So, a lot of people are murmerring. There is a bubbling going on about the Next Weird (or the New Weird coming back). So I’m leaving this as an open thread: what’s next? What is going to be the next experimental/literary genre? Will there be a movement? Or just a new way of approaching stuff? Will there be manifestos slung, or will it rise from the murky ooze without an us versus them mentality? Does it exist now, or will it exist soon?
What will it be a reaction against? Will it be a reaction? New Weird rose up against Epic Fantasy, New Wave against Space Opera, what will the next axe grind against it? Will it grind against anything?
Thoughts? This is an open thread. Make your arguments here!
Advertisement
Jeff VanderMeer pretty much explored all there was to explore regarding Sporepunk in FINCH. Larry Nolen is trying to create Squirrelpunk, which I guess I’d happily subscribe to.
But, seriously – I’d bet on a New Steampunk or a Post-Steampunk scene (even though Steampunk is still enjoying a good revival all over). Nothing too fancy, at least for the next 2-3 years.
I would be hesitent in agreeing about steampunk is revived/next big thing….it might be, it might. But the people in the steampunk scene are more interested in fashion, and less interested in books. So far, only Boneshaker seems the only BIG steampunk book. The rest of the scene? It seems to be obssesed with gadgets.
I would be happily proved wrong however….esp if Boneshaker causes a lot of other steampunk writers to breakthrough.
Actually, and not to cut hairs, but there are quite a few pretty big steampunk books out there, including Gail Carriger’s NYT Bestseller series which is both steampunk AND vampires. Alchemical magic, there. But I think the most successful steampunk has definitely skewed toward horror and Gothic rather than weird, at least commercially (which makes sense considering the publishing climes).
However, I’d be thrilled to see more weird in steampunk. Personally, weird west steampunk… but y’all probably know that already.
Natania- You’re not cutting hairs at all! How could I forget about Soulless? I love that book! Anyway, point taken
There’s also Leviathan too…
But to me, I can’t say steampunk is actually a legitamate sub-genre but more of an aesthetic–an overlay.
Some thoughts on the matter:
1- New Weird was a reaction to epic fantasy, which was (at the time) the dominant genre (and had gotten stale).
2- Epic Fantasy is no longer that genre. Does the language of New Weird still work? Will it need to change to approach something else?
3- The dominant genre is Urban Fantasy. Do we need a new genre/movement that questions, weirdifies, challenges, attacks Urban Fantasy?
4- I think pulp should still be a part of it. Pulp is fun.
5- Is that what’s next? A combination of the literary/existential/horror and urban fantasy?
Just some thoughts.
Urban fantasy in its earlier form (Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, etc…) was probably a reaction to the hegemony of epic fantasy in the 1980s and 1990s, as it took the fantasy tropes out of pseudo-medieval secondary worlds and put them into our own. They didn’t issue any manifestos though (at least as far as I know). New Weird came a bit later and reacted against epic fantasy by creating secondary worlds and creatures that were stranger, weirder and more out there than the pseudo medieval worlds of epic fantasy.
Somewhere along the way, urban fantasy became a three-way hybrid between romance, hardboiled crime fiction and dark fantasy, set in either in our contemporary world or one very much like it. And it became extremely popular.
However, the people who read and write urban fantasy are not necessarily part of the SFF community. Indeed, established SFF writers turning to urban fantasy (Tim Pratt or Daniel Abraham a.k.a. M.L.N. Hannover) are less successful than authors who came from elsewhere or debuted in urban fantasy. Besides, the SFF community overwhelmingly seems to dislike the current style of urban fantasy and doesn’t read it. There’s a lot of prejudice involved in this blanket rejection, as not all urban fantasy is vampire or werewolf romance. Nor is there anything wrong with a well-written vampire or werewolf romance. But with urban fantasy and its close sibling paranormal romance, you have big and commercially successful SFF subgenre that is overwhelmingly read and enjoyed by people who are not hardcore SFF readers.
This is also why I don’t think that the next big movement will be a reaction against urban fantasy. Because the SFF people who are prone to creating movements and writing manifestos largely don’t read it and the people who read and enjoy urban fantasy are not the sort to care for manifestos and movements. I doubt that the majority of Terry Goodkind or Robert Jordan readers ever heard of the New Weird either.
