Exploring the Ecological Weird, Part 3

See Part I and Part II.

Introduction

James Bradley, author of Clade and The Silent Invasion, is a journalist and critic I admire, for he explains eco-literature thoughtfully and thoroughly. When reviewing Jeff VanderMeer’s novels in the Sydney Review of Books, Bradley touches upon weird fiction:

With their atmosphere of nameless dread and terrifying transformation the Area X novels exist within the tradition of what is usually described as the Weird, a branch of writing that incorporates elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, yet eschews the tropes usually associated with these genres. Not quite a genre, more an affect or technique, the exact nature and boundaries of the Weird (and indeed the more recent effusions of writers such as China Miéville that are sometimes described as the New Weird) are imprecise and contested: in The Weird, the 2011 anthology VanderMeer edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer, the VanderMeers argued it is as much ‘a sensation as it is a mode of writing’, and that ‘because the Weird 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 modes of writing’. It’s perhaps a measure of the speed with which this field – and indeed our appreciation of the scale of the crisis we inhabit – has moved in recent years that the introduction to the VanderMeers’ The Weird does not mention environmental questions, despite having been published a mere three years before the Southern Reach Trilogy. Yet still, there is something pleasingly recursive about this notion of the Weird as an invisible presence, shadowing other genres and forms, unnameable yet present all the same.

This is a good thought to help introduce this short series’ finale,  Part III of “Exploring the Ecological Weird”, where we find ourselves in the grips of large-scale environmental crises. I like the idea that weird fiction can be discussed as an affect, technique, or sensation rather than a genre. I think also that eco-fiction overall is an exploration into topical writing that intersects many other genres–and when it finds the weird, that’s when things get interesting.

In the Sydney Review of Books, Bradley went on to say: “Yet however we define the Weird, the Southern Reach novels suggest a new twist, something we might call a New New Weird, or perhaps an Ecological Uncanny.” Part III of this series looks at a sampling of the newest of the weird–and some immediate precursers. This final part also looks at ecologically strong weird fiction that addresses, sometimes subtly, modern ecological concerns, such as climate change. When I hear the term “climate change” these days it seems lost. It feels saturated in use, yet often it is not really understood nor totally accepted as being real. Since the 1970s, however, scientists have converged on the fact it is happening, and since those times authors have been trying to work with this hyperobject in fiction. Little did we realize how uncanny the world, and our places in it, would become. Bradley adds:

Writing in 2015 Siobhan Carroll noted the way the Area X books make manifest our creeping awareness that the distinctions we have traditionally maintained between the natural world and ourselves no longer make sense, and that ‘in the Southern Reach trilogy, it is no longer just one’s psychological depths that are being repressed, but one’s knowledge of oneself as nonhuman, as much an alien part of a natural world as a plant or a whale.’ Rebecca Giggs has likewise described the Ecological Uncanny in terms of the dissolution of the boundaries between the inner world of the self and the outer world engendered by climate change, suggesting that ‘the Ecological Uncanny is perhaps best encapsulated as the experience of ourselves as foreign bodies’.

Weird fiction is full of alien and haunted worlds. Yet what we think of as weird might not always be weird but entirely natural. It’s only human perception that gets in the way of making sense of what non-human nature is. So-called ecological weird fiction is rare fiction that tries to break down the barrier and realizes the horror, fantasy, mystery, illogical, bizarre, uncanny, and wildness of the natural world surrounding us, while taking into consideration our old insignificant place in deep time or the way we have changed the global landscape drastically and permanently in the Anthropocene, which is significant and haunts us. In the sense that weird fiction is now recognizing and exploring ecological subjects, it tries to break out of the status quo. It’s also fun to read because it has suspense and drama to uncage us.

