China Miéville on what weird fiction means to him:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m teaching a course in Weird Fiction at the University of Warwick, so this has come up a lot. Obviously it’s kind of impossible to come to anything like a final answer, so I approach this in a Beckettian way – try to define/understand it, fail, try again, fail again, fail better…I think the whole “sense of cosmic awe” thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird.
Sounds a lot like that old, much derided sfnal concept of sense of wonder, that moment of conceptual breakthrough you get when you’re shown what the universe is really like. In its most mundane form it’s achieved by plopping a Big Dumb Object in front of the reader (Ringworld frex), at its best it’s a literary thrill that no other genre can offer. Weird fiction is one of those genres that’s even less definable than science fiction, but it does have the same sensawunda, if in a more horrorific sense. The best example is H. P. Lovecraft with his dread and revulsion about the scale of the universe and the insignificance of mankind, the anti-science fiction writer.
Incidently, for a personal sort of horror, the opening sentence fragment, “China Miéville (1972 – )”, has it. Two years older than me and look how much more he has accomplished. Moments like that I appreciate where Michel Vuijlsteke is coming from when he talks about how much he had wanted to leave some sort of legacy behind. Work is alright but just work, at best an interesting and challenging way to make money, but not something people will remember you for or all that important in the scheme of things, while unlike Michel I also don’t see myself ever having kids and leaving my mark on the world in that way. There must be more to life than work and entertainment.
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