from “The White People,” by Arthur Machen

Machen and the Intrusion of the Weird

Ah! The weird as literature, the weird as genre, and the weird as…weird. Once upon a time such distinctions were not that important and literature was so inclusive as to encompass a pre-genre expanse by which fantasy and the weird could not be overtly distinguished from the mainstream. That was then, this is now. Then relates to the work of Machen, now relates to the work of VanderMeer, for whom the recent review of his novel Borne in the New Yorker suggests a more inclusive acceptance of the weird in literature, an acceptance that harkens back to a situation current over a century ago. In between, we have a simplification of literature in which genre becomes increasingly a defining and selling point, but where the concept of weird literature repeats and reinvents itself, returning after this century to a point of origin where it is invigorated and pointedly relevant to the world in which we live.

The quote from Machen with which I initiate this essay is one of the most evocative and, at the same time, defining that I have ever encountered. I first discovered Machen through his 1948 collection, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, a gift from my father when I was in high school. “These stories are pretty weird,” my father said. “I think you’ll like them.” I still don’t know where he got that old hardcover, but he was right about my reaction. The sensation that this quote and its accompanying story engender in me is part and parcel of the joy I encounter in reading such weird fiction. I still own and treasure that collection by Machen, along with other books of his that I have collected over the years.

The quote comes from Machen’s amazing short story, “The White People,” which is initiated by a philosophical but nevertheless enthralling discussion on the nature of Sin and Evil. It is here that Machen performs an amazing sidestep around the quagmire of morality with its nebulous and ill-fitting definitions. Machen moves the concept of Evil away from human nature and into the landscape. Religions often focus on criminal actions such as theft, murder, and adultery, but these are not truly evil because, although negative, they arise from purely human failings. Rather, “There is something profoundly ‘unnatural’ about Sin, about Evil.” This statement, along with its examples, encompasses much of what I find stimulating in weird literature. Here, I explore the concept of landscape as it relates to the Weird, and as Machen describes, to Evil.

I appreciate Machen’s philosophy of the weird and its relationship to evil because it need not be dependent on religion and morality. According to Machen, Evil can be considered a poisoning, an infection that is revealed by changes in the landscape, a recognition that the landscape is ‘unnatural’ based on our experience: a weird landscape. The concept of landscape as I use it here incorporates the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral, all that we perceive as our expected reality, the quotidian encounters based on a lifetime of rising each morning to greet the sun and another day’s labor.

Even though not dependent on religion according to Machen’s definition, in his two best-known stories—“The Great God Pan” and “The White People”—the incursion of evil arises from the incompatibility of earlier pagan religions with modern-day Christianity. This, in itself, need not be interpreted as indicating that such earlier religions are innately evil but rather that they are incompatible with the modern world. This incompatibility has the same effect as an infection, with potentially lethal results. The evil arises from this incompatibility and is revealed in part through effects on our landscape.

“The Great God Pan,” first published in 1890, is probably Machen’s most influential story. A key aspect of it is the sense of the awful, or awe-full, that to look upon the face of a god is to inspire madness. In this novella, two landscapes are set in opposition to each other within the first chapter: “You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things are—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.” There are two worlds, the one that we experience and believe to be real, but there is also another, almost Platonic in its nature.

But to perceive this other world, this weird world, is to pay a price, as the experimental subject Mary discovers. She becomes “a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.” What follows combines elements of the detective novel and the Decadence Movement in literature, in which the hybrid child born of that unhallowed night invites disaster on all whom she encounters. Elements of the infected landscape include a house that has “the most unpleasant physiognomy he had ever observed,” a wine that is “about a thousand years” old, and a human body that transforms and begins “to melt and dissolve” before the eyes.

In “The White People,” completed in 1899 although it did not see publication until 1904, there is no clear demarcation of an antagonist, which sets it apart from much fiction. It is not a single god but rather paganism itself and its associated ceremonies that invite evil and result in catastrophe for the protagonist, a girl. She is found dead near the statue of an ancient idol, but not before she has explored and encountered various aspects of the weird although, in her innocence, she does not recognize these as such.

Among her earliest memories are white faces, white people that differ from the norm in this memorable aspect. But the true advent of the weird occurs after she discovers a strange land by following a brook, pushing her way through bushes, low hanging trees, and thorny thickets, and clambering along a dark tunnel, to make her way to a hill that seems, “another world that nobody had ever seen or heard before.” In her journey, she finds rocks like “horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words that I could not say.” The stones spring about and dance and she learns and joins in their dance, her initial horror turning to fascination and complicity.

Her death is commemorated with the simple but telling words, “She had poisoned herself—in time.” The early pagan gods have escaped their time, being invited to enter into ours, this being the incompatible evil that infected the girl, now sixteen and post-puberty, and which ultimately resulted in her destruction. Interestingly, this sense of warped time is something that repeats itself in many a subsequent weird landscape.

“The White People” encompasses a number of ideas that can inform the weird landscape: (1) a sense of its opposition in relation to the ‘normal’ landscape, such that there is often a clear transition that occurs when moving from one to the other; (2) a sense of unnaturalness where the surreal becomes real; (3) a temporal disjunction such that the stream of time is no longer constrained; (4) a relationship to concepts of evil, sometimes although not always with religious connotations, such that the landscape can infect or poison our world; and (5) that the infection of our world can involve a deleterious effect on humans, this being perhaps its most horrific and evil aspect.

Here I explore this concept of the weird landscape in light of these ideas and how they have been translated over time into other works of fiction. By nature of this expedition I must pick and choose and, in doing so, I highlight seminal works that are also part of my personal pantheon (pun intended), most of the older works discovered when I was in my teens and ripe for discovery of the strange continents within these stories. Such an enterprise is not exhaustive, and I do not mean to imply that all weird fiction must embody similar concepts. Nor do I mean to imply that any specific work is necessarily influenced by those works that came earlier—although many of these writers freely acknowledge their indebtedness to antecedents—just that these forms of the weird landscape reoccur with such frequency that they can be considered emblematic. Each author has brought their own unique perspective to their weird landscape, and I emphasize those distinguishing aspects of their works. I finish with a look at how the use of the weird landscape has transitioned and been reinvented over time from those earlier works to now.

The Weirdness of the Plane and the Pit in Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland

First published in 1908, the initial setting of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland suggests that we are revisiting the Gothic, with its protagonist taking charge of an ancient towered and castellated house that hangs precariously over a chasm. This supposition is further enhanced by the description of how, after midnight on the morning of January 21^st, while the narrator is reading in his study, the unnatural is announced by candle flames burning low and then shining with a “ghastly green effulgence.” The man’s dog cowers and whimpers at his feet. What follows is not a traditional Gothic fright, but the truly weird.

The light that the narrator sees does not emanate from within his study, but rather from beyond the walls of his study, which are now transparent. They reveal an alien landscape that is progressively stranger the more clearly the protagonist perceives it. We have crossed the border from our normative world and into the landscape that announces the weird. This is truly an alien landscape, for the Plane, as the narrator refers to it, is illuminated by a black-centered sun limned with radiant red, such that the entire landscape appears ruddy. Also of note is a gargantuan house that is the exact replica of the protagonist’s house but of mammoth proportions: “a stupendous structure built apparently of green jade.” The inclusion of this house makes the warped image of this landscape all the more clearly a strange reflection of our world, of surreal and impossible proportions. There is a connection between the worlds but not by any natural law we understand.

Like Machen, Hodgson evokes gods as the impetus for the weird landscape. The narrator, in his passage across the Plane, sees “hundreds of them. They seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several I recognized almost immediately as mythological deities; others were strange to me, utterly strange, beyond the power of a human mind to conceive.” This last statement is significant for Hodgson not only evokes the pagan gods of lore, but gods of whom we have no knowledge. In particular, he describes a Beast-god, a gargantuan swinish creature, one that seems to combine the elements of animal and man. Here we have the entry of a god-like creature not born of any known religion, but one that poses ill to humankind.

There then follow incursions into our world, from beyond the house but drawing ever closer in an attempt to invade its comparative normalcy. These creatures are revealed as Swine-things, diminutive reflections of the Beast-god. Although suggestive of pigs, to the narrator’s horror they exhibit an unexpected intelligence. Their horrific grunts are a form of speech, a demonic suggestion that domesticated animals have taken on the aspect of humans, or that humans have devolved into something animal-like. The Swine-things are, “something beyond human; yet in no good sense; but rather as something foul and hostile to the great and good in humanity.” Machen in his story, “The Great God Pan,” described the progeny of a woman and a god, the female offspring being preternaturally beautiful but still emulating humankind. In Hodgson’s novella, we witness the perverted evil in which the physical aspects of humans are weirded and debased.

Hodgson also allows time to invade his weird landscape. The horrific cosmic landscapes into which the narrator is thrown undergo a rapid abrasion due to accelerated time. There is much in common here with H. G. Wells’s descriptions of far-future travel in The Time Machine. But with Hodgson there is no mechanical invention and the narrator is thrown forward against his will into a decaying future, one in which the sun spirals more and more rapidly across the sky, all the time dying to a dismal red. The parallels to The Time Machine do not end there for, by analogy, the Swine-things that emerge from their dark caverns, from the Pit, harken back to Wells’s debased and subterranean Morlocks (and are also reminiscent of the man-beast hybrids found in Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau). The Borderland of Hodgson is not constrained by space or time and that is part and parcel of its weirdness.

Lovecraft and the Weird from Beyond

Lovecraft moves the concept of Evil into a demonstrably science-fictional territory. In the stories that make up the Cthulhu mythos, he posits the existence of monstrosities from the stars, beings of such great power that they might easily be mistaken for gods. Indeed, these monsters are eager to accept the mantle of god-hood for, as Lovecraft writes, “They came from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them,” these false idols then becoming the focus of worship among susceptible humans. Although Lovecraft is generally considered an agnostic or atheist, the morality in his stories is consistent with that of Christianity, and embodies a concrete sense of good and evil. The entrance of the weird, for all intents and purpose, is synonymous with evil, and Lovecraft uses the word ‘evil’ repeatedly in his stories.

Although the idea of a weird landscape clearly predates the writings of Lovecraft, his use of this motif is almost fixed in our imagination due in part to his recurrent use of the descriptor, ‘non-Euclidian geometries.’ This phrase has become something of a Lovecraftian cliché and is referenced in “The Call of Cthulhu,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “Dreams in the Witch House,” and “The Trap.” Thankfully, Lovecraft clarifies the meaning of this mental tongue-twister in his actual descriptions of the weird landscapes that presage the incursion of his alien monsters. For example, when sailors explore Cthulhu’s citadel R’lyeh protruding above the waves, they find that “all rules of matter and perspective seemed upset,” and later in their hurried flight to escape the resurrected monster, a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.”

Lovecraft’s greatest evocation of the weird landscape occurs in “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), which many, including I, consider his finest short story. Here Lovecraft eschews graphic descriptions of monsters and instead focuses on the environmental manifestation of their influence, the result being one of the most palpable evocations of a landscape in transition from our world and into the weird. Indeed, the story is almost entirely a description of the landscape in transition, a recipe for how a normal landscape can become a weird ‘blasted heath.’

As in many stories with a weird landscape there is a physical separation of the weird from the normal landscape, the weird being known as the ‘blasted heath’ and centered around the farmhouse where the landscape became corrupted, following the impact of a meteorite. The meteorite is the proximate cause of the trouble, foreshadowed in part due to its aberrant characteristics, shrinking although “stones do not shrink.” It is only later that we come to clearly understand that an alien force arrived with the meteorite, this ‘creature’ being more alien than any monstrosity from the Cthulhu mythos, being perhaps a gas, or more explicitly simply a ‘colour’ that feeds on the life force of flora and fauna.

The characters in the story are of little value except in their roles, both passive and active, as reporters of the transitioning landscape. At first the farmer and his family are excited due to the bountiful effect of the meteorite on their crops, the fruit growing to “phenomenal size.” But disappointment soon ensues when it is discovered that “for all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat.” But it is more than just a poisonous unpalatability to the crops, for all the vegetation begins to possess “hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The Dutchman’s breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion.” The final deathly transition for the vegetation is its becoming brittle and gray and crumbling into dust.

The effects on the vegetation are horrendous and weird enough, but there are also effects on the animals in the vicinity of the meteorite. This is initially suspected due to the strange arrangement of their winter prints in the snow, and is then confirmed by alterations in the actual body proportions of a trapped woodchuck. In the end we witness the ultimate horror of humans being susceptible to the same weirding process as the animals, as the vegetation, a process characterized by madness and that recapitulates the same steps observed with the rest of the landscape: “By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before the month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark.” And, knowing what has come before, the result for the human must be the same: “collapse, greying, and disintegration.” Here we witness humans that have become weirded in the same manner as the surrounding flora and fauna, the palpability and inexorable logic of this being more horrific than the suggestive relationships between human and ‘other’ found in Machen or Hodgson.

C. L. Moore and the Weird Sexuality of “The Black God’s Kiss”

Catherine Lucille Moore’s story “The Black God’s Kiss” appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, a bit less than two years after Robert E. Howard’s genre-defining first Conan story. Moore was a fan favorite and through her character Jirel of Joiry, introduced in the story, provided her own spin on sword and sorcery, and this with a woman in the lead role. Moore set her Jirel stories in medieval France—unlike the mythological Hyborian-Age of Howard’s Conan stories—and this allows for the incursion of the fantastic into a real-world setting, the appearance of the weird landscape telegraphing evil. “Black God’s Kiss” is, in fact, largely devoted to the entrance into and the transit across just such a weird landscape.

