Yatterings

I was talking with Mark Bould at the Clarke awards about New Weird and he reminded me of a project that I pitched some time ago. Did New Weird ever really exist or was it a fleeting moment? The question, in my mind, boils down to the nature manifestos and movements.
Manifestos and movements come along like London buses, one every so often and three at one time.

They seem to arrive when one or two individuals get really hacked off and just do something interesting, like Gibson/Sterling with Cyberpunk, and China Miéville with New Weird.

They all identified something that they detested in genre fiction and sought to apply their own artistic fix to the problem and create something that they liked. If cyberpunk gave us the wallpaper, then New Weird gave us back monsters (and some nice large footrests). Reading the Vector issue on genre manifestos, the true subtext became clear.

Manifestos and movements are not necessarily about projecting the future, though they may claim that. They are fundamentally about a moment in time, a moment perceived as being broken and proclaiming a fix. Consider China’s writing from Perdido Street Station with its Peakian verbose city taking apart politics and rebuilding a newer city which challenges our attitudes, both expressed and unexpressed. New Crobuzon is different though not necessarily better. In The Scar he challenges and recreates the Quest motif where the ending, the Scar, is largely irrelevant. It is potential but how many quest fantasies have the goal as the actual aim. Iron Council delivered on the genre motion that New Weird had claimed but it also showed that the fantastic genres could move and develop, indeed need to by utilising some fantastic effects in with the Western.

By this time, Miéville had walked away from the term and practised what he preached. As he has put it on several occasions, it has become a marketing term and was thus devalued of any practical benefit.

That is perhaps why manifestos/movements are doomed to failure. They become appropriated and bowdlerised. At that point they appear to lose any energy that there had been and some authors walk away, some carry on in the same vein. The moment has passed and like Ozymandias’s plinth, gaze over never ending sands.