve into any sort of imagined "past" unless he absolutely had to was rather refreshing. I had first read his Viriconium stories back in 2007, but when I began re-reading them for this review project, it was as if I were reading them anew.

The first Viriconium tale, The Pastel City (1971), however is in many ways the most straightforward and "familiar" tale. Barely over 100 pages long, it resembles a typical fantasy quest novel with its weather-beaten, soldier-slash-poet protagonist, a dwarf companion, and a city of ruins. However, Harrison twists each of these stock elements into forms that are often quite unsettling for readers expecting revelations about the setting (or "world," as some would insist on calling it, probably to the author's chagrin) and the unfolding story. The key, I believe, is in Harrison's prose. Take for example his introduction of tegeus-Cromis, the above-mentioned soldier/poet:

tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of Viriconium, the Pastel City, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than swordsman, stood at early morning on the sand dunes that lay between his tall home and the grey line of the surf. Like swift and tattered scraps of rag, black gulls sped and fought over his downcast head. It was a catastrophe that had driven him from his tower, something that he had witnessed from its topmost room during the night.

***

He worried more, for instance, about the beauty of the city that had fallen during the night than he did that it was Viriconium, the Pastel City. He loved it more for its avenues paved in pale blue and for its alleys that were not paved at all than he did for what its citizens chose to call it, which was often Viricon the Old and The Place Where the Roads Meet.

He had found no rest in music, which he loved, and how he found none on the pink sand.

For a while he walked the tideline, examining the objects cast up by the sea: paying particular attention to a smooth stone here, a translucent spiny shell there, picking up a bottle the colour of his cloak, throwing down a branch whitened and peculiarly carved by the water. He watched the black gulls, but their cries depressed him. He listened to the cold wind in the rowan woods around his tower, and he shivered. Over the pounding of the high tide, he heard the dull concussions of falling Viriconium. And even when he stood in the surf, feeling its sharp acid sting on his cheek, lost in its thunder, he imagined it was possible to hear the riots in the pastel streets, the warring factions, and voices crying for Young Queen, Old Queen.

He settled his russet shovel hat more firmly; crossed the dunes, his feet slipping in the treacherous sand; and found the white stone path through the rowans to his tower, which also had no name: though it was called by some after the stretch of seaboard on which it stood, that is, Balmacara. Cromis knew where his heart and his sword lay - but he had thought that all finished with and he had looked forward to a comfortable life by the sea. (pp. 7-8)

Within that passage, there lies a major clue as to where Harrison will later take the Viriconium setting. "Whatever its citizens chose to call it," "his tower which also had no name" - those two little asides give a hint to the maplessness of the area, revealing that there is no single, concrete association of a name to a place. Viriconium, or whatever it might be called, depends strongly upon whatever associations the people in the area have formed to deal with this surviving ruin of an incomprehensible, ancient culture. Whereas other authors might have been tempted in their first or latter volumes to explore that mystery, perhaps to reveal it, "tame" it (as Harrison said in an essay on his tales) and "claim" it as something that feels "real," Harrison sets the stage for what he accomplishes in his later Viriconium stories; he deconstructs this fallacy, revealing secondary-"world" creations as being hollow, empty substitutes for the reality around the reader.

As I read The Pastel City, I found myself slowing down to read and re-read almost every single paragraph. There is a richness in Harrison's prose that makes reading each sentence a pleasure. Look again at the passage quoted above. Say it aloud, listening for the rhythms. There is a music of sorts in Harrison's writing, a music that is haunting and seems to come from a place within us that isn't a discoverable, tangible country. Hamlet perhaps, in speaking of this "undiscovered country", might be closest to describing the effect of reading The Pastel City (and even more with A Storm of Wings and In Viriconium). Harrison's prose matches his literary ambitions and that provides this story and its "sequels" with power.

The plot itself is rather straightforward. tegeus-Cromis and his dwarf companion, the annoying Tomb the Dwarf (decked out in a scavenged powersuit, toting an axe), along with an awakened bird-like creature, cross ruinous landscapes, like the Rust Desert, to return to the City to help the Young Queen, Jane, in her fight against the Old and the northern tribes that are invading. But against this backdrop, Harrison drops in comments such as this:

During the Birdmaker's monologue, Methvet Nian had wept openly. Now, she rose to her feet and said:

"This horror. We have always regarded the Afternoon Cultures as a high point in the history of mankind. Theirs was a state to be striven for, despite the mistakes that marred it.