Jirel’s journey is inspired by a sexual trespass, following her having been taken captive by Gauillaume the conqueror. He has her iron helmet removed and is startled to discover a woman with short red hair beneath it. Recognizing her sex, he forces a kiss on her even though that turns out to be “like kissing a sword blade.” In a later time and place, the story might contain a more substantive sexual transgression, but eighty years ago this is more than enough to suggest the excessive liberty taken. The imprisoned Jirel cannot forget or forgive, for “upon her mouth she felt the remembered weight of his, about her the strength of his arms.” She will journey “beyond all the bounds of the hells we know” to seek an unholy weapon with which to wreak her vengeance.

Almost immediately we are confronted by strange geometries. Jirel removes stones from within the lower depths of the dungeon, revealing a tunnel that twists and curves downward as if marking the passage of a gargantuan snake. “There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known…the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground—perhaps through time too.”

This description might suggest Moore is paying homage to Lovecraft’s “non-Euclidian geometries,” but that is not the case. Moore did not read the “The Call of Cthulhu” until 1935, the year after “Black God’s Kiss” was published, when Lovecraft initiated a correspondence with her and sent her two packages of his tales. She comments in her May 27 letter to HPL that “you really had me reeling and dizzy with the geometry of Cthulhu’s city.” The description recalls to her the awful dreams she experienced as a perpetually sick child. Tellingly, she describes this early experience as “nothing was at all describable in terms of physical things, because I wasn’t aware through the senses at all. There was a greyness over everything that was greyness of the mind, not of the light, and nothing had size, yet there was an awful bigness outside the bounds of mere dimensions. And there was an instability of the ground underfoot—only it wasn’t ground and there was no ‘underfoot’—it was rather an instability of anything basic in which to build one’s consciousness.”

It is not too much of a stretch to extrapolate from these descriptions to the weird landscape Moore evokes in “The Black God’s Kiss,” that the landscape is inspired in part due to the dreams she experienced as a sickly child. The story is largely made up of a journey across an aberrant landscape, this strangeness of the journey accounting for part of the story’s attraction. Dreams are repeatedly referenced in terms of the landscape and her supernatural ability to traverse it. The world itself is uneven, full of quaking morasses, strange stars and falling stars, a tower composed of spurting water or tangible light, and a black lake that heaves “with a motion unlike that of any water she had ever seen before.” There is also strange life, these including blind white horses, pale monstrosities with clicking teeth, and a mirrored version of Jirel herself.

Two elements of this journey deserve specific mention. First, in order to view the new landscape, Jirel must set aside the crucifix she wears, throw aside this symbol of Christianity so she may gain access to a non-Christian world. Second, the subject of her quest, not revealed until she has reached it, is a carrier for a type of poison. This final encounter echoes the earlier strange geometries, for she enters a temple in which waits a semi-human statue with one central eye and its mouth pursed for a kiss. “Every line and curve in the dim world seemed to sweep round toward the squatting thing before her with its closed eye and expectant mouth.” The kiss of the alien statue is like a poison, one she then carries with her, the kiss itself having a transformative aspect, for “she ran with the weight from her curiously alien body, heavy with its weight of inexplicable doom.” She carries the poison of the weird environment within her, a vessel awaiting its deliverance to the object of her hatred, to the conqueror Gauillaume, the man who violated her.

Margaret St. Clair and the Weird “Child of Void”

Margaret St. Clair is receiving a recent and well-deserved ascendency in the critical assessment of her work. She began publishing her work in the 1940s, with over a hundred short stories to her credit, but it wasn’t until 1985 that a Best of collection was published, by which time she was over seventy years old. And now, another thirty years later, her work is being included in major anthologies of weird fiction and SF. This is as it should be. Simply on a technical level, St. Clair is one of the best writers to have published in the pulps. Moreover, and unusual for SF at the time, her stories exhibit a seemingly casual awareness of and willingness to explore themes of sexuality, her ability to do so in the pulp magazines no doubt assisted by the humor with which she often handled her subjects.

“Child of Void” (1949) shares some plot elements and structure with Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” although I find no documentation that this was an influence. Like that earlier tale, we have an alien intrusion that takes place on a farm. The aliens have no tangible form themselves, but are “like electricity or radio” and they draw sustenance from energy including that found in living things. They need this because they are trapped on earth in their ‘egg’ and need energy so they can escape back to their home in a parallel dimension. A key difference from Lovecraft’s story is that everything is told from the family’s perspective, in this case by one of the two sons.

The family is going to live in Hidden Valley and, three paragraphs into the story, we learn that something is amiss there, the son saying: “It was the kind of place you see articles about in the Sunday supplement—a place where water flows uphill and half the time the laws of gravity don’t work, a place where sometimes a rubber ball will weigh three or four pounds…You never could depend on things being normal and right.” We thus have the idea of the unnatural landscape forefronted in the story, serving as a signal that the family is entering weird territory, and establishing a mystery as to what is disrupting the natural order. Once the aliens are discovered, it is made clear that their presence is harmful to the family. As the narrator’s younger brother explains, “They can’t help hurting us. It’s something they put into the air, like, by just being alive. They can stop it for a while, if they try hard. But that’s the way they really are. Like poison oak or a rattlesnake.” The things in the egg aren’t consciously evil but put out “a vibration which is hostile to human life.”

St. Claire’s choosing the perspective of someone directly affected by, and living through, the alien ‘invasion’ allows her to place a greater emphasis on characterization and how the aliens mentally control the family. This stands in contrast to Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” where it is suggested that the alien may have some mental hold on the farmer and his family, but the perspective of an outside observer places this in the realm of conjecture. In St. Claire’s story the mental struggle is front and center. The most noticeable characteristic that marks Hidden Valley as strange when the family arrives is how they are emotionally affected, for they all experience a horrible depression, one that lifts suddenly, these seesawing emotions pointing to some outside agency affecting their minds. The range of powers the aliens possess, in particular their modes of mental manipulation, become increasingly evident as the story progresses.

An interesting aspect of the story is how little of the weirded landscape is actually described. The initial description, from three paragraphs in, comes before the narrator and his family move to Happy Valley, and is based on the son’s memories of having visited his uncle there when younger. Once the family moves to Hidden Valley, there is a specific reference to the bounty of the farm (‘milk so rich you could hardly drink it’), even though others in the area don’t experience this bounty. We also learn that, for some unknown reason, the narrator’s ham radio won’t work. A key to this invisible aspect of the story is the depression the family initially experience because later, after this depression lifts, the son says, “The funny things about the Hidden Valley stopped bothering us.” So we know that something had been happening but we have not been made privy to it, in part because the narrator no longer notices or is concerned about such things. This is one of the balancing acts that St. Clair performs in the story. She makes use of an unreliable narrator, not entirely in control of his mind, who can’t process everything that is happening to his family, but who still communicates enough so we know what has happened. As a result, the upbeat ending contains underlying depths of horror, for we know that the narrator, now infected by an alien, is not in control of his emotions.

The Weird Colours of Ballard’s “The Illuminated Man”/The Crystal World

Thirty-odd years separate Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” from J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Illuminated Man,” published in 1964 and then developed into a full-fledged novel two years later as The Crystal World. Those years exemplify the increasing divide between genre and literary works that accreted over this time span. Yet, although Ballard’s works are now often seen as transcending genre, I find it hard to imagine Ballard’s efforts here as existing without his having read, processed, and rejuvenated Lovecraft’s story within his own more modernistic ethos.

Ballard’s story and novel, although taking place at different locations, are initiated with the same transcendent lines: “By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jeweled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…” But it is telling in how Ballard transitions from story to novel. The story tells of a scientific expedition that intends to uncover the truth about the mysterious crystallization process occurring in Florida. In the novel, which takes place in the tropical forest of the Cameroon Republic, the focus shifts from the weird landscape and the explanation for its origins. Instead the novel explores the relationships among a Graham Greene-channeled cast of characters and how they interact with each other and with this bizarre landscape. In fact, less of an explanation is given about the crystallization process over the entire course of the novel than in the thirty-odd pages of the short story.

There is a surprising sense of similarity between the crystallization process found in Ballard’s work and the poisoning petrification found earlier in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” The relationship is even more pronounced when in Ballard’s story, the Russian agriculturalist Lysenko “maintains that crop yields are increased because there’s an increase in tissue weight.” Furthermore, as the crystallization takes hold in Ballard’s world, objects glow in the dark as they amplify moon and starlight, much like the luminescent flora and fauna of Lovecraft’s world. Also, there is a strange desire shared among characters in the works of Lovecraft and Ballard, a madness that derives from the poisoning, such that the infected characters are drawn to it and refuse to leave the weirded landscape, even against their own better judgment.

Ballard, like Lovecraft, evokes a science-fictional explanation for the crystallization process that has occurred. He cites such names as the Hubble Effect, the Rostov-Lysenko Syndrome, and most suggestively, the LePage Amplification Synchronoclasmique (this litany of tongue twisters all being in the story rather than the novel). Differing from Lovecraft is the lack of a proximate cause for the crystallization process. There is no alien as such, but simply events taking place light years away that are mirrored in our world. Indeed the accepted explanation from the team at the Hubble telescope in “The Illuminated Man,” is that the effects “are a reflection of distant cosmic processes of enormous scope and dimensions, first glimpsed in the Andromeda spiral.” Ballard may have been just reaching for the stars, providing an SF-gloss on astrology, but the relationship between these distant stars and Earth is surprisingly suggestive of the modern theory of quantum entanglement (“spooky action at a distance”).

Also notable in Ballard’s world is his usage of altered time as the basis for the crystallization process, which arises due to particles of ‘anti-time’ colliding with particles of time. Creatures and plants slow as they encounter ‘anti-time,’ and their frozen images proliferate, building on each other to form petrified crystals. The body becomes so thoroughly crystalline that the removal of the crystal destroys the body. These effects of ‘anti-time’ recall Hodgson’s warping of time in The House on the Borderland, although as an inversion, slowed time becoming crystalline with Ballard, whereas Hodgson’s speeded time reduces all to ash and snow. The destructive nature of the altered time also, of course, recalls Machen’s telling quote from “The White People” about the girl who ‘poisoned herself—in time.’

The Weird Science Fiction of Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”

“And we passed through the cavern of rats.

And we passed through the path of boiling steam.

And we passed through the country of the blind.

And we passed through the slough of despond.

And we passed through the vale of tears.

And we came, finally, to the ice caverns. Horizonless thousands of miles in which the ice had formed in blue and silver flashes, where novas lived in the glass. The downdripping stalactites as thick and glorious as diamonds that had been made to run like jelly and then solidified in graceful eternities of smooth, sharp perfection.”

That was my high-school yearbook quote. It comes from Harlan Ellison’s Hugo-award-winning short story, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and, although this story had long been a favorite, it was only while assembling this essay that I realized it embodied key elements of the weird landscape. It is surely a coincidence that the crystalline is emphasized in this quote but, as with Lovecraft and Ballard, such a landscape brings out some of Ellison’s most haunting and beautiful language.

The religious allusions in this quote from Ellison are no accident. Like Machen, Hodgson, and Lovecraft, Ellison evokes a pagan god in relation to the creation of the weird landscape. But Ellison places this ‘god’ fully within the boundaries of a traditional SF trope, that of the malevolent computer. Here the computer that achieves sentience and turns against its human creators is named AM, for Allied Mastercomputer, although the name is also intended to echo Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” Ellison does not hide the relationship between the computer and god, the story’s protagonist even stating, “If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.”

Ellison’s story is readily labeled as science fiction because it employs an out-of-control computer as its antagonist. The story’s sections are even separated by images of a computer punch tape, now an historical anachronism. But the scientific aspects of the story are in fact fairly minor, and it could be argued that Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror rely more on scientific considerations than does Ellison’s tale. The significance of AM is not necessarily that it is a computer, but rather that such an omnipotent computer allows Ellison to explore the relationship between gods and humans (“God as Daddy the Deranged”). “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a weird tale in the grand tradition of weird tales with their weird gods. It is also a fine example of evil as revealed through its weird landscape.

AM has taken over the entire Earth so that no part of the Earth can be considered as separate from AM. The five human protagonists live in AM, the entire story taking place within the bowels of the computer. Unlike the pagan gods evoked by Machen, the animalistic hybrid gods of Hodgson, the tentacled monstrosities of Lovecraft, Ellison’s AM is a god who has no definitive form, a god as encompassing (and therefore as invisible) as the God of Christianity. But, like the old-Testament God, AM talks directly to humanity, humanity being reduced to the single handful of humans he has chosen to keep alive, to torture.

William Blake urged us to discover God through the evidence of His wondrous creation, (“To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower”). Ellison’s AM is the world, but that world, the landscape the protagonists encounter, although wondrous, miraculous, is also unnatural. It is a marriage of machine and nature—chittering computer banks, a frozen elephant, and a Roc-sized bird whose wings beat a hurricane wind—with the machine controlling whatever originates from the natural. My yearbook quote suggests the malleability of the physical landscape. Time is also skewed in AM, this being apparent early on in the story when the narrator almost casually indicates, “It was our hundred and ninth year in the computer,” that single line evoking the computer as landscape and that there is something unnatural about the narrator’s lifespan or his understanding of time. The narrator later says, “Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don’t know. AM has been having some fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense.”