Of course, we might eventually see a reaction against urban fantasy and what it is perceived to be in the SFF genre. To some degree, we probably are already seeing that. After all, we have had a certain uptick in works featuring extremely monstrous vampires (stuff like 30 Days of Night and Guillermo del Toro’s The Stain) which is probably a reaction against the romanticized vampires found in much of today’s urban fantasy and paranormal romance. The growing popularity of zombies is probably another reaction, as zombies are very difficult to romanticize. Though the first zombie romances will apparently be hitting the market soon – so much for that idea.
I’m really glad you posted this- it succinctly sums up a lot of stuff I’ve been saying about Urban Fantasy in a very nice way. I’m not sure I agree with what you said 100% (for example, Jim Butcher, Patricia Briggs,and others wrote something akin to epic fantasy before writing Urban Fantasy, and a lot of the more popular writers, including Carrie Vaughn were active in the F/SF community and magazines -before- writing Urban Fantasy).
I think there are a lot of people in the F/SF community that -like- Urban Fantasy and want to write it. I don’t feel like there is much of an us versus them as you do- sure, some of the best come from outside (usually from mystery writers/noir writers….which makes sense, in a way) but a lot of it is still coming from F/SF community, and a lot of them hit the best seller charts regularly.
“This is also why I don’t think that the next big movement will be a reaction against urban fantasy. Because the SFF people who are prone to creating movements and writing manifestos largely don’t read it and the people who read and enjoy urban fantasy are not the sort to care for manifestos and movements. ”
I really do take this as an insult. First off- who says a manifesto is necessary? Second off- don’t second guess what people like to read and like to write. Like I said, I’ve written (and had published) Urban Fantasy, and I like reading it. I’ve got an illustrated book on Werewolves coming out from Chronicle later this year (and don’t look to that for New Weird Urban Fantasy though…this was a joint project, and it was meant to be a straight up werewolf story right out of the box. Nothing wrong with that at all
)
But that doesn’t mean we can’t take Urban Fantasy and layer it, make it more complicated and more intellectual. Hell, it’s already being done. I consider the Mercy Thompson books to be along these lines.
“I doubt that the majority of Terry Goodkind or Robert Jordan readers ever heard of the New Weird either.”
And did they need to hear about it? It wasn’t aimed at them, was it? No. It was aimed at a cross-section of readers. Readers who liked literary, intellectual fiction as well as epic fantasy. It’s a fairly large cross section, which is Perdido Street Station sold so well.
Am I saying that we should go after Urban Fantasy because it’s making money? Hell no. I’m trying to see what is next, and I’m looking for patterns of what has happened before. That’s all.
Oh, and oddly enough, more Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance readers enjoy my short story collection Glass Coffin Girls than the classical F/SF readers.
The usual F/SF review of that book goes, “All of the characters are women or girls” and then go onto say how confusing and pointless it is.
I’ve had two paranormal sites who reviewed the books, and they loved it. They don’t seem to have the same baggage that F/SF readers have (that intellectual books are written by snobs who want to confuse people).
Good point on Patricia Briggs. She really did write epic fantasy before she wrote the Mercy Thompson and Alpha & Omega books. Though Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series only came out after The Dresden Files (of course, he may have written them earlier). There are a few others as well, such as Lyda Morehouse/Tate Hallaway, S.L. Viehl/Lynn Viehl, Rachel Caine, Mindy Klasky. But a lot of urban fantasy writers seem to come from crime fiction and romance, a surprising number even got their start in e-book erotica.
I certainly did not mean to insult you. I know that you are not prejudiced against urban fantasy. Nonetheless, many in the SFF community are. How many times do you get SFF fans, readers and even writers claiming that all urban fantasy is just “vampire porn, Harlequin romances, Twilight knock-offs” or that urban fantasy used to be good until those damned women took over and so on. And when you probe further, it turns out that they maybe read one Laurel K. Hamilton novel and didn’t like the Twilight movie. Whereas everybody who complained about cookie cutter epic fantasy had read Jordan, Eddings, Brooks, Goodkind, etc… at some point and was sometimes still buying and reading them.
