The New Weird 3: The New Weird
TTalkback: Harrison, M John: The New Weird 3: The New Weird
By MJH on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 11:55 am:I go away for three days & find plenty to get my teeth into, both on the thread and by email. The thread is now drawing considerable interest. At the same time, it's getting browser-unfriendly again, as Dan/David mentioned above. So please post here now. I agree with Kikujiro & others that in the end you can't control how you're perceived, defined, marketed, carpetbagged, diluted; and that all that is part of the evolutionary history of any event of this sort: but I think you should have a damned good try (& that's inevitable too). I agree with Cheryl & others that what we're seeing is in some way broader that any given attempt to define it--ie, that we're trying to listen for the zeitgeist, & at times like these--when there's lots going on--that's always very easy & very hard at the same time, & that's why, obviously, the New Weird seems somehow caught up with the new Space Opera, etc. At the same time inclusivity is another medianising mechanism; I'd warn against it, because I'd rather see the trees than the wood (as Map Boy might say). I agree with Paul McAuley & others that our relationship with the corporate marketeers is (a) lethal and (b) the only one we have. But there are other relationships we can have which would give us a little more leverage. My recent interest has been our relationship with the literary editors--a more direct relationship with them would apply practical energy for change, give us some sense of control over factors which, traditionally, have reduced us to the level of toddlers in a world managed by incompetents and baby-farmers who don't neccessarily have our interests at heart. (No wonder we throw tantrums.) But a direct relationship with literary editors--at least in the UK--requires that we be doing something that interests them. You have to give some to get some. This is a point I have made repeatedly on this board, in this thread, and elsewhere. I agree with Gabe when he says that production is vital, that, in a sense, you *write* your way forward. Mike Moorcock always believed this: while I don't entirely agree--because it presumes a kind of sweatshopping, a treadmill which reminds me of the way popular fiction treated its authors when I first began to be published--it didn't do the New Wave any harm. Charlie: I think I probably did get you misreported, and I welcome the chance to have your ideas first-hand. Thanks. Please keep posting if you continue to find us interesting. Paul: the Bowie quote you emailed me seems very relevent to the discussion. I think it should be posted.
By MJP on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 01:07 pm:Iotar, pop represents the age but it isn't a representational form. It's a mythic form. Choose any artist you like. (Bowie would be a good example. Major Tom, et al.) Advertising is mythic form. It envisages a mythos, a world. Science fiction too. Its impulse is to mythologise. In these terms, all the above are fiction led. Al, the French and British poetic traditions are interestingly different in so far as for the French poets, notably Mallarme, language was the 'thing itself'. The thing itself, beyond critical interpretation, paradoxically unsayable. This created a philosophical tradition, through Benjamin, Blanchot up to Derrida. (Who is, notably, 'unreadable'.) Thus I would argue the same for this too: art as a non-representational form. Art was attempted to be understood as an irreducible act. Tennyson, like other Victorian poets, was lost in the foul air of the backwash of Anglo/American representationalism, and was unable to find this instinct in a poetry that actually expressed the age in which he lived.
By Paul McAuley on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 01:27 pm:Hi Gabe. Nice to be here. I came by sublight slowboat; I'm in one of those Zones where nothing works above C. ?Submission Guidelines for New Wave Fabulist Fiction? Christ. How quickly the bottomfeeders spot a Trend. Came across this quote by David Bowie, from a late '70's Charles Shaar Murray interview. It is about how punk rock was killed off by too many bands diving into the category instead of striving to be assessed outside it; I think it that sums up the problem of *any* new genre trying to maintain its identity: "...None of them are saying *we are us*. They're saying *yeah, we are punk* and in so doing they're putting a boundary on their writing scope, which is a shame because there could be a real movement of sorts. But you have to let a movement remain as a subculture for a little while and gain some - I'm wary of using the word 'maturity' - gain some recognition of its own relationship with the environment it lives in." There's a warning. Fly under the radar until you are ready to Shock and Awe.
By Al on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 01:34 pm:So a statement like Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre' can be interpreted as the seed of such a position; from the point of view of language, the 'I' is indeed something else as it is not language. So (presumably) the I's expression of itself through language is not really an expression; it's an interaction with something completely separate and different from itself that allows it to leave a trail of clues about what it is / is up to, but not directly represent itself? On that level, presumably, saying 'I feel happy today' (for example) is not as effective a use of language as saying 'I'm on top of the world today' as it both ignores the fact that language cannot literally represent the self and refuses to use the full capability of language as an expressive *thing* in its own right. Hmm.
By Al on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 01:35 pm:Last post following on from MJP btb.