AM can also manipulate the bodily form of the humans. This is also made clear right from the beginning of the story. There’s the immortality, of course. But we also learn that one of the humans has been remade into the semblance of a chimpanzee. Later, sound and beams of light are emitted from the chimp-man’s eyes. And then, lastly, AM’s revenge on the narrator is to manipulate his form into something that is no longer recognizable as human, but tortured by its mind still being intact and containing all the humanity lacking from its form. Here, the situation is made all the more horrific by the narrator NOT lapsing into a Lovecraftian madness at recognizing the horror but having his faculties fully intact and eternally aware.

The Weird of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy

A key writer I discovered as an adult, one who inspired me with his glancing sidewise vision, his reimagining and deconstruction of SF and fantasy tropes, was Jeff VanderMeer. I first discovered his work in the stand-alone novella, Dradin in Love. Set in VanderMeer’s second world of Ambergris, this story would later be incorporated into his mosaic novel, City of Saints and Madmen. Ambergris bears a tangential relationship to our world. It incorporates names and technologies, interrogates the politics of colonialism and subjugation, and also exhibits VanderMeer’s fascination with flora and fauna, evidenced here through ecstasies of fungi and squid. There are elements, as you progress through City of Saints and Madmen, that indicate the membrane separating Ambergris from our earth is permeable, suggestive of the poisoning relationships of landscapes described by Machen. But the Ambergris revealed through VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen and the subsequent novels Shriek: An Afterword and Finch fits comfortably enough within the historical concept of a second world to fulfill the popular concept of a fantasy.

This changed with VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Published in 2014, this trilogy of novels—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance—later collected into the single hardcover edition Area X, is clearly set on our earth and does not fit comfortably within traditional genre labels. The time is close enough to now as to be now, and the setting is inspired by VanderMeer’s hikes in the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in Florida. An alien environment appears within this territory, shielded by a force field and referred to as Area X, the intrusion of the weird into the normal, into our world.

Such an intrusive weird landscape invites a novel-length exploration. We have a new world, an accessible world, but one in which our natural laws are called into question, a situation that establishes readerly expectations appropriate to detective and suspense novels. The novel’s characters, and the reader, are put into the position of the detective searching out clues as to what rules now apply in this unprecedented environment. The suspense arises because our hard-won experience, the years we have spent negotiating and learning the rules that govern our world, are now worth nothing and may, in fact, invite disaster. There is a relationship here to classic novels in which strange lands, typically prehistoric, are discovered inside the hollow earth or on secluded mountains (e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World). But nowadays, the idea of such lands persisting undiscovered across millennia invites disbelief. In contrast, the sudden intrusion of a weird hostile landscape is more believable, and certainly more in keeping with the disconcerting realities experienced in our increasingly incomprehensible world.

I did not use the word ‘exploration’ loosely when introducing the previous paragraph. In the Southern Reach trilogy, exploration teams are sent into Area X to study the environment once an entrance is discovered. This contrasts with the passive mobility of the protagonist in The House on the Borderland, who wafts from cosmic scene to scene, from vision to vision. Ballard’s story, “The Illuminated Man,” also utilizes an exploration team to facilitate the reader’s entry into the weird landscape, although when he extended his short story to the novel-length The Crystal World, our understanding of the landscape did not increase proportionately, the novel instead emphasizing the interpersonal dynamics of the characters. VanderMeer creates a more diverse weird landscape than does Ballard, which allows him to find a more engaging balance between the interactions of characters with the environment and their interpersonal dynamics.

World building, so common to SF, indeed prized by aficionados for the abilities of the authors in this respect, is focused by VanderMeer on Area X. Elements of the weirded environment include the flora and fauna, not exempting humans. There are creatures in Area X that are unlike anything on earth: human-eyed dolphins, luminescent fungi that write script, the Crawler. There are creatures that are mistakenly assumed to be of our world but are not, their mimicry so perfect that their veracity is not interrogated by the scientific teams. There are also strange geometries, the inversion of up and down, such that the exploration team cannot recognize whether they are climbing a tower or descending into a tunnel. Furthermore, maps from earlier expeditions lack the striking feature of the tower/tunnel, suggesting that Area X is unmappable, that it may be malleable, or that it reveals itself preferentially to different teams. There is also time travel, a knowing employment of quantum entanglement…

…but most significantly, in comparing Area X to previous weird landscapes, there are clear reminders throughout the text that Area X is a more unspoiled environment than that found in our own world. For example, the biologist describes Area X as a “pristine wilderness devoid of human life.” The implication is that our world, our technology-enabled despoilment of the environment, is the true Evil. The exploration team recognizes their own limitations as humans in such an environment: “Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.” This becomes ever more apparent as the trilogy progresses, the black humor of the second book (Authority) emphasizing the Three Stooges-like capabilities and culpabilities of a government agency tasked with uncovering the secrets of Area X.

Within this structure, Area X suggests the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were cast out, never to return. It is the Eden that existed before the advent of humankind: day and night, vaults of sky and water, vegetation, sun and stars, creatures of sea and sky, of the earth, all accomplished before the evening of the fifth day, before the creation of humankind in God’s own image. Our modern world is a despoiled, contaminated version, but one that strangely mimics all that was lost in that original Paradise. Or does the poisonous Paradise of Area X mimic our expectations, our desire to return to the garden, to a harmonious interaction between humankind and the environment?

But notably, and in contrast to many of the tales described earlier, there is no overt religious relationship of Area X to our world. My suggestion of the Biblical Paradise is something I bring to the tale from my own upbringing, inculcated with the Christian mythos prevalent in Western culture. The relationship of Area X to our world could just as readily be described in terms of Rousseau’s philosophy of the natural human, an agnostic but environmentalist perspective that the more humans deviate from nature, the worse they and their world become. Rousseau wrote, “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.” Area X pointedly reminds us of the follies that arise from nature and humankind out of balance.

Regardless of which perspective you hold, the expeditions from our world into Area X clearly suggest a level of incompatibility between the two worlds. You cannot accept both, be congruent with both, at the same time. To become part of Area X requires a clear rejection of our world, and with it an accompanying weirding of what we have come to accept as humanity. Does one protagonist truly become a tidal wave of eyes, or is that the only way we can perceive this from our distorted and unsustainable perch?

Weirding the Weird: The Double Negative of VanderMeer’s Borne

Jeff VanderMeer followed up his Southern Reach trilogy with the novel Borne in 2017. The events of Borne take place in the near future, a dystopian future where the protagonist Rachel and her parents were refugees cast adrift like flotsam on waves roiled by wars and political turmoil. That pessimistic but realistic prognostication is already in the past by the time the events of the novel take place. The immediate locale Rachel inhabits is purely weird, the result of the global dystopia coupled to the repercussions of the Company, which through biotech has created a bestiary of strange creatures, drugs, and artifacts. There are neuro-spiders employed as weapons, gangs of morphed children with wings, claws, and fangs, and the giant flying bear, Mord, who terrorizes the city. This is the locale that Rachel now inhabits. She was thrown into this city and has had to learn new skills, acquire new knowledge, if she is to survive.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this environment is the giant flying bear, Mord, who constitutes a weird landscape in and of himself. Indeed, the concept of Mord as landscape is established at the outset of the novel. Mord is truly gigantic, able to carelessly level buildings with a shrug, essentially unknowable but also an invitation for exploration, and the novel opens with Rachel having performed a scavenging expedition on Mord. Such expeditions are worthwhile because Mord’s lair is in the hollowed-out Company building; as a result, he accumulates all sorts of strange items in his tangled fur—food, dead creatures, and biotech—each day bringing a new supply, a bounty for those brave enough to scale his flanks. The existence of Mord reminds us of Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that a sufficiently advanced science will be indistinguishable from magic. Much of the biotech in the novel, the other creatures no matter how strange, seem possible from the vantage point of an advanced science. Mord slams us up against the impossible—how does one have a creature so vast that it should crumble under it’s own weight, and moreover that can fly without visible means—ricocheting us between the magic of a surreal fantasy and a science beyond our comprehension. This tension between possible interpretations is heightened by one of the characters, even though steeped in biotech, being called the Magician. This tension also moves us out of the comfort of science fiction, with its rationalistic worldview, into a world that is thoroughly disconcerting.

There is a clear sense of transition in Rachel’s memories for how she came to be in this world, a spatial and a temporal disjunction. She entered into the city almost as if through a magic door, leaving behind the human-made hell of war, disease, starvation, refugee camps, and betrayal to enter into the weird: “My last memories from before the city were of floods and makeshift rafts and the expanding silence of people dead or dying in the water—and a hint of land on the horizon. My last memories were of going down for a second, third time, my lungs full of mud. But when I came to, I was in the city, walking. I was walking through the city as if I had always been there.” Rachel has lost her parents and the transient homes they clung to. She has been born anew into a weirded city, an evil locale, one in which the dystopia she inhabited as a girl achieves the distinction of nostalgia. In doing so, she has also lost a chunk of time from her memory; she is now a young woman but she came to the city as a girl.

Rachel combines knowingness and innocence, characteristics in keeping but also telling about the weird environment she inhabits. She has the seasoned abilities of someone who learned hard lessons in brutal environments, both in the world she left behind and in the weirded city she now inhabits. She is an adept scavenger in the ruins of the city, of Mord, and she also knows well the dangers these hold, including the danger in trusting others, a trust she withholds even from her lover Wick. Nevertheless, her cynical caution is balanced by the desire to love, to care for others, and into this conflict of will and desire appears the strange creature Borne.

Borne weirds the weird, being stranger and less predictable than anything Rachel has encountered before in this city. It is no coincidence that Borne is discovered in a scavenging expedition into the weird landscape of Mord. The relationship between Rachel and Borne recalls other encounters between children and the alien, as found in Spielberg’s movie ET with its extraterrestrial visitor, in E. Nesbit’s novel Five Children and It with the snail-eyed Psammead, and in Barbara Euphan Todd novels featuring the animated scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, whose actions entangle his young friends in trouble. In all these cases, the protagonist encounters something outside their mundane world, and whose powers are not yet clear but are disruptive to the world they have known. But, unlike those examples, here the protagonist is older and sexually aware. Such elements were never part of traditional literature where, even if the protagonists had achieved puberty, the story elements were chaste. Furthermore, Rachel’s relationship to Borne changes dramatically throughout the novel, for Borne is itself changing both physically and mentally, her relationship with Borne transitioning from that with a houseplant, to a fish, to a dog or cat, to a child. But just as clearly, we have the sense that the existence of Borne will disrupt the world into which Rachel has been thrown, that the double-negative of weirding the weird might prove beneficial.

Of particular significance is that the weird world found in Borne does not derive from ancient gods or extraterrestrials. Both worlds found in the novel were created by humans, one with the mundane horrors that originate from humankind acting at its worst, the other due to humans having created something incompatible and poisonous to themselves. If anything this is a poisoning of the Present by the Future: “…the wrenching dislocation of trying to make two separate worlds match up, the one that was normal and the one that was grotesque, the old and the new—the struggle to make the mundane and the impossible coexist…” One might also see this as a weird echo of William Gibson’s maxim about the future being already here, but not evenly distributed.

But, as with The Southern Reach trilogy, Borne does not render a verdict on these two worlds as being a simple case of good versus evil, that the weird is innately evil and should be destroyed. The danger, the evil, is in the use of power, not simply the abuse of power, just its use, coupled to the ability and desire to use these items as weapons. As Rachel says, “All I wanted is for there to be no great power in the City at all.” Indeed, the novel suggests the possibility of a synthesis such that the two worlds can coexist without deadly effect. In this respect, one can return to the metaphor of the weird as a disease that infects or poisons our reality. Only maladapted viruses exhibit a high lethality, for such lethality is detrimental to both the host and the virus; this is why highly lethal epidemics often burn themselves out without spreading far. Co-existence, reduced lethality, can benefit both the host and the infecting agent, for our world and the weird.

Conclusion

Writing an essay is much like a journey—an essay about the weird landscape perhaps even more so than usual—in that you start off with some concept of the itinerary and destination but the joy comes in the experience itself, the details you discover along the way. Here I’ve explored fictions that embody Machen’s concept that Evil can be considered a poisoning, an infection that is manifested by changes in the landscape, his century-old story “The White People” defining some of the features we find reiterated in later stories. Fiction is not static, of course, and each author brings their own vision and concerns to this enterprise, these reflecting the cultures in which they live and resulting in the ever-shifting environments we experience as readers.

Reflecting on these stories, on this journey, I find that the most profound changes have to do with the nature of the Evil the authors find invested in the landscape. I titled this essay, “The Weird Landscape as an Avatar of Evil,” using the term avatar in its broadest sense, in which it simply refers to the manifestation of a concept. In its original use, however, avatar referred to how a Hindu deity such as Vishnu manifested himself on earth. This concept is close to how Machen and other early practitioners of the weird made use of the landscape, linking its evil to non-Christian deities. Machen explicitly explored the conflict between early paganism and modern Christianity. Hodgson and Moore also made use of supernatural deities, although they incorporated elements of their own devising, not restricting themselves to the gods of established religions.