"How could they have constructed such things? Why, when they had the stars beneath their hands?"

The Birdmaker shrugged. The geometries of his robe shifted and stretched like restless alien animals.

"Are you bidding me remember, madam? I fear I cannot."

"They were stupid," said Birkin Grif, his fat, honest face, puzzled and hurt. It was his way to feel things personally. "They were fools."

"They were insane towards the end," said Cellur. "That I know." (p. 80)

Unlike many other fantasy novels, especially those of Tolkien and others who sought to create an image of the past as a sort of lost, idyllic paradise, Harrison introduces the notion that the past might have its own horrors, that there are certain things that best ought to be left forgotten and unexplored. But if the past is that horrible, then what about the cultures that seek to emulate it and to bring back the revenants of those times? Near the end of the story, Cromis's task accomplished, he says this to Tomb, who wants to create an army of men revived from the memories of the Afternoon Cultures:

"They are too beautiful, Tomb; they are too accomplished. If you go on with this, there will be no new empire - instead, they will absorb us, and after a millennium's pause, the Afternoon Cultures will resume their long sway over the earth.

"No malice will be involved. Indeed, they may thank us many times over for bringing them back to the world. But, as you have said yourself, they have a view of life that is alien to us; and do not forget that it was them who made the waste around us." (p. 104)

That commentary on the past and the present is a cautionary one, one that is heightened by what follows after, when confronted by Methvet Nian:

"My lady, we regarded the Northmen as barbarians, and they were." He laughed. "Today, we are the barbarians. Look at them!"

And when she turned to watch the choreography of the brain, the celebration of ten thousand years of death and rebirth, he fled.

He ran toward the light. When he passed the corpse of his dead friend he began to weep again. He picked up his sword. He tried to smash a crystal window with its hilt. The corridor oppressed him. Beyond the windows, the dead brains drifted. He ran on.

"You should have done it," whispered Birkin Grif in the soft spaces of his skull; and "OUROBUNDOS!" giggled the insane door, as he fell through it and into the desert wind. His cloak cracking and whipping about him, so that he resembled a crow with broken wings, he stumbled toward the black airboat. His mind mocked him. His face was wet.

He threw himself into the command bridge. Green light swam about him, and the dead Northmen stared blindly at him as he turned on the power. He did not choose a direction, it chose him. Under full accleration, he fled out into the empty sky. (p. 104)

As I read the end, I felt as though all things had come full-circle, or rather that there were layers imposed upon layers and that the story had become not about an imagined place and the deeds done within that created setting, but rather that Viriconium (or whatever its name might be) was an idea, a notion of how people view their own pasts and presents. As we age and death makes us silent, how can those who follow understand what we have written on our hearts? It is fitting that The Pastel City closes with this exchange between Cromis and the Queen:

Later, he made her look at the Name Stars.

"There," he said. "You will not deny this: no one who came after could read what is written there. All empires gutter, and leave a language their heirs cannot understand."

She smiled up at him, and pushed her hair back from her face.

"Alstath Fulthor the Reborn Man could tell you what it means," she said.

"It is important to my nature," he admitted, "that it remain a mystery to me. If you will command him to keep a close mouth, I will come back." (p. 108)

And with that, the transition to A Storm of Wings and its mysteries begins. Looking forward to re-reading it in the next few days, as The Pastel City has left me wanting to go further into the void, seeking to see not what comes after, but rather to discover what lies within my own perspective of time and place.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, The New Weird

weird (wîrd)

adj. weird·er, weird·est

1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of the preternatural or supernatural.

2. Of a strikingly odd or unusual character; strange.

3. Archaic Of or relating to fate or the Fates.

n.

1.

a. Fate; destiny.

b. One's assigned lot or fortune, especially when evil.

2. often Weird Greek & Roman Mythology One of the Fates.

tr. & intr.v. weird·ed, weird·ing, weirds

Slang To experience or cause to experience an odd, unusual, and sometimes uneasy sensation. Often used with out.

---

[Middle English werde, fate, having power to control fate, from Old English wyrd, fate; see wer-² in Indo-European roots.]