Besides – and you experience with Glass Coffin Girls seems to confirm that, urban fantasy is frequently not reviewed in the same places as other SFF works and if it is, it often gets negative reviews. Urban fantasy does not get Hugo, Nebula or World Fantasy award nominations, no matter how good it is. It does not show up on the Locus recommended reading list. I found urban fantasy on my own, none of my SFF reading pals ever recommended any of those books to me (and they recommended a lot). That is, someone once recommended The Dresden Files to me, which I ignored because I couldn’t get past the name Harry Dresden at the time. To a German, Harry Dresden is as silly a name as Mr Chicago (actual name of a German pulp hero) would be to an American.
All of which leads me to suspect that there is not a whole lot of overlap between the urban fantasy and the general SFF readership. Some writers – Jim Butcher for example – do have a crossover appeal, but many don’t.
As for the movement thing, the tendency to form literary movements, with or without manifestos, is pretty specific to the SFF genre (and to experimental avantgarde fiction). Other genres have trends, they have old subgenres dying and new ones springing up, they have tectonic shifts in the direction of the genre, they have bitter subgenre and inner-genre wars, but they do not have movements in the SFF sense. I never truly realised this until I tried to give a brief summary of SFF history to a genre outsider and got a big “WTF are you talking about?” reaction, because that person was mightily confused by all the different movements.
I think the big trend that we are already seeing is one towards mixing elements of different genres. Urban fantasy in its current form is a big part of that trend, as are paranormal romance, futuristic/SF romance, romantic suspense, futuristic crime fiction, New Weird hardboiled, etc…
Cora-
I’m not talking about a movement, per se. I’m talking about genre. To me, New Weird was a genre, that got eventually sucked into a movement (and then not a movement, and then a movement again, and then not). This is all IMHO from reading all the various things.
But I do wonder- does person X need to know a movement exists to enjoy it?
And re: genres being Sf/F/Experimental…what about the Beat writers? What about neo-realism? Magical Realism (and I mean Marquez and etc)? Existentialism (novels), etc? Literary fiction (which should never be confused with experimental…) has it’s own movements and subgenres and what have yous.
Anyway, this is all me just musing aloud. Don’t take it as OMG I KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT
Also, you’ve got a lot of great points in your thread.
Is Glass Coffin Girls Urban Fantasy? I don’t think it is, but it might be. It’s not about vampires and werewolves, and it’s very experimental and surreal.
But! For some reason UF/PR fans don’t seem to care as much about the literary/pulp divide as SF/F fans do. WHich I like. They’re more open to weirdness and strangness and IMHO, that’s cool.
The prejudice of Sf/f against UF does seem odd though. I’m not surprised. SF/F is still filled with old white guys from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s who want it to stay a boy’s club, no matter what. Which is sad.
It is quite funny because I always thought the New Weird was urban fantasy, and I still don’t see how a word for a built up environment has come to mean paranormal romance, but I digress.
I suppose some crossover is already occuring. Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone seemed to me to be steampunk with some New Weird ideas, and I think Valente’s Palimpsest certainly combines urban fantasy with New Weird themes (primarily in the surrealist influences I suppose). Does it need to be combined with urban fantasy? For popularity perhaps, for artistic merit, no. While Fabio thinks Finch was the last word on New Weird, I think it was the first, a way to show what is possible when you approach the subject from a different angle. For me it is a door opening, not one closing.
I think there are still people writing New Weird, yourself the perfect example, and there are still fans like myself who will buy it. I don’t know if it will ever emerge in strong a force that it used to be, perhaps it will. Maybe as a literary reaction to the lighter themes of steampunk and urban fantasy.
Oh, and Mark Teppo’s Lightbreaker/Codex of Souls books are another great example of Urban Fantasy crossed with New Weird. You should read them…they are completely insane. In a wonderful way.
I’m not so sure Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy are even close to being the same thing…but I digress
(one is based on romance that uses vampires in an urban setting, the other riffs on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc).
Does it need to be combined with Urban Fantasy? Of course not. I’m just saying New Weird, as a genre, attacked the staleness of Epic Fantasy, so I was just musing what the Next Weird would attack?
I agree on Finch- Finch is probably one of the most interesting New Weird ideas out there. And I really think Palimpsest is New Weird Urban Fantasy style (as well as Lev Grossman’s the Magicians, and my own Glass Coffin Girls I see as a collection of New Weird, Urban Fantasy style stories questioning things…)
I do take a teensy weensy bit of a bone with the “for artistic merit, no”. I mean, isn’t one of the tenents of the original New Weird to show that Epic Fantasy had artistic merit, when people thought it had none? Of New Wave to do the same with Science Fiction? Isn’t that the point of all this, to take a genre people consider lifeless, vapid, and to inject it with a layer of artistic complexity?