Lovecraft’s influential contribution to the weird landscape is to shift the concept of Evil away from gods and into the realm of science fiction. The alien monstrosities of his Cthulhu mythos are a small step in this direction, they being pagan gods in all but name. Not unlike Pan in Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Lovecraft’s creations are chimeric amalgams of animal parts, have superhuman powers, are capable of inseminating humans, and inspire madness in those who come to understand their reality. More significant from a modern perspective is his story “The Colour Out of Space,” in which the alien is truly alien and its mere existence is destructive to humans. Lovecraft’s colourful alien, like that in St. Claire’s later story “Child of Void,” is reminiscent of the Aesop fable in which a frog swims across a river ferrying a scorpion on its back; the scorpion stings the frog even though it means both their deaths, doing so simply “because it’s my nature.” Frogs and scorpions, humans and aliens: these are natural pairings, but the later may poison the former.

At its most basic level, science fiction implies a rationalistic viewpoint of the world, one in which even the strangest phenomena have an explanation. The uncertainties of the modern world suggest that such a viewpoint is overly optimistic, that satisfactory answers may never be forthcoming. Although Ballard’s The Crystal World may echo aspects of Lovecraft’s landscape, the causal agency behind the crystallization process is never fully clarified. Similarly, scientific explanations are suggested for how VanderMeer’s Area X popped into existence, but these are not highlighted in the same manner as might be expected in a traditional SF novel. VanderMeer’s Borne also contains elements that are discordant with current scientific understanding, this being part of what gives the landscape its unsettling weirdness.

Furthermore, when it comes to deciphering the ultimate source of evil, such answers are now as likely to implicate humans as malevolent aliens. Walt Kelly popularized the Earth Day slogan “We have met the enemy and he is us,” in his comic strip Pogo over forty-five years ago, a potent ecological reminder that we humans don’t need an outside agency to poison ourselves. That concern is now more relevant than ever. Ellison, in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” explored the concept as to how our computers could assume a poisonous intelligence. VanderMeer fully embraces ecological concerns. His Southern Reach trilogy serves as a pointed reminder as to how, due to our having ravaged Earth, the appearance of an unspoiled Eden is now poisonous to us. More recently, VanderMeer considers the dangers of rampant biotech in the decimated world of Borne. If anything, a century’s worth of differing takes on the weird environment point to the varied goals for which it can be employed, its recent use in interrogating ecological and environmental themes seeming a natural but still underexplored avenue.

On any journey, there are glimpses of other locales, of alternate routes, these tempting you from your chosen path in spite of the knowledge that such indiscriminate journeying may become a maze with no exit. And so, a few final thoughts on those roads not taken, my hope being that these may inspire explorations by fellow travelers. First, although I had initiated my study of the weird landscape based on motifs suggested by Machen’s “The White People,” I was surprised at some unanticipated mechanisms by which the world could be weirded. Of particular note are strange seemingly-impossible mirrorings, best described by Einstein’s phrase “spooky action at a distance.” This refers to the concept that objects, even though far apart in space, perhaps a universe apart, can still affect each other through quantum entanglement. The crystallization of earth in Ballard’s The Crystal World is apparently due to some process occurring in the Andromeda spiral. Area X in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy exhibits qualities that suggest a similar mechanism behind its manifestation. William Hope Hodgson recognized the disconcerting effect of having a gargantuan mirroring of his protagonist’s house across space and time in The House on the Borderland, doing so long before physicists proffered a possible mechanism by which this could occur.

Second, although the tropes of the haunted house story have become so engrained as to be clichéd, many of the best harken back to the precepts outlined by Machen for how the landscape can reveal evil. Here, the landscape is the house itself, setting it off from the healthy world outside its walls. The morbid history of the house, its unquiet ghosts, are poisonings out of time, ready to infect and destroy those who take up residence within. In stories as varied and potent as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat,” we find strange geometries, discontinuities between the expected and the actual structure, an increasingly confused sense of place, of time, one that grows ever more disconcerting as the tale progresses…

But, third, why halt with a single house, for what is a house but one element in a town or a city? Machen’s thoughts on the weird landscape were focused on how the natural world, its flora and fauna, was rendered unnatural so as to reveal evil. But this has only a minimal relationship to human distortions of the natural, the aberrant constructs we call houses and, in their aggregate, towns and cities. What about the urban weird? Locales that come to mind are Lovecraft’s Arkham as well as Samuel R. Delany’s Bellona from Dhalgren. Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, Neil Gaiman’s London Below, and Brigadoon might also fit the bill. As might television’s Twin Peaks, Washington and Eerie, Indiana.

Fourth, and lastly—to all those who followed this journey and who now, setting aside any warnings about inherent dangers, equipped with nothing but curiosity and a knapsack glutted with books, following their own whims and predilections, to all those who now embark on their own explorations of the weird landscape—Bon voyage!

Recommended Readings

Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” in which the French love for the surreal is married to landscape.*

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in which wind, sand, and willows transition from the natural to the unnatural.*

Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” in which the weird takes up residence on a New York street.*

Angela Carter, “Master,” in which a hunter meets the old gods of the New World.

Ralph Adams Cram, “The Dead Valley,” in which meteorology is just as significant as the Pit.

Thomas Disch, The Genocides, in which humankind takes refuge in a garden.

Harlan Ellison, “Jeffty is Five,” in which the Present poisons the Past.

William Hope Hodgson, “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict,” in which sea travel leads to encounters with fungoid weirdness.

Thomas Ligotti, “The Strange Design of Master Rignolo,” in which spooky action at a distance creates a work of naturalistic art that has mortal implications.

Kelly Link, “The Hortlak,” in which the Pit is located next to a convenience store.

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi, in which a floating island in the Pacific transforms an oceanic adventure story into something more.

Mary Rickert. “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” in which the weird fauna are our children.

Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” in which the significance of landscape is emphasized by the title,* and “The Ninth Skeleton,” in which the Boulder Ridge of Smith’s native California is transformed.

* anthologized in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds., Tor Books, 2011

Acknowledgements

I thank the 2017 Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird, that occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, for the inspiration and discussions that inspired this piece. I also thank Daniel Braum, Ramsey Campbell, Matthew Cheney, Barry Lee Dejasu, James Everington, Jeffrey Ford, John Glover, Blaine Stevens, and Chad Woody, who responded to an open invitation to recommend their favorite weird landscapes in literature; I have included those that most resonated with Machen’s concept about the intrusion of the weird landscape into our known world in these Recommended Readings. The quotes from C. L. Moore’s letters are from Letters of H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to C. L. Moore and Others, 2017, David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, eds., Hippocampus Press, New York.

Images

Aubrey Beardsley, cover image for 1894 Machen collection The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light.

W. Otway Cannell, 1921 edition cover to The House on the Borderland.

Wenzel Jamnitzer, 1568, from Perspective of Regular Solids

Frantisek Kupka, 1903, The Black Idol

Joan Miró, 1922, The Farm

Gerardo Dottori, 1919, Forze ascensionali

Joseph Leidy, 1879, Amoeba proteus, from Fresh-Water Rhizopods of North America

Ernst Haeckel, 1904, Lichen lithograph.

Artist unknown, 1760, from Alchemical and Rosicrucian Compendium.

The post From Machen to VanderMeer: The Weird Landscape as the Avatar of Evil appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

Sculpture of Borne by Vladimir Verano

Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid. During my recovery, I had such trouble remembering what waited for me outside, as if I had to learn it all over again, despite having been taught so many lessons.

All kinds of dangerous ideas entered my head while groggy. It was as if the little foxes and other animals out in the desert ran in circles around my mind, barking and kicking up dust, stopping only to stare at me from afar and encourage me to wander. I kept fantasizing that I lived in a real apartment in one of the stable, lawful sanctuaries from my past. Everything would be fine—I just had the flu or a cold and was out sick until I got better. And when I was better, what would I do? When I was better, I would go back to university and to some part-time job. I would complete my studies so I could become a writer. Because the ruined city was just a bad dream and my life as a scavenger was a bad dream, and soon I would wake up, and the visions of almost drowning, of losing my parents and with them all connection with the past would prove to be an illusion, too.

The longer Wick expended time and energy protecting me, the more ideas like this took hold of me. They had only a vague relationship to my memories of flight, of trying to find refuge, of all the dangers before the city.

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps. Even as I started to walk around my fortified rooms with Borne, even as I ventured out into the corridors. It was so sad a fantasy that I brushed by without recognition the revenants that told me it was a lie. The chair stuck in the wall. The filing cabinet rusted beyond use, now just a barricade at the mouth of a tunnel. The lack of libraries or other people.

Yet those sequestered weeks also contain some of my best memories because of Borne. Wick was gone a lot, spying on the Magician’s movements, providing beetles to his small band of dealers … and possibly because of our argument.

Which left Borne and me ever more time to explore. He’d gotten tired of being cooped up in the apartment. On days when I knew Wick would be out for hours, I’d take Borne into the hallways, prickly with the fear of discovery and stiff from my slow-healing wounds.

It was all a construct by then, this game of not telling Wick that Borne could talk. He had to know. But because I never admitted it and Wick never brought it up, Borne became an open secret that existed between us like a monster all its own. It made me reckless, as if I wanted Wick to confront me. That somehow our relationship would be a total lie if Wick didn’t confront me.

Ignoring the strain on my own body, Borne and I would race down dim-lit, dust-covered corridors, Borne afraid of colliding/congealing with the wall and tripping over his own pseudopods, wailing as he laughed: “You’re going toooooo fast!” Or, “Why is this fuuuuuuuun?” Which just made me laugh, too. When you don’t have to run and you have the chance to run for the hell of it, it becomes a strange luxury.

Then we’d collapse at the end of the hall and Borne, in addition to his usual observation that he was hungry and needed a snack—I now let him hunt lizards and rats to blunt his appetite—would ask some of his questions. He never stopped asking them, as if he were really ravenous for the answers.

“This dust is so dry. Why is dust so dry? Doesn’t it need some wet for balance?”

“Then it’s mud.”

“What’s mud?”

“Wet dirt.”

“I haven’t seen mud yet.”

“No, you haven’t. Not yet.”

I would show Borne a photo of a weasel in an old encyclopedia and he’d point with an extended tentacle and say, “Ooooh! Long mouse!” Which brought me quickly to the idea of teaching Borne to read, except he picked that up on his own. When we played hide-and-seek, I’d sometimes find him hunched up on the edge of a midden of discarded books, two tentacles extending out from his sides to hold a book and a single tentacle tipped with light curling down from the top of his head.

He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don’t believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.

But the truth is, I don’t really know what he thought or how he thought it, because most of the time I just had his questions.

***

Wick’s “disgusting” swimming pool full of biotech. Art by Kayla Harren.

Eventually, I took him to Wick’s swimming pool, which was Wick’s laboratory. I loved the swimming pool, and perhaps that meant I loved Wick, too, in a way. The swimming pool had originally had a skylight above it, extending to the top of the Balcony Cliffs, and a divot of open space remained all the way to the top, with Wick contriving to camouflage it from above with his illusions.

When the light from the hole in the ceiling was right, it formed green-and-gold waves, as if the moss and lichen on the surface had mingled with the sun’s rays and been transformed in some fundamental way. The light would glisten against the living filaments Wick had placed there as part of his work, and you could see dust motes floating and the occasional water bug or glider and, rising off the water, a mist that curled back on itself like certain kinds of ferns.

It could take a while to get used to the mélange of chemicals, which gave off a dank smell, cut through with something spicy. That spice could be sweet or sour, but was always sharp. Wick needed the light in the mornings to feed the rich, revolting, shimmering stew-brew to finish his beetles and other creations. But our shit and piss fed it, too, although the harsh smell was more of algae and peat and some bitter chemical. I’d long ago gotten used to it, even found it pleasant.

Eellike things wriggled in the mire and the fins of weird fish broke the surface only to submerge again.

“What’s a swimming pool?” Borne asked.

“A place people go into to … swim.”

“But it’s full of disgusting things! Disgusting things live in there. Just disgusting. Really disgusting.” Disgusting was a word Borne had just picked up and used often.

“Well, just leave those disgusting things alone, Borne, even if you are hungry.” I gently slapped away a tentacle he’d begun to inch toward the water. I had no idea what effect those chemicals would have on him. Nor did I want Borne eating Wick’s supplies, which would only endear him further.

Borne summarized for me: “A swimming pool is a place where people like to swim in disgusting things.”

“Close enough,” I said, chuckling. “You won’t be encountering many of those when you’re out in the real world.”

And then I wished I hadn’t said it, because I’d acknowledged that this wasn’t the real world. That we lived in a bubble, of space and time, that just couldn’t, wouldn’t last.

The post Excerpt from the Novel “Borne” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Author Jeff VanderMeer’s newest novel Borne (FSG, out April 25^th) has been named one of the most anticipated of 2017 by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and others. Colson Whitehead writes, “Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it’s a thorough marvel.”

VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, TheGuardian, The Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, and The Los Angeles Times. He has also lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress. His body of work has prompted The New Yorker to name him “the weird Thoreau,” and Paramount Pictures has acquired rights to both Borne and the Southern Reach books. The first of these films, based the trilogy’s Annihilation, is slated for release next year.

VanderMeer discussed Borne and his other work by email with me recently.