Despite the seemingly precise definition cited above, "weird" is something that resists pat explanations or cute labels; it is just there, lurking at the peripheries, making the observers of it quite uncomfortable. In fiction, there have been hints of "weirdness" in the writing, places where it feels almost like a transgression to cross, because of its often alien and grotesque nature. From the beloved ruins of the Romanticists to the dank, dark corridors of an Ann Radcliffe, full of mysterious, odd, and quite possibly malevolent creations, to the rather unsettled end to the rather frightful 20th century, many writers have come to explore those boundaries that contain elements that both fascinate and repel humans. When I heard about Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's latest anthology project, The New Weird, I was reminded of a comment by M. John Harrison in his introduction to the PS Publishing edition of China Miéville's The Tain, "China Miéville & the New Weird" written in October 2002:

Good fiction should make us question our experience of the world; not to say the means by which we scaffold that experience. But it should never do this obviously. The most painfully defamiliarising gesture is the most subtle. Good fiction has an uncanny quality: and that's enough to make it "fantasy" and "mainstream" at the same time. Let's go out there, we might say, meaning, into this mainstream arena, and make readers uncomfortable. Instead of splitting hairs let's do some acts of the countermundane.

In his introduction to The New Weird anthology, Jeff VanderMeer addresses not just the history of this "movement," stretching back to and referencing the near-iconic old pulp magazine Weird Tales, but also the problems inherent in such a purposely vague and yet fitting term. Back then, there were no rigidly-defined terms such as "epic fantasy," "urban fantasy," "horror," or "hard SF." Instead, in pulps such as Weird Tales, writers might mix elements of all of the above into an alchemical brew that would leave their readers feeling in turns fascinated and uncomfortable.
All well and good, one might argue. But what makes this "weird" the New Weird? VanderMeer continues, noting that the often-political, almost-always experimental approach of the New Wave writers of the 1960s and 1970s(M. John Harrison and Michael Moorcock being two prominent writers of this time period), with their appropriations of whatever "mainstream" tropes and concerns that they saw fit to use, made it okay again, after the rather rigid divisions between SF and Fantasy that occurred during the post-World War II Golden Age of SF era, to blend and blur the boundaries. In addition, during the 1980s, some horror writers (Clive Barker being cited as a major influence) began to take a more visceral, unsettling approach to Lovecraftian themes, daring to reveal much more of the hideousness of the imagined and "real" monsters than had been done before.

But experimenters rarely are accepted into the fold and by the 1990s, during a time in which the older political models seemed to be dissolving into a toxic mixture of ethnocentrism, religious fundamentalism, and rising xenophobism in the so-called "First World" nations, some writers influenced by the predecessors mentioned above began to write their own takes on the older fantasy, SF, horror, and "mainstream" tropes. This, VanderMeer postulates, is the beginning point for what later became known as the New Weird.

The term itself, he notes, is quite controversial, as even those associated with its coining, China Miéville, Steph Swainston, and M. John Harrison, later came to distance themselves from the term. Labels, after all, are tricky and confining entities that seek to bind and to standardize. But if "weirdness," this "uncanniness" that unsettles people, is such a slippery, vague word in the first place, how can labels apply? It is around this question that much of the VanderMeers' anthology revolves.

Many anthologies give little more than a brief introduction by the editor(s) of whatever theme(s) that the anthology seeks to explore. Here in The New Weird, the questions raised in the introduction are underscored by how the VanderMeers have divided their book. In the first section, "Stimuli," the reader is introduced to seminal stories such as M. John Harrison's "The Luck in the Head" (originally published in 1984 as part of Viriconium Nights), Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities" (published first in 1984 in the collection Books of Blood, Volume I), and Thomas Ligotti's "A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing" (1997 publication, In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land). In each of these stories (and others that I neglect to mention above), there are a few common elements. The settings are very vivid, sometimes set in another "world," sometimes in a very recognizable contemporary Earth. The language of the stories focuses heavily on how the narrator/characters interact with their environs, which often differ from the characters' "norms." It is a classic "Man versus the Environment" clash in part, but there is much more to it than just that. In these stories, the reader can expect to find all sorts of unsettling situations or implications based on plot events, all designed to heighten any unease that the reader might hold. As an introduction to the influences on the latter styles, these stories work very well together.