Also- another one I was thinking of urban fantasy/new weird vibe- Murakami. Esp. his After Dark book (one I absolutely loved).
I do like the idea of combining it as a reaction to the themes in Steampunk and Urban Fantasy (lighter? well of course- New Weird is basically the way of the shadows…look how it corrupted something as light an airy as Epic Fantasy!).
I haven’t read The Kraken yet- maybe that’s a part of it, too? Not sure. Maybe that’s what the Next Weird is. It’s taking New Weird, and applying it to all sorts of other genres. It’s widening the base. Which makes sense…New Weird was very limited in a way. It felt repetitive after awhile.
I am flattered that you call me New Weird- but like almost all writers labelled New Weird, I’m not sure that’s what I do? I started publishing frequently past the New Weird expiration date…
But that’s just my uncertaintity.
Still, this debate is -very very- interesting.
As I said above, urban fantasy in its current form and paranormal romance are definitely related but they are not necessarily the same.
There is urban fantasy that has very little or no romance (e.g. Rob Thurman, Mike Carey, Simon R. Green, T.A. Pratt, etc…) and there are paranormal romances that are not urban fantasy, because they have historical or secondary world settings (C.L. Wilson, Colleen Gleason, Elizabeth Vaughn, Shana Abé, etc…). Most of it, however, exists along a spectrum with urban fantasy with very little or no romance on the one end and contemporary romances with a very slight paranormal element on the other.
In general I view paranormal romance and urban fantasy as part of a growing trend towards hybrid subgenres that mix elements of two or more genres.
I’ve read quite a bit (and had quite a bit) of Urban Fantasy published…so yeah, I understand what it is (and the differences are).
Cross-genre is becoming bigger and bigger. Which is only a good thing.
BUT! Let’s not get off topic here! This was just one idea. What are your ideas on what the next weird will be?
So far, we have:
-Steampunk
-Something really weird in about 2 or 3 years (which makes sense, since whatever is written now will be published 2 to 3 years from now)
-Urban Fantasy crossed with New Weird (which is bubbling up now through Mark Teppo, Catherine M. Valante and others)
-A revival of New Weird as New Weird itself. No other changes made. Just waking back up.
What are your thoughts?
Pingback: Progressy progress, and knee deep in weird… « Writing Across Worlds
It wasn’t a dig on Urban as I’m sure there are many great urban fantasy writers, more a noting that paranormal romance now seems to be shoved into the same genre box these days.
As for the artistic merit comment you take a bone with, the point I was making is that New Weird is still fine as it is, it doesn’t need some other genre adding to it to make it relevant. I believe there are a reasons why New Weird died out, and none of them are because everything that could be done with the genre had been done. If someone was to put out a good New Weird novel tomorrow with no cross genres or anything added, it would still be a good novel, and it would still be relevant, even if it might not be popular. That was the point I was trying to make.
What is in vogue now won’t be tomorrow, and doesn’t mean it wasn’t in the past. Warlord of the Air is still a great novel with steampunk themes before the term even existed, and if steampunk flares up and dies, any good steampunk book written after will still be a good book. If I wrote a great existential novel tomorrow, it would still be a great book despite the fact Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir have been dead for a long time.
I’m not entirely convinced there needs to be a Next Weird, it may come back as the New Weird, it may not. But whether there is a movement or a genre revival, I think there will still be some new New Weird books coming up through the cracks, and hopefully they will be good.
I think you misunderstood what I said- of course the New Weird is fine as it is…
I’m just talking about patterns…
Like, New Wave went after Science Fiction like Spacer Opera and tried to examine and extend it (as did Cyberpunk to SF, as well as New Space Opera). New Weird went after Epic Fantasy…what’s next will most likely go after whatever dominant form of F/SF is out there. That’s all
That’s the while point of this debate- is there going to be a Next Weird, a New Weird ++? Or is the legacy of New Weird in application, and that no single sub-genre will rise up, but will instead be artists “weirding” other genres?
Pingback: Empty Your Heart Of Its Mortal Dream
BTW, I know it’s hard to get subtext across online…I’m not offended, not angry, not anything with this.
I consider this a debate, and really I’m just playing devil’s advocate half the time. This is really interesting, and challenging conversation