Detail of Theo Ellsworth’s woodcut of Mord

Charlotte Wyatt: Thanks so much for the opportunity to read the new book! I’m a huge fan, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this novel. I love the way place and identity together become a primary concern from the first page.* The first communication Borne offers to Rachel is the scent of the ocean, a reference to the tidal pools of Rachel’s youth. You’ve spoken about the role of place in your fiction, like St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge in Florida and its influence on theSouthern Reach trilogy. Borne is set in an unnamed City, though you offer some tantalizing details about where and how it came about, and the appeal of anonymity “amongst all the wreckage of the Earth.…” Can you talk a little bit about this urban (or post-urban?) landscape, and why you chose it for this story?

Jeff VanderMeer:  I find more and more in my work that certain kinds of distance or anonymity help me to better realize a character or place. This kind of crystalized to me listening to Ottessa Moshfegh talk about her story “The Weirdos” in which she said when she tried to attach a name to the boyfriend that the name brought certain preconceptions with it about who that person was, so she left him nameless. Like, some names would immediately confirm he was a jerk, for example, and she wanted her story to be more subtle than that. And something similar happened in writing one of the novels in the Southern Reach, Annihilation, where characters are just known by their function. It helped me see them more clearly and know them better. Names got in the way.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that leaving the City nameless and even casting doubt on where it might be located made me see it more clearly and also because Borne is the opposition of the Southern Reach trilogy in the style of it. In the Area X books, people fade into the texture of the prose and the wilderness. In Borne, I wanted the people and animals to stand out in stark relief from the setting, and even in purposefully calling the biotech company The Company played into that, especially because I wanted to explore the end results of a situation we often find today—where some multi-national corporation comes into an area, sucks out the resources, destroys the environment, and none of it helps people locally.

CW: One problem I find myself talking to other writers about, especially poets, is the question of anthropomorphism. Namely, how “personification” risks implying non-human life cannot be considered “persons” unless given a human voice and mode of perceiving the world. This is not only a theme in Borne, but is pervasive in the Southern Reach trilogy. Rachel recognizes Borne has senses beyond her own, and while these are key to certain moments in the story, they also fuel Borne’s concerns about personhood. Why did you grant him a sensory perspective so different from Rachel’s and Wick’s?

JV: Unfortunately, I feel that pushing back against anthropomorphism in terms of animal behavior science actually kept that field from recognizing animal sentience for a long time because they didn’t want to attribute intentionality to certain behaviors. And this then became propaganda, a foundational assumption a lot of us seem to have: the less sentient a creature is, the more okay it is to exploit or kill that animal. Personally, I reject that paradigm entirely. We are so ignorant of life on Earth it is painful sometimes. There are juncos on the branches outside my office right now, flitting up and down from seed on the ground, playing amongst themselves, competing for the seed, perhaps even beginning mating rituals. I don’t really care how intentional they are in human terms or how useful they are to human beings. I just know that a junco in the moment is a marvelous creature and deserves our respect and attention like all living things. And I’m mostly thankful for my own intentionality in being able to appreciate the beauty that is a bird in flight. We need, really to also ensure our own survival, to be more mindful of how complex and limitless the world beyond our selves is and cherish that.

As for giving Borne extra senses, I’ve explored this idea many times in my fiction, because if you study any science and perception at all, you realize how limited we are with our paltry five. So I’ve always tried to get beyond the human gaze by imagining what other senses might be like, most notably in my novel, Shriek: An Afterword. But it’s all part of showing how Borne is different from human beings and how having different senses would change your perception of the world in vital ways. Often, Rachel and Borne aren’t quite communicating the way Rachel thinks they are. Take the juncos outside my window. You don’t even have to think of other senses, like possibly having a sense of Earth’s magnetic fields. You can think just of the fact that they perceive the world vertically not horizontally and that they have certain strata of the sky they prefer to inhabit. That by itself creates “alien” perception and I try hard to imagine what that is like. Imagine what it is like for a dolphin living in the ocean, with a sensitivity of skin to water, what kinds of communications occur and mannerisms are conveyed that are beyond our ken. There’s a whole subject for media theory just in the bodies of animals.

CW: And speaking of perspective, why did you choose Rachel, a female refugee, to tell the story of Borne?

JV: I write the characters that come to me naturally, and more and more they are women. I’m less and less interested in a male perspective, to be honest—and the trend continues with the next novel, an ecological thriller, Hummingbird Salamander, is narrated by a middle-age female bodybuilder. Rachel just came to me along with Borne, the first scene where she finds Borne entangled in the fur of the giant bear that terrorizes the city. And as soon as Borne smelled like the sea to her, I knew she came from an island nation.

But in Borne everyone is a refugee, which I thought was an important point to make. We think of “refugees” as “other,” really—they’re not us—which is just so wrong. But in the City everyone’s come fleeing somewhere else or brought there by the Company. A lot of the demonization of refugees that isn’t just plain racist comes from this idea of them existing in a separate space somehow. We want to think it can’t happen here, and thus we perhaps even unthinkingly put up a wall or a difference in perception that’s harmful. I thought that Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West tackled this whole issue so beautifully, with the portals to the West. Just a simple little speculative element that illuminates the situation with such grace and humanity.

CW: I’ve heard you speak a little bit about structure, and how understanding the shape of a story can come early in your process. In Borne, mystery is crucial to the character arcs and ending, and Rachel tells the reader as much from the opening section. Could you tell us how much you knew about your characters’ backgrounds and histories, and about the City’s origins, when you set out to write the novel? When did you know how it would end?

JV: This is probably the most organic novel I’ve ever written, in that so many things came to me unbidden and of a piece. So it’s hard to untangle where one thing came into focus as opposed to some other elements. I think that’s because I always knew that the two “monsters” of the novel might be on some kind of collision course. Where complication came in, that I very much welcomed, it was in the form of a rival to Wick in the City with regard to selling biotech—the Magician. But she was there in the first scenes, too. It’s just that what she meant and what her point of view meant didn’t come to me until a little later. The exact progressions of Borne’s education also weren’t clear at first. Wick’s secrets I knew would in part be based in vulnerability and I just went with that. But it was always my intention to have a very personal story play out against an epic backdrop and the challenge in that case is to make sure the third act doesn’t come to seem like a CGI-laden blockbuster or something—that the personal is very much the anchor instead. I also must say that in addition to taking onboard lessons from Moebius and Jodorowsky, that some of the things the TV show Hannibal did in the end of the second season were highly instructional in terms of how you reveal things to the reader.

As for the very end of the novel, I knew that only in the moment. It was a very cathartic moment—I just wrote those last scenes so deeply in the voice that I hardly knew I was writing them, the aftermath, and I didn’t revise those scenes much at all.

CW: I like the way you use the term “organic” to talk about structure, especially in light of the talk you gave at the University of Houston last month. You used the term “hyperobjects.” [Timothy Morton’s term for “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions, they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.”], and the example you gave was global warming, but in Borne, the designation (or denial) of “personhood” strikes me as a hyperobject in and of itself. What it means to be a “person” permeates (or to use another word from your talk, “contaminates”) every level of the novel and interacts with questions of ecology, civilization, and morality. Could you talk a little bit about how, as a writer, you cultivate this kind of contamination in your work?

JV: One way is simply taking the leap to expose myself to the thoughts and analysis of people in other creative fields and in the sciences. I’ve always tried to do that, but the process has accelerated since Annihilation came out because it’s been formalized—getting invites like the one to the University of Houston, from the art department, for example, or getting invited to DePaul to speak on Earth Day, and doing formal presentations on storytelling and climate change. I meet philosophers, musicians, artists, biologists, and others who come at the issues from a different perspective, and that creates contamination in my own work. It permeates. And I don’t mean in any specific way—I always credit a specific reference or influence—but in general, how I look at the world, which means that incoming stimuli is transformed. Even that junco on the branch changes in its essential nature from some new perspective I’ve taken on board.

But it always means finding the right delivery system, so to speak, for the right ideas. In Borne, it’s, well, Borne and the little animals that seem to be in the backdrop but are more important than that. In the novel I’m working on, Hummingbird Salamander, it’s even more direct because the novel explores eco-terrorism, the illegal wildlife trade, and other topics from a contemporary, here-and-now perspective. The very nature of the mystery in that book allows me to directly grapple with issues that would have seemed preachy or didactic in Annihilation or in Borne.

CW: Maybe a flipside of “personhood” is the problem of nature versus nurture, or culture, and where a line can be drawn between the two. I’m thinking of moments like Rachel’s reflection on her relationship to Wick: “Were we symbiotic or parasitic?” The question is further complicated by the presence of biotech and the actions of the Company, and how the “nature” of “created” life might be defined. A New Yorker profile of your work used the phrase “hidden continuity,” which is altered via Wick’s biotech, for example, with memory beetles that help his clients escape into other people’s memories.

JV: Wick’s biotech seems to me a literalization of what we do all the time when we escape via other media—when we project ourselves onto characters in TV shows and in movies, for example. To want to be someone else, and as we see many examples of in real life, you can sometimes become someone else just by pretending to be. Sometimes all it takes is a change of clothes. I’m fascinated, too, by what’s intentional and what’s not, in terms of recent studies that show some things we take to be from conscious thought not being from conscious thought at all, just that we retroactively rationalize it as being a conscious decision. This speaks to your prior question about animal sentience, because if we are less intentional than we think, but a bee, for example, might be slightly more intentional than we think, then suddenly the gap between us and animals, which was always artificial anyway, becomes much reduced.

But, yes, nature-versus-nurture is explored in the novel, except that it’s totally skewed by the fact that Borne may be created biotech, with the “nature” part reinforced by his “made” existence. The significance of nature versus nuture is thus a very different thing for Borne than for Rachel or for Wick, where they may have more ability to reinvent themselves…even as in the background all kinds of other things are reinventing themselves as well. I’d also say that I’m not entirely sympathetic to the decisions Wick makes and in a different context than the one in Borne, there could easily have been different outcomes relationship-wise.

CW: That makes perfect sense. And speaking of reinvention, I know you’ve talked about this elsewhere regarding your other work and literature in general, but I wonder if you can speak to the elements of speculative or fantasy fiction present in Borne. Time, place, and giant flying bear aside, you have an antagonist who calls herself the Magician, and a protagonist, Rachel, who dissociates from her life by becoming a “ghost” in different scenes. Neither of these terms are used in the strict definitions fantasy or horror fiction might historically give them, but I couldn’t read either word without considering how they have been used in other books. Can you talk about why and how you choose to engage (or subvert, or repurpose) ideas from so-called “genre” fiction?

JV: Just like I think of the Southern Reach trilogy as an uncanny fiction disguised as science fiction, in terms of tone and texture and whatnot, I think of Borne as really fabulist fiction that’s also science fiction. But then I also believe if biotech became part of our every-day lives it would not seem science-fictional. Any more than a smart phone does. But the Magician kind of puts on airs by calling herself that—to suggest something magical about what she does with biotech, which is also a way of sustaining a cult to counter-balance the cult of the Company. And it does get at the idea of gene manipulation being a kind of organic “magic” or something that perhaps has ramifications beyond what we think.

I see Rachel’s dissociation as what has happened to her before that part of the novel, the trauma, truly catching up to her. We often handle something or think we do but then some later crisis pushes the emotion from the prior thing out into the open. So it is a coping mechanism, but also in a sense if the City is ruined and its life seemingly over then the people who inhabit such an urban corpse are, in a way, ghosts. Hauntings in physical form of the past, because the past still lives within them. People can be maps. People can be in their memories a kind of resistance against the dominant narrative. And in that sense, too, the City being anonymous allows the characters to stand out in stark relief.

The courtyard of dead astronauts. Art by Kayla Harren.

CW: And, I can’t help myself—I have to ask about the “astronauts.” Each of their appearances is striking, but the first image, half-buried or planted in the ground, will stay with me forever. What can you tell us about them?

JV: It just came to me in a flash and then I had to decide if they were really astronauts and what people thinking they were astronauts meant in terms of the story—in a sense, people in the City thinking they’re astronauts is a kind of hope about the future or perhaps about the past. But I knew it was a potent image and had some symbolism and so I felt it deserved to enter the story further.

CW: Finally, your presence in the writing world goes far beyond your own books—you help run a writing workshop every summer, do lots of reviews and interviews (thanks again!), you and your wife Ann VanderMeer have edited several anthologies of stories and make up VanderMeer Creative, and you’ve written the great, unique craft guide Wonderbook. I’ve often heard publishing referred to as its own ecosystem, and I wondered how you see yourself within it.

JV: I started writing early and had poetry and stories published in my early teens, and I also always just had this idea in my head that writers were people of letters, so to speak. That you were part of a community and you should also write nonfiction and support other writers, and so it all comes out of that. But also, I guess, on some level it could be considered selfish, because I receive so much back in terms of inspiration and energy from all of these endeavors. It is a continuing education, and as long as you keep yourself open to other people and to other forms of creativity, it enriches your own creativity so much. I love this space and I cherish it, and it feels like a gift.

CW: And, really finally, your books have generated a lot of fan engagement, especially in the form of visual art. (I’m thinking especially of an amazing photograph you posted online, of a park bench in northern Florida’s St. Mark’s refuge where someone had written the text from the Tower in Annihilation!) The film version of Annihilation is set for release later this year, and the rights to Borne have already been acquired by the same producers. While these responses to your work are on vastly different scales, how do you see your role as an author as your stories are assimilated, changed, and given back to you by readers?