In the second part, "Evidence," there are reprinted stories by Miéville, Jay Lake, Jeffrey Thomas, Steph Swainston, and Jeffrey Ford, among others. In these tales, the earlier tales' atmospheric settings and unsettled narrative reactions is married to an even closer attention to language and "real-world" concerns. Miéville's "Jack," set in his New Crobuzon universe, explores the machinations of a totalitarian state and the usefulness for that regime of having mythical hero-opponents such as Jack Half-a-Prayer oppose it. Miéville's descriptions of the Remaking process, of how Jack is eventually caught, and what happens to his snitch all serve to focus our attention not just on the wonderfully described situation, but also on how our own political systems are fraught with corruption and how complacent many citizens can be in light of such potential governmental abuses. Although the other stories in this section are not quite overtly political (or Marxist) as is Miéville's, they too have their moments in which the "weirdness" presented often hits a bit too close to home for our comfort.

But as well-written and presented as these stories were, one of the key selling points for this anthology in my mind was the third section, "Symposium." Here the VanderMeers have reproduced the opening salvos of a landmark 2003 discussion that originally appeared on The Third Alternative forums (now archived here) as well as publishing reprinted and original essays on the New Weird theme by Michael Cisco, K.J. Bishop, and a series of non-English language editors from Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe on the impact that such a movement as the New Weird has had in their countries, both in the selling of translated fiction as well as on native writers. It is in this section that the questions presented in the introduction reemerge and take center stage. The reader witnesses the debates over the terminologies employed, the questions over the efficacies of even having such a label, and so forth. For me, it was this section that made this anthology much more than the sum of its parts.

In the final section, "Laboratory," there is a writing project in which authors not often associated with the original New Weird movement, are presented with a story beginning written by Paul Di Filippo and are asked to riff off of that intro, using their own understandings of what "New Weird" might mean. This collaborative exercise on the parts of Di Filippo, Cat Rambo, Sarah Monette, Daniel Abraham, Felix Gilman, Hal Duncan, and Conrad Williams is a very striking look at how the techniques employed by the New Weird writers have influenced those whose stories at first glance might not be associated with such a movement. It was an interesting way to end the anthology and one that will take me multiple reads before I will feel comfortable presenting a cogent discussion of its themes and elements.

Perhaps that was one of the points of that exercise - to shake readers such as myself from our comfort zones and make us contemplate things that are often baffling, sometimes repulsive, but almost always imaginative and vivid. In this, the final section fits in well with the previous three and hints at what may lay ahead in the field. Defined precisely or not, the New Weird certainly has had a major impact on writing both inside and outside the narrowly-defined genre limns. This eponymous anthology does an outstanding job in presenting the New Weird in all its unsettling, vague, weird glory. Highly Recommended.

Publication Date: February 1, 2008 (US), Tradeback.

Publisher: Tachyon Publications

Two more articles on "worldbuilding"

I remember near the beginning of the year when M. John Harrison posted a blog entry called "Very Afraid," in which he talked of the "clodding foot of nerdism" in reference to a certain type of fantasy fiction. Although I mostly agreed with his comments, I posted a link to his blog to see what others at Westeros and wotmania would make of it. To say there was a vociferous disagreement would be an understatement. There were a few pieces said here and there on the blogosphere, of course, the usual arguing akin to that of dogs over a meaty bone recently discovered.

It is now late December. Harrison has closed down his blog for the most part, but I see he posted an extensive article back on the 21st in which he outlines his position in a much greater detail than before. Whether or not you agree with him (again, I mostly do), it is well worth the time it'll take to read it (it's quite a few thousand words long).

The second link I have is to a brief interview that Canadian author Caitlin Sweet did with renowned artist John Howe. Although she submitted this back in October, it was not "live" until a week or so ago. In it, she discusses her frustrations with her attempts to write a third novel and her resolutions, some of which get at the heart of the "worldbuilding" issue for me: If you become so meticulous and devoted to crafting something that the "life" and "magic" of the writing/reading experience is drained from it, have you really "created" something of worth, or have you just ordered others' imaginations like a puppeteer does in a puppet show?

Best of 2007 Countdown: M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

Many of the finalists for my Best of 2007 list have written works that either have vivid characterizations or contain imagined vistas that are so strange and warped that it is impossible to think that the "normal" laws of physics (or anything else) can be presumed to apply. M. John Harrison's kinda-sorta-but-not-really sequel to 2002/2004'a Light, Nova Swing (released in 2006 in the UK but only in October here in the US) is an excellent example of the second.