By Al Reynolds on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 01:41 pm:Hi Paul! Those Slowboats will get you there in the end... Dropped out of this discussion a few weeks ago due to not knowing what refractoriness meant. Re: Bowie's quote - very sensible, notwithstanding the fact that he must have been about one year from making his last good album - but can any movement hope to stay under the radar for more than about five minutes these days? I like "Shock and Awe" though. While we're at it can we go for "Full Spectrum Dominance"? Got to love that military jargon... Al R
By MJP on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 01:55 pm:Al, to be brief: The "I" doesn't represent, stand for, work in place of, a self. It is *not* a referring word. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, see index.) When I say "I am well" the "I" is an expression of me. But what is that? It is the metaphysical. There is nothing under, above, beneath, or beside the word. (But I don't want to get too far into this issue as it might sidetrack the discussion.)
By Al Robertson on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 02:05 pm:Hmm. I think I will need to ponder that for a while... Point taken about sidetracking, tho' am not sure this is a sidetrack to the extent that it's a conversation about literal / non-literal representations of the self / its relationship with the world - which debate would seem to be at the heart of the realist / non-realist fiction debate which weirdness joins in with. Though come to think of it, discussing it in terms of 19th Century French poetry pretty far from the point! So, yup, will now shut up about it. *salutin' your falutin'* Other Al R
By Charlie Stross on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 03:50 pm:I'm happy to stay around and free-associate frantically for as long as you'll put up with me ... (The alternative being to beat my head on a novel -- isn't the net wonderful?) One side-effect of having moved to Scotland is that I'm getting to as many (more) US cons than UK events; things in London seem curiously distant. So this all leaves me feeling somewhat bemused, as if I've wandered into the living room to turn the TV on, only to discover there's a dinner party in full flow and everyone's already into the fourth glass of wine. The view from outside the party is curiously -- but interestingly -- fractured. In the States, there seems to be a longing for a new wave to fill the gap left by cyberpunk -- a need to have something to point the finger at and chatter about, and to stimulate the imagination, as much as anything else. I don't think, however, that anyone's thinking in such ambitious terms as I'm seeing here. It's an itching of restless feet within the ghetto, not an attempt to kick down the walls. (One thing everyone seems to agree on is that Cory Doctorow's idea of calling the zeitgeist "nerdcore" is not a Good Idea. Apart from Cory, that is. I think we had a close shave there ...) Meanwhile, I'm seeing odd things in odd corners. The comics and graphic novel field is throwing up hopeful monsters and happy mutants and also something else -- a level of subtlety unprecedented in the medium. Does anyone want to try and convince me that Warren Ellis, for example, as a comics writer, is of no account when assessing the state of British SF today? Or Grant Morrison? Those guys are doing stuff that the extruded media industry wouldn't touch with a bargepole -- but it's selling well, and it's getting attention, and more importantly, it's breaking the medium they work in wide open. "Pervert suits" (as Ellis calls the trad superhero fare) it ain't. Then there's machinima. Which is under the radar right now -- far as I know, the field is so embryonic that the first ever machinima TV series is still in the early production stages, and nobody's even considered a full-length feature movie -- but it promises to take CGI cinema and make it cheap, fast, and out of control. All the criticisms of The Matrix upthread in this discussion seem to me to arise ultimately from the fact that it's a big budget studio production, and as long as it costs $70M to make a movie, creative issues take a back seat to financial risk management. If you can cut the cost of a feature movie by two orders of magnitude to $0.7M, then suddenly it's possible to make movies using private capital and to take risks, to actually do something creative without being held to ransom by the studio marketing committees and focus groups that have turned the mass media into such a field of shit. (Need I add that the world's oldest machinima production house is based about a hundred yards from where I live? Not in Hollywood, where if anyone has even heard of the field they're probably in denial ...) And finally there's the tone thing. The way the tone of British SF has changed in the past decade or so. It's unprecedented. It's not that everything is suddenly happy-clappy cheerful, but it's no longer seen as weird and unusual if a British SF novel doesn't anatomize the end of civilization, the decay of relationships, and the retreat from empire. "Downbeat British SF" was a walking cliche; but something seems to have changed during the 1990's, and I think this is important. (I'd be the last person to argue that all stories require a happy ending, or that genre plot conventions should be compulsory, or that the only function of SF is escapism -- but it's foolish to deny that many fiction readers expect entertainment, and I suspect a chunk of the story of British SF is the way we and our antecedents persistently applied operant conditioning to train our audiences to expect a negative emotional payload at the end of the book -- until they give up. And the big news is that somehow we seem to have kicked the habit.) So. Back to the dinner party. The "New Weird" is, obviously, important. It's a big thing and there are names and faces identified with it and if we don't take ownership of it the marketing dweebs will do it for us. But it's only part of the picture, which is of a restlessness of many feet, shuffling in a variety of directions, but all away from the status quo. Big Media is the one factor in common -- the Marvel and DC Comics Pervert Suit factories, the big-budget Hollywood movies with gorgeous special effects and nothing to trouble a single brain cell, the sub-Robert Jordan extruded fantasy production machine that fills our bookshops with a torrent of derivative nonsense. And Big Media is a negative motivating factor, because we're all trying to strike out away from it, to do something original and creative and to thumb our noses at the focus groups and marketing executives who think they can automate the imagination and break it to harness. I don't know if I qualify as New Weird, New Space Opera, or New Anything. (I think I'll settle for New Charlie, Brighter! and Sparkier! than Old Charlie.) But I do have a sense that the creative impulse, and the reaction to the growing standardization and attempts to regiment the entertainment industries, is driving people to seek new outlets and to break out of the snare. And I think we should be looking outside the dinner party, beyond the cosy dining circle, to look for allies and strange new media to cross-fertilise with. Mutate and survive. (Now I'm going to go and cower under my laptop in anticipation of the gathering storm of indignation . I'd just like to add that these are my opinions right now -- in another quarter of an hour I'll have a brand new set. Okay?)