JV: Sometimes I don’t engage with it or look at it, if I’m still working on fiction set in a particular “world.” But otherwise, I embrace it and use it. Often, art, for example, created by fans, winds up in limited editions or later editions of a work. I feel blessed that I’m writing fiction that allows space for reader imaginations to engage in such ways. So that too feeds back into my own creativity and is yet another gift.

The post Interview: Jeff VanderMeer on “Borne” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The post “Borne” Artwork appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I. The Detective

The rabbit was dead. Was white. Was dead. Was six feet long. Supine. A trace of red against its mouth. A pocket watch half buried in the sand. Rubbery and indistinct, a blackish waistcoat curled across its midriff. While above us the mountain rose like a threat or a throat, unexpected.

I could smell the death in its matted fur. I could feel its death in the complete, the utter stillness of the body. The eyes stared out into a great nothing, a vast nowhere.

I was supposed to solve this.

Brown eyes, flecked with green. Fur around the mouth, stained green with grass. There was no grass anywhere around here. Bitter winds. Desiccated. Husk.

I stood up, fought the urge to sigh, fought the urge to fight against the gentle pressure on the nape of my neck.

Hush. Dusk. I had spent an hour staring at this apparition, with no insight forthcoming.

What makes death solvable or soluble? What might be considered a clue? The red hissing from the mouth like a long sleek ribbon of snake? The wound to the belly, spilling out like sawdust? The ticktock of the watch on my wrist, telling me to hurry? Should I solve the crime, I’d be much praised. Should I fail, none would care but me.

Behind me somewhere lay the city of teeth and blood and exhaustion and the cries of abandoned children, back alleys with their deeper wounds and the skies full of smoke and the streets at night lighted like strands of emeralds, the towers set to rise like knives cutting the underbelly of the blank sky.

Here, in the desert, the sky was a deep blue shot through with deeper cloud, masked by the mountain rearing out of the sand.

Out here, I had my familiar. In the city, my familiar could not always manifest himself, make himself known to me. No one could manifest in the city all the time. Out here, he could stretch, uncurl, spread his wings of manta ray black to their fullest extent. The desert glinted off of them, melting into a relaxation that seemed earned.

“Rabbit,” I said. It sounded like I just wanted to hear myself talk.

“Rabbit,” my familiar agreed.

I had no name for my familiar. I felt no need for names, even for myself. How could anyone mistake him for another? His shape formed a shadow across me, his breath a black spurling of memory, cloves, desire, and cinnamon. With the desert’s red dust around us, the mountain rising, it seemed I could be his familiar. His voice like a reflection of a star in a pool of still water, his flickering appearance like a piece of gold glimmering up to meet the reflection. In a courtyard in the city. Where a hundred thousand familiars…

“It’s not from here.”

My familiar rippled and coalesced behind me, over me.

“Not from there, either.”

Where a hundred thousand familiars gathered, the motion of their obsidian passage a mighty wave across a parched land…

Helplessness and shame overtook me, the emotions I always feel at the scene of a crime. The death that cannot be catalogued except by time. The death that cannot be avenged except by the deceased, the only person who cannot avenge…anything.

What could my familiar and I do? The taste of continual failure was like ash on my tongue. Yet I could not remember any of my other cases.

***

Sunset. Reds peeling off across the reds of the corpse, the fur flush with dust and dirt and sand.

I felt the tickle in my throat caused by the umbilical that hung between me and my familiar — this cloak, this being that spread out behind me through the celestial air. My familiar was feeding me, and I did not want to be fed.

I saw a children’s book. I saw a large white rabbit. I saw a girl in a dress. I saw a talking caterpillar. The familiar was feeding me what was not familiar. But the story seemed familiar somehow. As if I had pressed my face against a fogged up pane of glass, just barely able to see inside a house of marvels. I shuddered. Stop feeding me.

“You don’t recognize it.”

If a familiar can feel disappointment, I felt that emotion course through its undulating body and into mine. The itchiness in my throat became severe.

“This is not a real murder,” my familiar told me. “This is a dream of murder. It will fade, if you do not recognize it.”

I began to panic. I began to have memories from before the city. I really was a detective once. I knew this; it had not been fed to me. My blood crawled with the knowledge.

What I cannot solve may kill me.

The red desert dust, the clot of dust in the air, like a stroke about to claim me. I could feel the tube from its body to mine in the back of my head, my neck. I could feel it there, coiled like a question mark. The taste of lime on my tongue.

He should have had a real waistcoat. He should have been somewhere else, this rabbit. Not here.

“You will see,” my familiar said. And then said again, in another way: You will see. And you will be amazed.

For that was when the white rabbit shuddered. That’s when the white rabbit shivered. Shook, coughed, wiggled its ears. Sat up. Wiped the blood from its mouth.

“I thought you were broken,” I said to it. “I thought you were dead. I thought you did not know what you were.”

The creature turned to me, its eyes brown and deep: as deep as hazelnut in winter, by a fireplace, in a city, but not the city, except I should not have that memory. Was it fed to me? Was it me?

It turned to me, this creature, and said, “You are the broken one. I’ve been sent to solve you.”

“Solve me? But I’m not dead?”

“How do you know?”

II. The Accounts of Others

“Get out of my brain!” the man shouted while at some far-flung trading post. Dirty shantytown without enough water. Faded grass. A couple of horses looking close to gone. This place would not be here much longer. I had passed through selling knives, but no one needed knives.

“Get out of my brain!” he shouted again.

I didn’t know if he meant the city, or the familiar rising half invisible above him.

The familiar was dead white‚ just drifting in the breeze, in the pale sunlight. The umbilical was like a dry reed. The man could have pulled himself free at any time.

Was I the only one among them who could see it?

I met his wild stare.

“I’ve come to take you back to the city,” I said.

He ignored me. He was already there.

***

There was nothing to stop me from getting there. I had been walking for a long time, but there was still nothing to stop me. Why should there be? I could either walk or stop walking. There’s no real decision in that, is there?

The desert spread out ahead, the city where it had always been: in front of me. It never changed. It always seemed to be in the same place: a dark glitter, a black speck in the corner of my eye. A hint of a scent, taken by the wind. I never made any progress toward it. It never made any progress toward me. You could say we were equals in a way.

Sometimes I passed other people, most of them dead, their flesh flapping off of them like little flags. Sometimes I passed no one but the ever-wheeling hawks against the blue disease that was the sky.  It did not matter. Walking mattered. Finding water mattered. Finding food mattered. Eventually reaching the city mattered. Not minding the mirages mattered.

The mirages could become intense. A mirage could kill you if you let it. You had to want to let it. You had to want to let it inhabit you. It could take any shape, any form.

Like a familiar. I had heard tales about the familiars. The city blossomed with them, all manifesting in different ways. Manta rays. White rabbits. I heard about a detective once. Just once. But never again.

People in the city had lost the thread of living without familiars. People there had just lost the thread, period. Deep wired into the spinal cord. Sucking into them. Sucking out of them. A city of spines. A city of familiars. A city of people. A city of not-people. Had it created them or had they created it?

Sometimes, as I walked, I didn’t think I ever wanted to reach it, though the blisters on my feet yearned for it. Sometimes, it seemed the promise of bliss.

Walking is good, but walking can get to you. Endless walking. When it first occurred to me that the city wasn’t getting closer, I wondered if perhaps I didn’t deserve the city. Sometimes, I thought it didn’t deserve me. Perhaps both were true. But, regardless, there was nothing else to see on the horizon. Nowhere else to head for. It really was the last there. The only there.

And sometimes I would scream at the city. I would drop to my knees and scream in wordless rage. How could it keep evading me? How could it make me keep on walking?

And it’s true. I admit it. Eventually, I begged the city to accept me. I stood there and begged for this dot at the corner of my vision to let me get close.

But by then it was too late. By then it had become a little bit too…familiar.

***

The tube of flesh is quite prophetic. The tube of flesh, the umbilical, is inserted at the base of the neck, although sometimes inserted by mistake toward the top of the head, which can result in unexpected visions. Anyway, the umbilical feeds into the central nervous system. The nerves of the familiar’s umbilical wind around the nerves in the person’s neck. Above the recipient, the manta ray, the familiar, rises and grows full with the knowledge of the host. It makes itself larger. It elongates. The subject goes into shock, convulses, and becomes limp. Motor control passes over to the familiar, creating a moving yet utilitarian symbiosis. The neck becomes numb. A tingling forms on the tongue, and a taste of lime. There is no release from this. There should be no release from this. Broken out from their slumber, hundreds are initiated at a time, the tubes glistening and churling in the lesion of the steam, the communal need. Thus fitted, all go forth in their splendid ranks. Thus filled, all go forth in their splendid ranks. The eye of the city opens and continues to open, wider and wider, until the eye is the world.

This is what I have been told. I have never witnessed it myself. I heard it from a walker.  A man who told me that the city is a mote in his eye. I suppose it might not be true. I cannot verify it. I cannot deny it.

***

A city in her head that could not be true made her wince. A city that she had been searching for her entire life, all across the wastelands that often revealed more of their past than made her comfortable. A city that pulled her out of herself. Something that was more than a Thought but less than an Idea. A city that became so real to her, in its scraps and tatters, that her own life became the abstraction. She saw glistening spires and sudden terror, and an illumination that nearly blinded her. She saw great black shapes passing through the sky, attaching themselves to more mundane shapes. She saw causeways made of air that yet bore weight. A thousand images that could not be real, that would never be enough to sustain her in that vision, that delectation, forever on the tip of her tongue, the word she could not say: the name of the city.

***

I left my lover in the city because I found it too intense. Now all I had of her was memories. Rosebuds. Rose petals. Dried roses. Flowers found in parks and more dangerous places. The thought of the forests in the south of the city where you could always find the blood-soaked remains of a person for whom the familiar had become strange. The visitations in the north. The long palatial glide down the ramp above which gather the blindly searching umbilicals. The music of the city that permeates the air, reaches into the stones, the trees, the rich dirt. The fragrance as of a thousand perfumes, the air jagged with the musk of familiars. The clean, strong lines of buildings. The way everything is planned, so perfectly. One can hardly contain it in one’s mind. It’s like sunlight shining on marble that turns to water that ripples with light as seen through a mirror.

I had broken from the city as she could not. I had proved stronger than my familiar, and feasted on its memories. Now, exiled, I lie in her arms every night and make love to her. Although she is not here, in these tiny rooms in forgotten towns, she stares at me from the bed. This comforts me; she has become my familiar.

The city? I remember little of it now. It is like a long caravan disappearing into distance and time. Day by day, my lover conquers more and more of my memory. Perhaps, one day, it will seem as if I never lived in the city at all.

***

A joke, passed along in the wastelands:

Two men are fighting in the dust, in the sand, in the shadow of a mountain. One says the city exists. The other denies this truth. Neither has ever been there. They fight until they both die of exhaustion and thirst. Their bodies decay. Their bones reveal themselves. These bones fall in on each other until each man is the other. One day, the city rises over them like a new sun. But it is too late.

III. The Detective

“You are the broken one. I’ve been sent to solve you.”

It’s dusk now, when the rabbit tells me this. It’s dusk and there’s no light except the lights of the city at our back. An unimaginable sorrow comes over me. I cannot help it, even with my familiar pumping good thoughts, good images, into me through the umbilical, the cord, the chord, the knot, the fence, the gate, the conduit that reaches him into me.

“No, you’re not dead,” the rabbit says. “And there lies part of the problem. Who can love that which is not dead?”

“Familiar?” I query. Familiar?

But there is no answer. Just the rabbit. Staring me in the eyes. Trying to tell me something.

“Do you want to return to the city?” he asks me.

I turn away to look back at the city. It is as a mote in the corner of my eye.

I tell him, “No. Not really.”

“Then leave this behind.”

The rabbit stands over me. His fur is rough, his scent thick. He brings his arms around my head as if in an embrace. There is a slight sound, indescribable, as he detaches my familiar. My familiar detaches. The weight lifts. The tickle in my throat is gone. I cough, cough again.

Above me, in the dark, with no moon, just the afterglow of sunset, my familiar floats, his voice no longer in my head, my mouth, my guts, my guilt. He is taken on the breeze. He is taken from me. Away. Toward the city. I crane my neck to watch him go. I watch him go: a black manta ray drawn to the lights.

I am alone with the rabbit. I am alone. I was sure the rabbit had been created by my familiar, but now I am not so sure. I am frantically searching my memory for some prior experience, some glimmer, some fragment that will help me.

The rabbit takes my hand, his surprisingly human, and he whispers in my ear. The black waistcoat unwraps itself from his torso and rises until it exists, whole and glistening, above his head, plugged into his neck. His familiar’s tube is bifurcated. As he whispers, part of it coils around my own head. It connects. And there is no city. And there is no sand, no thirst. And I am weeping. I can see the girl and the rabbit and the caterpillar and the rest of it. It is no comfort. I am nowhere again, like the first time, walking with the rabbit into the desert, the familiar’s familiar.

By what right should I have achieved this state? By what right should I never solve my case, only to have it solve me?

Save me. Please.