In turns an exploration/detective novel and a dark comedy, this novel goes further into exploring the weirdness that emanates from the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract, as one part of it has somehow "split off" and fallen to Earth, in a place called the Saudade Event Site (more on this place's etymological meaning in my first review). But since this is a post about elements that appealed to me, I'll let new readers glance through my first review while I cite a passage from page 40 in the US paperback edition:

Among the litter in the apartment Vic kept a Bakelite telephone with cloth-covered cables and a bell that rang. Everyone had one that year; Vic's was as cheap as everything else he owned. Just after he finished shaving, the bell rang and he got a call from a broker named Paulie DeRaad, which he was expecting. The call was short, and it prompted Vic to open a drawer, from which he took out two objects wrapped in rag. One was a gun. The other was harder to describe - Vic sat by the window in the fading light, unwrapping it thoughtfully It was about eighteen inches long, and as the rag came off it seemed to move. That was an illusion. Low-angled light, in particular, would glance across the object's surface so that for just a moment it seemed to flex in your hands. It was half bone, half metal, or perhaps both at the same time; or perhaps neither.

He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog, first moving away up a slope of rubble somewhere in the event site, then back towards him as if it had changed its mind and become curious about what Vic was. It had huge human eyes. How it turned from an animal into the type of object he finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn't know. He didn't want to know.

Passages such as this are not going to appeal to everyone. Those who like meticulous explanations for everything under the sun will not be enchanted by Harrison's narrative; they will think it bunk and might just loudly declaim it to those of a like mind. But for those of us such as myself who find themselves caught up in the rhythm of these passages, fascinated or horrified by such "monstrosities," reading a book such as Nova Swing becomes a real delight. It is for this reason that I added this book to my shortlist for the Best Novel of 2007 (US release, again, obviously).

Review of M. John Harrison's Nova Swing (2007 Clarke Award Winner)

Note: The beginning to this review was inspired by reading a review of this book by John Clute. Although my take is a bit different than his in places, I felt that I needed to acknowledge this influence on the opening part of my review.

Solitude - the word, like others derived from the Latin solitatem, evokes quite a few emotions when examined from various angles. Gabriel García Márquez in his seminal work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, illustrates all the forms that solitude can take.

In M. John Harrison's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel, Nova Swing, solitude is a physical place called Saudade (taking its name from the Portuguese word for solitude). Although set in the world of his 2002 novel, Light, and although the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract appears here as well, Nova Swing has only the most tenuous of connections with that earlier novel. Instead of exploring the heart of the Tract, the characters here in Nova Swing remind me more of Humphrey Bogart and crew in the classic movie Casablanca. Rick's Café Américain has instead become a city within a stretch affected by a recent falling of the Kefahuchi Tract's odd physics onto parts of the Earth itself. The geography is strange, with everything seemingly skewed and even "reality" itself not being what it seems. And then there are those mysterious black and white cats that come and go with the dusk and the dawn.

Such a strange, weird place. The reader never will be able to feel "accustomed" to the place; it is simply too twisted and dreamlike, which is exactly the mood that Harrison aimed to achieve. The story itself is relatively simple, that of the aptly named "travel agent" named Vic Serotonin who often enters Saudade for clients. His latest client is a mysterious and unpredictable woman whose desire for a tour drives the action of this story. Shadowed by a detective intent on shutting down his technically illegal operation, Serotonin finds himself going ever deeper into a world in which the strange and warped become as "alive" as the characters themselves.

That is the bare-bones, mostly spoiler-free summation of the plot setup. Harrison is doing much more than just telling a simple story. With his use of words and the images evoked, Harrison addresses issues of imagination and perception in a way that allows for the reader to fill in the blanks eagerly rather than being forced down a single perceptual path by the author. Characters shift, their minds as much as their bodies are altered, and what happens is something that is more easily visualized than something put into mere verbal speech.

Nova Swing is perhaps the most difficult novel I have read this year in regards to summing up the plot. Harrison strives to create a setting in which the unfamiliar and the near non-describable become important parts of the action, with the intent to cause the reader to change perceptions and to consider even "everyday" matters from other angles. In a shade over 250 pages, Harrison realizes most of his ambitions and the end result, for me at least, was an almost literal mindfuck of a tale, with solitude having yet another dimension added to our concepts of it. One of the best and most challenging reads of this year.

Publication Date: November 9, 2006 (UK), Hardcover. September 25, 2007 (US), tradeback.

Publisher: Gollancz (UK), Bantam Spectra (US).