Alien vampires invading London: a familiar plot. But these vampires get at us through mirrors and take shapes such as swarms of floating lips and flying hands. That’s the scenario in China Mieville’s 2002 novella The Tain, and it gets stranger as it goes on. It first appeared with an introduction by science fiction guru M. John Harrison, in which he coined a name for this kind of fiction: the New Weird.
Some of Franz Kafka’s fiction was decidedly weird. Credit:
Weird fiction has been around for a long time: think of Kafka or Gogol. In more recent years we’ve had the weirdness of David Mitchell or Haruki Murakami. What makes this fiction new, according to its devotees, is that it has the characteristics of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy or horror) but pushes those genres even further out there.
So stand by for spiders with human baby hands, women with insect heads and boys giving birth to alien beings. And that’s just the beginning. But it’s not enough just to come up with a weird idea: it has to go somewhere significant.
It’s an elusive genre to define, and writers love to argue about that. However, they agree the New Weird is nonconformist; breaks down the barriers between genres; is sometimes highly literary; can act as a political and social critique of the real world; and in the words of scholar Robin Anne Reid, “subverts clichés in order to put them to discomfiting rather than consoling ends”.
The New Weird encompasses many books that are both well-reviewed and bestsellers. Mieville continues to be one of the stars with a string of novels, and his latest book, A Spectre, Haunting, is a non-fiction defence of The Communist Manifesto and how it is still relevant for our times.
Mya Nunnally has a beginner’s guide to New Weird on Bookriot, with some mind-stretching plot summaries. Borne by Jeff VanderMeer has a gigantic flying mutated bear as its villain. Going Bovine by Libba Bray has a hero dying of mad-cow disease who sees punk angels. Bloodchild by Octavia Butler includes a short story about a boy impregnated by an alien race.
Alexis Wright uses weirdness to explore the here and now for her people.Credit: Justin McManus
Inevitably we have elements of New Weird turning up in Australian fiction. One fan is Nina Culley, who says a new wave of writers is coming up with experimental and offbeat stories that defy the long tradition of the Australian realist novel.
“Frankly, there are far more buck-wild stories out there than I could have ever dreamt of, so many that there aren’t enough genres and subgenres to hold them,” she writes in Kill Your Darlings. Literary magazines and small publishers are “revolutionising Australia’s literary output by responding to an expanding readership that craves literary disobedience”.