The post The City appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

AN EXCERPT FROM HOEGBOTTON’S
COMPREHENSIVE TRAVEL GUIDE
TO THE SOUTHERN CITY OF AMBERGRIS

Chapter 77: An In-depth Explanation
For the City’s Apparent Lack of Sanitation Workers
(And Why Tourists Should Not Be Afraid)

Upon the traveler’s first visit to the legendary city of Ambergris, he will soon espy crimson, rectangular flags, no bigger than a scrap of silk cloth, attached to the tops of pencil-thin stakes hammered into dirt or between pavement cracks. Such a traveler, as he peruses the Religious Quarter, the various merchant districts, or even the run-down Industrial District, may also notice the complete absence of rotten food, human excrement, paper refuse, flotsam, jetsam, and the like on the streets — as well as the almost “spit-cleaned” quality of the gutters, the embankments, the front steps of public buildings — and no doubt with a measure of puzzlement, for this sparkling condition contrasts sharply with the disheveled state of Belezar, Stockton, Tratnor, and the other picturesque southern cities that straddle the silt-mad River Moth.

Such a naive traveler (unless having had the good sense to buy this particular guidebook, available in Ambergris itself only at The Borges Bookstore [see Ch. 8, “Cultural Attractions”]) may not at first, or even on second or third glance, discern the connection between the flags, as uniform and well-positioned as surveyors’ marks, and the preternaturally clean quality of the city’s convoluted alleyways. The unobservant or naive traveler, therefore, may never come to understand the city itself, for these flags mark out the territory, and are the only daylight sign, of those unique inhabitants of Ambergris known in the vernacular as “mushroom dwellers.“¹

Travelers should expect a certain tight-lipped anxiety from the locals upon any query as to (1) the red flags, often as clotted and numerous as common weeds, (2) the preternaturally-clean nature of the city, or, especially, (3) “mushroom dwellers.” The curious outsider should not be particularly surprised or alarmed at the stone-faced non-response, or even hostile extremity of response, engendered by such questions. (See Ch. 6, “Survival,” for a list of mannerisms, sayings, and articulations that will charm or mollify angry locals.) A corollary to these questions, “When is the Festival of the Freshwater Squid?” should also be avoided if possible. (See Ch. 5, “The Festival of the Freshwater Squid: Precautions, Preferred Weapons, Hoegbotton Safe Houses.)

However, given a choice between satisfying rampant curiosity on these matters through consultation with the locals or through interrogation of the mushroom dwellers themselves, it would be advisable for even the adventurous traveler to seek out the nearest local. The mushroom dwellers generally remain mute on any subject related to their close-knit clan, nor are they likely to help the disoriented or lost traveler find his way to a safer part of the city.² Nor are they likely to converse with the casual passerby on any topic, especially as their only documented language consists of equal parts clicks, grunts, and moist slapping sounds that have thus far frustrated even the most prominent linguists.

Nor should it be expected that the average visitor will actually ever set eyes upon a mushroom dweller. These shy citizens of Ambergris³ sleep from dawn until dusk, and although the red flags often do indicate the close proximity of mushroom dwellers, they are likely to be resting below ground. Such flags — always found in clumps, except when a single flag marks the doorstep to a house or building⁴ — may simply indicate an opening to the network of old sewage conduits and catacombs that have existed since the First Construction Empire presided over by Trillian the Great Banker. (See Ch. 3, “Rulers, Tyrants, and Minor Merchant Barons.”)

It has been put forth by the noted naturalist and social scientist L.(oqueem) Bender — cousin to the great opera composer Voss Bender (see Ch. 2, “Native Celebrities) — from the bloodstained notes discovered near the sewer duct where he was last seen (see Ch. 15, “Unsolved Mysteries of the City”) that the mushroom dwellers have excellent night vision, but that as a consequence of their generations-old sleeping patterns, their eyes can no longer bear any but the weakest sunlight. If true, this intolerance would certainly explain the wide-brimmed floppy gray felt hats they wear during the day (and which, in combination with their short statures, diurnal habits, and long necks, have no doubt given them their eccentric reputation).⁵ Bender’s notes include fascinating physical details about the “mushroom dwellers,” whom he once, during the early days of his research, described as “merry little pranksters”: “I find they are remarkably strong, this strength at least partially due to a low center of gravity combined with thick, flat feet, extremely well-developed, almost root-like leg muscles, and very large yet supple hands.” Although it is not advisable to attack a mushroom dweller, or even to defend oneself from an attack (L. Bender, in his later notes, recommends standing quite still if charged by a mushroom dweller) it should be noted that their long, strangely delicate necks will break easily if the traveler can get past the clinging, flailing hands thrown up in defense (and which, coincidentally, may be groping for the traveler’s own neck).

It was L. Bender who first conducted credible scientific studies⁶ of the mushroom dwellers’ two main preoccupations: mushroom harvesting and the daily cleansing of Ambergris. L. Bender discovered that the ritual cleaning of the city’s streets provided them rich leavings with which to propagate their midnight crop of fungus. “Although the mushrooms are grown underground for the most part, and may reach heights of four feet, weights of 60 pounds,” L. Bender wrote, “on occasion a trail of mushrooms — like a vein of rich gold or silver — will burst out from the netherworld to riot in a spray of mauve, azure, yellow ochre, violet, and dead man’s gray upon the walls of a merchant’s pavilion or across the ceiling of a mortician’s practice.”

L. Bender’s studies further proved that the mushroom dwellers nightly mastery of city refuse was due not to incredible efficiency so much as to a large population — they simply exist in greater numbers than previously thought by so-called “experts,” much as a single cockroach seen implies the existence of a dozen cockroaches unseen. Second, by studying the few civil records still in existence, as well as the 30-year writings of the obsessed statistician Marmey Gort⁷, L. Bender discovered that over hundreds of years Ambergris’ citizens had altered their patterns of consumption and refuse disposal to accommodate easy pick-up by the mushroom dwellers.

The locals’ treatment of the mushroom dwellers varies drastically between valley residents and city residents (see Ch. 9, “Cultural Differences Between Valley and City, And How to Exploit These Differences to Get Better Bargains”), no doubt because the city folk have spun a complex series of legends around the mushroom dwellers, while the valley folk, who rarely see them, know them only from the watered-down versions of such stories.⁸

These legends run the gamut from the inspired to the inane, although the traveler will, as mentioned previously, find it hard going to pry even a word or two from the lips of locals. Some folk believe the mushroom dwellers whisper and plot among themselves in a secret language so old that no one else, even in the far, far Occident, can speak it. Others weave tales of an origin in the subterranean caves and tunnels beneath Ambergris, inferring that they are not of human stock. Still others claim they are escaped convicts who gathered in the darkness many years ago and now shun the light from guilt over their forebears’ crimes. The sailors on the docks have their own stories of mushroom dwellers as defilers of priests and murderers of young women to provide nutrients for their crop of fungus. The poor and under-educated spread rumors that the mushroom dwellers have supernatural powers — that newts, golliwogs, slugs, and salamanders follow in their path while above bats, nighthawks, and whippoorwills shadow them. And, even among the literati, especially among the Shortpin Group led by the noted author Sirin, irresponsible gossip has revived the old chestnut that the mushroom dwellers can “control our minds simply by spreading certain mushroom spores throughout the city’s public places, where they may be inhaled all unknowing by the general populace, this inhalation soon followed by an unnatural fascination with fungus, and, of course, an unwavering devotion to the mushroom dwellers.“⁹

However, the most ridiculous version of their origin postulates that they once belonged to a guild of janitors, ordained by the Priests of the Seven-Edged Star when that order ruled the city so many centuries ago (see Ch. 21, “Conflicting Religions”) and that, during the lawless Days of the Burning Sun, they became feral, seeking haven underground as a desperate remedy for unemployment and the persecution meted out to public workers as a form of protest against the government. (See Ch. 1, “A History of the City.”) While this theory provides an explanation for the mushroom dwellers need to “cleanse” the city of refuse, it ignores the blatantly spiritual nature of their many rituals.

In any event, anecdotal evidence from rare eyewitnesses (including two of the compilers of this book) suggests that the city folk secretly worship the mushroom dwellers¹⁰, setting out plates of eggs and moist bread or mugs of milksop for them at night, while some young girls and boys, strangely unafraid, have been known to feed them by hand as they would pigeons or squirrels. For the traveler interested in a more scholarly pursuit of the mushroom dweller myth, the L. Bender Memorial Museum, until recently kept up by his wife, Galendrace Bender¹¹, provides a good starting and ending point. The museum contains the actual bloodstained notes discovered near L. Bender’s last known location. It also displays items L. Bender stole from an underground mushroom dweller religious site, including such enigmatic objects as an ancient umbrella, a duck embryo preserved in ether, a mop even more ancient than the umbrella, and the steering wheel to a now-extinct motored vehicle.

As with most attractions in Ambergris, however, the careful traveler should not visit the museum after dark. To reiterate the safety precautions set out in Ch. 13, the wise tourist should avoid the following areas after nightfall: the Religious Quarter, the Industrial District, the Majori Merchant District, the Hoegbotton Merchant District (save for the Hoegbotton Safe Houses, half-price during the monsoon season), the docks, and the old bureaucratic center. Mushroom dwellers are notoriously near-sighted despite their fabled night vision, and have been known to mistake even the best-dressed gentleman as an exotic form of refuse, fit to be processed and dragged underground.

If confronted by mushroom dwellers (they often travel in groups of 50 or more) safe places (in addition to the Hoegbotton Safe Houses) include: (1) the top floors of tall buildings, especially buildings that do not possess dumbwaiters or air ducts; (2) the topmost branches of tall trees; mushroom dwellers are mediocre climbers at best and will, at dawn, forget their prey and return below ground, allowing the traveler ample opportunity to escape any light-sensitive sentry they might leave behind; (3) the center of large groups of fellow tourists (groups of locals may be inclined to give the unsuspecting traveler up).

The traveler planning a vacation to Ambergris this year should not be unduly alarmed by the information set out above. In fact, there have been far fewer tourist fatalities this year than in the previous three years combined, no doubt due in part to the extensive city-wide bloodletting that occurred at last year’s Festival of the Freshwater Squid (see Ch. 5). For this reason, it is the opinion of the editors of this guide¹² that even travelers who too closely investigate the apparent absence of sanitation workers in Ambergris will enjoy a pleasant stay.

____

¹ Please see “Exploration of a Theme,” the rather inaccurate if pleasant rendering by the famous collage artist of the last century, Michael Shores. Shores has included in his montage an even earlier and more whimsical drawing of the ‘monkfish’ by the celebrated draftsman Nablodsky. “Exploration” is currently on display at the Voss Bender Memorial Art Museum.

² For a list of inexpensive Hoegbotton Safe Houses, please refer to Appendix A.

³ Sometimes referred to as “mushies” by the locals when drunk, but never when sober; indeed, if the mischievous traveler wishes to provoke a full-scale riot, he simply need shout into a crowded tavern or church, “You’re all a load of stupid ‘mushies!’ “.

⁴ Do Not Enter any such marked house or building. Often, these dwellings will, on closer inspection, prove to contain relatives mourning a late relative still encased in a living room casket. The mushroom dwellers seem particularly sensitive to the presence of death.

⁵ Incidentally, L. Bender posthumously received the Manque Kashmir Award of Achievement from the Morrow Institute of Social Research for “his close friendship with and in-depth studies of the mushroom dwellers.” The book of his notes published by the Institute is on sale at the aforementioned Borges Bookstore.

⁶ Previously, there had only been such romantic renderings as a slight description in Voss Bender’s famous opera “The Refraction of Light in A Prison” sung by the distraught, suicidal Frange when he looks out of his window to exclaim:

What mystery fringed by dusky dawn
has given the soul of misery form?
Has the face of love come stumbling
crippled and confused to mewl ‘neath
a sneering moon? No, ‘tis only the elders
of the city eager to cleanse, and pray

More descriptive is this melodramatic passage from Dradin Kashmir’s semi-autobiographical short novel Dradin, In Love: “Positioned as he was at the mouth of the alley, Dradin felt as though he were spying on a secret, forbidden world. Did [the mushroom dwellers] dream of giant mushrooms, gray caps agleam with the dark light of a midnight sun? Did they dream of a world lit only by the phosphorescent splendor of their charges?”

⁷ Gort kept minutely detailed records of city denizens’ sanitary habits, including their storage of refuse. A typical entry reads: “X — outhouse use increase: av. 7x/day (5 min. av. ea.); note: garbage output up 3x for week: connex?”

⁸ As recently as three years ago, a mushroom dweller that wandered into the valley, presumably by mistake, was lynched by an angry mob of tradesmen. (Coincidentally, short travelers, defined as “under four feet six inches tall,” are advised not to visit the valley without several sets of corroborating identification.)

⁹ L. Bender seems to have disproved this once and for all in his final set of notes, when he writes, “Not only did I allow them to sprinkle my entire naked body with the spores, but I readily breathed them in. At no point did I lose control of my mind. At no point did I fall asleep, or come under the spell of a hypnotic trance.” Thus, the spores appear to be a friendly form of ritual welcome.

¹⁰ Two editors, it should be noted, preferred the phrase “secretly fear,” followed by “setting out placatory plates.”

¹¹ Sadly, Ms. Bender, a noted specialist on fungus reproduction, did not long survive her husband’s death. She disappeared one month before this revised guide went to press, leaving behind a letter in which she indicated she had decided to live in the catacombs among the mushroom dwellers. A postscript to the letter which read in part, “I believe the mushroom dwellers are doomed angles [angels?] who have lost their wings, their position, and even any knowledge of their glorious past, and now consigned to a lugubrious state of semi-awareness,” does not say much for her current mental state and it is only to be hoped that she will indeed someday emerge from the catacombs. [Ms. Bender was a frequent contributor to the Ambergris travel guide — she contributed greatly to this very article — and her expertise will be sorely missed. –Eds.]