By Paul McAuley on Tuesday, May 27, 2003 - 07:40 pm:Hi Al, Bowie had just made "Heroes"; he was still plugged in to the zeitgeist. Punk Rock was at least as self-conscious as anything in 'literature', so I think its rise and fall is a telling lesson to us all.
By MJP on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 08:57 am:Paul McAuley: "Punk Rock was at least as self-conscious as anything in 'literature', so I think its rise and fall is a telling lesson to us all." Good analogy. However if that is a criticism, it should be remembered that punk rock was a powerful liberating force. It couldn't last but it did create a lot of new directions, and by comprehensively trashing prog-rock (Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes, all the dinosaurs of rock), made a virtue out of simplicity. Many of its values are still with us. (You could compare the Robert Jordan style of endless book cycles with prog-rock. Very Yes indeed.)
By MJH on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 10:35 am:Hi Charlie. >I do have a sense that the creative impulse, and the reaction to the growing standardization and attempts to regiment the entertainment industries, is driving people to seek new outlets and to break out of the snare. And I think we should be looking outside the dinner party, beyond the cosy dining circle, to look for allies and strange new media to cross-fertilise with. Mutate and survive. I can go a long way with that. If I wasn't so keen on writing actual books, I could probably go all the way with it. Part of my problem with the present situation is that--as someone said a couple of weeks ago (a million years in thread time)--the corporates don't buy books any more, they buy content to option. For those of us who write to be read, ie off the page, providing the concept and a tiny bit of the content of the next shoot 'em up game film isn't all that interesting a career. That stuff doesn't give any more scope for writing character than film scripting does; & it's one of the reasons f/sf is viewed as a juvey-nerdy thing by lit eds. They won't support written f/sf because they see it as already covered by their blockbuster film critics. Much of the time they're right. On the other hand, I'm all in favour of looking for allies outside the circle of orthodoxy. The Sudden Cheerfulness of Brit SF: What got me going again in the 90s was Seattle. I never bought the optimism of the great bull market, and I don't feel Blair's Britain is any less grim & fucked-up than Thatcher's: but there are genuinely value-driven politics available again and that cheered me up enough to want Light to have an ending that threw the narrative forward beyond the last page.
By Charlie Stross on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 11:36 am:On the shift from buying books to buying content: yes. I'll go further and add that I think there's a deep rot at the heart of the construct "intellectual property" these days, that it's inimical to the creative urge, that copyright has changed from being a carrot-on-stick incentive for artists and writers into something that's being rammed down our throats by corporate interests who see it as a tool for extracting money from wallets ... but I think that's Cory Doctorow's rant, so I'll leave off for now.
By MJP on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 01:05 pm:MJH, could you clarify what you mean by "a direct relationship with literary editors"? Do you mean that ordinarily they have too little interest in what you are doing and just accept whatever you submit, without comment, if it fits into a commercially viable bracket?
By MJH on Thursday, May 29, 2003 - 10:58 am:Hi MJP. I missed this yesterday, sorry. The literary editors are those people in charge of the book reviews at a newspaper. They decide what books get reviewed, and by whom. In the current state of the market they are completely overwhelmed by the number of books published, and have a frighteningly difficult task trying to decide what to review. They are caught between their demographic, the limited space available, and the publishers' publicity departments who are constantly on their case to review this or that "important" book (ie, important to the puiblisher's sales figures). To get reviewed as a "solus", ie to get a quarter or half or full page notice to itself, your book has to be considered important. Lit eds find it almost impossible to know what's important and what isn't in f/sf because (a) there is more of it than anything else, and (b) they don't read it themselves. They therefore evade the issue as often as they can. It's easier for them to tar all sf with the same brush than it is to wade through all that stuff. F/sf authors who can talk to them in their own language--both literally and in terms of the content of their books--have a slim chance of drawing their attention to *further* interesting books. But you have to give some to get some. You can't demand that the lit eds read novels without any of the qualities they associate with novels. They aren't going to put up with crap writing, near-autistic levels of emotional intelligence, no sense of humour and no human interest, just to get at the one nugget of so-called "speculation" in Bulging Metal Muscles (Number 5 in the Today's Druggie Starship Troopers series), which is in any case not very relevent to the way the paper's demographic lives its life, and is generally a throwaway notion based on a throwaway notion based on a throwaway notion anyway. If they read it, they'd laugh at you. I don't know what the solution is, but getting to grips with the problem has been interesting.