¹² Six in agreement, two in abstention.

The post Exhibit H appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Both works use it and deal with it, but where Danielewski metaphorizes it in an object (a book), VanderMeer remarkably refuses to do the same. VanderMeer, on the contrary, leaves fiction be as a “state” experienced both by the characters and the readers. Fiction in the “Southern Reach” is the very fabric of the novel. In a way, one could say, that is the visible fabric of the invisible fabric, and vice-versa – as, like Area X, its borders are uncertain and keep expanding.

This trilogy appears at a very important time, when academics from all sides try to define “Fiction”, “Fictionality” and “Genre”. This desperate need to control an ever-fleeing territory is beautifully illustrated in “The Southern Reach” by the generic names of the characters – the biologist, the psychologist, Control, etc. – and the impossibility of their task.

What makes things interesting regarding Fiction is that the purpose of the tasks given to each character goes directly against the overall mission, which is to “understand” Area X. The vagueness of each mission, as well as their results, the strange consequences, the paranoid secrecy destroy any gain that could come out of these expeditions. In a way, like with the old Lovecraftian trope, trying to read “Area X” will make you go insane, as with the Necronomicon.

But although the Lovecraftian element is there – especially if one thinks of “The Colour Out of Space” – there is absolutely no mystique in “The Southern Reach”, no old gods or secret rites. Although it might sound unimportant, I think, on the contrary, that it is essential. The “Southern Reach” is not about beliefs, nor does it offer a new mythical explanation of everything – it is, only and solely, about “Area X”, which is precisely the ultimate non-explanation. Or rather – although there is an explanation – it doesn’t change anything.

And this is radically new – it places The Southern Reach in a no-place, that is to say in-between genres and Fiction categorizations, like Kafka, Borges and Burroughs. It is, therefore, purely literature and purely Fiction – an “Area X” in itself. It is a radical attempt and success in re-shuffling the old literary cards and inventing new rules. What we need now is to invent new names for the game – or do we, really?

The post The Southern Reach Trilogy and the Question of Fiction appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: I feel like Southern Reach really pushes the boundaries of weird fiction into new territory in a number of ways. Was that something you consciously tried to do with Southern Reach?

Jeff VanderMeer: I don’t know that weird fiction per se is known for characterization in the traditional sense, but for me the best weird tales are populated by interesting eccentrics and ne’er-do-wells who you’re interested in following as they encounter the unknown. So the first part of the answer to your question is that my first commandment was “follow the characters” and get their arcs right. I felt like the clues and revelations about the central uncanny mystery would fall into place as a result of that focus.

But there’s also no doubt that coediting the massive The Weird anthology with my wife Ann created a substrate of over a hundred years of peculiar fiction in the back of my reptile brain. Something about the speed with which we had to put the book together and read so many stories meant a lot of things got assimilated swiftly.

Added to that is the personal connection to the landscapes the characters move through, the wilderness I feel I know now to some degree. So in a round-about way, my answer is that I didn’t consciously try to push boundaries but that all of these influences came together in a natural confluence and out through the writing. Still, it’s true that I wanted to write something that didn’t bore me and wasn’t like something I’d read a thousand times before. So in terms of the pacing and editing of scenes and sections I was engaging in a form of play—playing off of the fiction I’ve read and reader expectations.

WFR: Southern Reach has been given various different labels. Most commonly, it seems like people describe it as science fiction but it’s also been described as speculative fiction, weird fiction, and just general fiction. How do you tend to describe the Southern Reach yourself? Do you still even think of it as weird fiction?

JV: This is a difficult question and one that, to me, is all in the eye of the beholder. When I think of the trilogy I think about the characters and the wilderness aspects—the aspects of expedition, and what that word means. Then I think in a secondary way about the weird fiction aspects, and then the SF elements. There’s a practical concern in all of this too. What do you spend the most time with as a writer? First the characters, then getting aspects of the weird affect correct. Last comes the SF element because that’s only on the page a small percentage of the time. It’s not that the SF element isn’t important, just that there are so many other places you spend your effort and attention as a writer. Now, for readers, the answers may be as various, but I don’t presume to speak for them. I will say, however, that FSG Originals made the entry point for readers as gentle and as wide as possible with those incredible covers and the marketing and PR for the books. You’d think that would just be about crass commercial issues but it’s really about the reading experience and how the reader perceives a book and their challenge was ensuring that a reader who might like the novels but not typically pick up SF would in fact take a chance on the novels.

WFR: Were there any science fiction works that influenced the Southern Reach? And do you think that reading works outside of weird fiction in other genres, etc. can help writers create better weird fiction?

JV: Any writer is better off reading voraciously and across all kinds of fiction. The more curious you are and the more wide-ranging, the more you bring back to your fiction. I’ve mostly read mainstream literary fiction the past couple of years and in the past binged on space opera and on experimental fiction and I love all of it. There’s very little I don’t like if it’s done well or in an interesting way.

In terms of science fiction, it is probably mostly on the weird side of things. For example, Hodgson’s House on the Borderlands, which holds up even today. Also “The Other Side of the Mountain” by Bernanos, a short novel in The Weird. The works of Jodorowsky are hugely influential as well as the fiction and art of Leonora Carrington. Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which has three interlocking but separate novellas also was very useful to have in the back of my head. The works of Angela Carter, Edward Whittemore, Vladimir Nabokov are always also in my mind. Stepan Chapman’s The Troika, which breaks every rule of fiction.

WFR: Do you think you’ll explore this sort of area along the fringes of weird fiction in future works?

JV: I’m sure I will. At the moment, I’m working on a novel called Borne that is perhaps less weird and more influenced by manga and anime, or some mix thereof. I’m also working on a short story that might get long entitled “The Birdwatchers” that’s set in the Southern Reach universe. Here’s the beginning of it, just as a teaser:

Once there had been biologists here, in numbers so great that the forgotten coast shook with the aftermath of their passage. These men and women bestrode the terrain like conquerors, sent by government money in the form, it was rumored, of gold bars well-hidden that could not devalue or decay like the money kept in banks. They were thus ungoverned by the dictates of barter or of neighborly responsibility that had bound this place for so long.

In the summer of that first year they established their headquarters in the ruins of the ghost town, a bivouac of scientists unprecedented for that place even when it had been alive. As they spread out across their migratory range, the biologists as observed by the locals began to carry out a series of arcane rituals. They shoved pieces of swamp grasses and bits of bark into vials. They put up tents out in “the field” as they called it, even when it was just black swamp. They used binoculars, scopes, and microscopes. They took readings with innumerable peculiar instruments. At times, they stopped in their labors to swear about the heat and humidity, which did not endear them.

The biologists tagged many living things—at least one of every creature that moved and breathed across the pine forests and the cypress swamp, the salt marshes and the beach. They took fine nylon nets and set up capture zones for songbirds, running clod-stepped to the rescue of what they had themselves endangered. Fragile wings and fragile beaks, heads to the side; small eyes looking up at giants that held their bodies in half-closed fists. They tagged so many things, had brought so many tranq darts, that the blue caps removed from the tips still showed up years later in the marshes, along the river bank or crushed into the gravel of the dirt roads.

In their heyday, at the zenith of their powers, some said their boot prints outnumbered the tracks of deer and raccoons and otters on the salt flats.

But over time, the effort that had quickened slowed, the impulse behind it dulled, and the biologists began to die out. Their mobile tents that had once dotted the camping ground near the lighthouse began to disappear. The sounds of their idle conversations before expeditions in the early morning became muted and infrequent. That last spring there might have been a hundred of them and by the fall only four or five. It was a mass extinction created by lack of grant renewal, a matching funds disaster, and a moving on of government attention, that great eye roving toward other lands and foreign wars.

WFR: At its core, the Southern Reach is a story about the search for knowledge. In the first book, the biologist is looking for answers as to what happened to her husband; in the second book, Control is trying to undercover the secrets behind Area X and the Southern Reach; and so forth. In this respect, it’s reminiscent of works like Goethe’s Faust and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand.” Did other works or perhaps real-life events influence this theme?

JV: Aren’t we all seeking answers? To be glib for a second. But also serious. Part of the effect created by the weird is about seeking answers but not necessarily finding them. You could say the second half of that equation is just as much part of what the weird espouses. To be willing to say you don’t get all of the answers, ever. In that way, the weird is oddly aligned with certain forms of mainstream literary fiction where the story has an open kind of ending. Yes, some weird fiction ends with a twist or a full-on revelation. But the best stuff keeps open the blissful possibility of never knowing everything. We are defined in a sense by our inquisitiveness, and with inquisitiveness comes the arrogance that we are in control and thus have achieve peace of mind through knowledge. Whereas writers have been telling us for ages that’s a false comfort. At some point, the universe reveals itself to you as uncaring and your place in it none too secure. Which is just fine. There’s comfort in that, too, because it’s the truth.

WFR: Have you gotten any indication that Southern Reach might be helping to boost weird fiction readership and might be exposing readers to weird fiction that haven’t read it before?

JV: It’s really hard to quantify. I do know I’m getting a lot of “I don’t usually read SF/horror/fantasy but liked this” reactions. I certainly hope it makes readers pick up more weird fiction. I think it’s a category that’s definitely got affinities with writers who read in the general fiction category can get on board with—they mostly know Kafka and Borges and writers like that. And it’s not at all far into weird territory from there. And, again, I feel like publishers being smart about how they package and market weird fiction is half the battle. If you put a book cover in front of a general reader that screams “messed up” that’s going to turn them off. It’s as simple as that. No amount of saying “yes but that shouldn’t matter” is going to help you. It’s one of those useless territorial battles to say “I must define this as core SF/F/Horror or I’m betraying my ideals.” Instead, it’s better to listen to readers and to speak to them in their language, not impose yours. The fiction itself is still the same.

WFR: Looking back, what were some of your favorite weird fiction elements that you included into Southern Reach?

JV: I’ll try not to spoil too much, but simply point to these elements: hand-hair, mountain moving, weird wall, mound of journals, smashed mosquito, and cell phone.

WFR: Tell us about the new Area X omnibus. Is the text revised? Who did the cover design for this book?

JV: I did cut about three pages from Authority and trim some other sections a tad in anticipation of a continuous read from those who pick up the omnibus. I also altered just a couple of little things in Annihilation and Acceptance for continuity reasons. Rodrigo Corral did the cover design.

WFR: With the success of Southern Reach, do you plan to devote more time toward writing?

JV: I’ve been a full-time writer since 2007, but that has included books I’ve edited being part of the equation, as well as nonfiction. I don’t think that’s going to change. Fiction is my first love—the most personal thing to me—but all evidence to the contrary I’m a fairly slow writer and need other projects in between to keep me stimulated. So expect The Big Book of SF, another big anthology, co-edited with Ann, and a new coffee table book in the mix along with the next novel. All of this feeds into the fiction anyway.

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WFR Interrogatory:

Dear Readers:

–Who are some of your favorite writers of weird fiction, especially those who tend to be overlooked or are underrated in your opinion?

Your answers will  help WFR determine who and what to cover in the coming months.

Sincerely,
Oddkin, Weirdie, & Old Peculiar

Clarkesworld Magazine has hosted a roundtable with just a few of the contributors to our The Weird compendium, centered around the subject of “What is The Weird?” Their answers are various and fascinating.

Our own take on it is can be found in our intro to The Weird, where we cite Lovecraft’s classic definition as well as make the argument for the influence of Kafka, especially after World War II.

What was Lovecraft’s definition? In 1927, he wrote that the weird tale “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane—a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or defeat of…fixed laws of Nature”—through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.

As we write in our introduction, “Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions. Because The Weird is as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing, the most keenly attuned amongst us will say ‘I know it when I see it,’ by which they mean ‘I know it when I feel it’—and this, too, the more rigorous of categorizing taxidermists will take to mean The Weird does not exist when, in fact, this is one of the more compelling arguments for its existence.”

In  Michael Moorcock’s  foreweird to the anthology, he writes about the tension in weird fiction between an unwillingness to be pigeonholed and yet finding useful entry points for readers: “Generally the real tensions in literary forms come from that which can be readilycommodified and branded and that which cannot. Fritz Leiber, one of the best American stylists I knew, told me that he had talked about this with two Weird Tales contributors Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame) and Henry Kuttner (primarily an SF writer). All had begun writing unrationalised fiction, having much in common with surrealism or absurdism, to discover very quickly that literary magazines wanted an approximation of realism and commercial markets needed to know why, forcing you to cook up some sort of rationalization for the events you described so that you came to see your failure to rationalize as some sort of flaw or laziness in yourself.”

Among other fascinating ideas found in his idiosyncratic afterweird, China Mieville asserts that “The fact of the Weird is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten, ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged edges, things are looking at us.” (Next week, WFR will post a substantial excerpt from Mieville’s afterweird.)

The idea of things looking at the reader from the story is deeply weird, and also hints at the sense in the best weird fiction of something beyond hidden in the paragraph, an almost luminous quality of meaning just beyond comprehension. The best weird tales also reward multiple readings and like the best fiction generally seem to change or shift upon re-reading.

Don’t forget to tell us about your favorite weird writers.

The post The Weird: What Is It?…and Is It Watching You? (Give Us Your Picks) appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.