The first part of this series relied heavily on Brad Tabas’s Dark Places: Ecology, Place, and the Metaphysics of Horror Fiction, which is a good introduction to weird fiction writers exploring natural places, and covers earlier writings such as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote heavily about place. The following authors continue into the new new weird, or the ecological uncanny of the modern times, or whatever you want to call it. Note that this is not to be confused with the “new weird” but may be related. The new weird, and really a lot of newer weird, defies traditional tropes and crosses genre boundaries–which is what eco-fiction itself does as well. The following sections show a sample of newer authors tackling ecological hyperobjects and uncanniness. Again, please forgive me for providing such a short sample below, but it’s all I have time for, and I hope that the references and links in this series lead you down a wonderful rabbit hole.

J.G. Ballard

Known as a New Wave science fiction writer, starting in the 1960s Ballard is also sometimes seen as a pioneer to modern novels that tackle climate change. He was not the first to look at apocalyptic weather-related events; such topics have permeated science and literary fiction forever, but one of Ballard’s motifs involved weather and/or long-term climate events that were brought on by the kind of trajectory we see in the Anthropocene–by industrial waste, for instance. His three world novels: The Drowning World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World, all published in the 1960s, had ecological themes, and were also wildly weird with description. Take “The Illuminated Man,” which originated as a short story of an expedition to uncover a weird crystallization process and was fleshed out to become the novel The Crystal World. The Weird Fiction Review‘s Eric Schaller wrote an article titled “From Machen to VanderMeer: The Weird Landscape as an Avatar of Evil, which comments on the story-turned-novel:

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…”

Schaller looks at several stories in his article, but his conclusion–that the evil in landscapes may come from poison or infection–compares older weird landscapes to modern ones. In older literature, the evil had a religious meaning. He states:

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.

Schaller later summons Pogo’s “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” and goes on to discuss the ecological concerns of Jeff VanderMeer’s work, which is not about gods or religious concepts of evil but the evil of humans poisoning the land.

Ballard’s 1964 short story “The Drowned Giant” was one of four stories not included in the Weird Compendium but was covered in the Weird Fiction Review by Christopher Burke. “The Drowned Giant” was published in the anthology The Terminal Beach. Burke states that stories like these, from Ballard, resisted the nebulous category of New Wave, entering into the weird. The story features a giant that dies and is found on a beach. The narrator, and several of the nearby town’s onlookers, watch as the giant decomposes and then as its remaining parts are further dismembered to various places in the nearby town. It’s a story about identity and what it means to be human. It is a story about resource allocation. Burke calls this a story with an anti-gestational tendency and states:

The juxtaposition of the mundane and the spectacular is just one of many such contradictions present in “The Drowned Giant” and the rest of of Ballard’s work. Presented here are life and death, the animate, anonymous collective and inanimate, identifiable singular, utility and futility, the mysterious otherworldly and the rational investigations of science.

Like other writers of apocalypse and weird horror, Ballard’s work was a precursor to what we see as modern Anthropocene writers who also fiddle with the weird and the “mysterious otherworldly” concept we have of nature.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Kiernan trained as a vertebrate paleontologist and has authored scientific papers, but also began her published fiction career in 1992. In an interview with the Weird Fiction Review‘s Jeff VanderMeer, she says, when asked about how weird fiction stories affected her when growing up:

In this way, they were a profound comfort, as was my passion for paleontology, geology, and herpetology. I’d walk around in the woods or through old rock quarries telling myself stories aloud, stories I never wrote down. They were my stories, to keep me company. I never had a lot of friends as a child, so, often, those secret stories became my friends.

In the interview, she states, regarding H.P. Lovecraft, “Deep time is critical to his cosmicism, the existential shock a reader brings away from his stories. Our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large. In all possible universes.” It seems that Kiernan has a host of influences for her writing, but the weirdness of nature seems to be a big one–uniting some of her influences such as the otherworldiness of Lovecraft and her paleontologist and scientific studies.

Deep time is an interesting concept when manifesting in fiction. The phrase refers to a long geologic time period, the multi-billion year age of Earth. When describing humans, or humanity within that time, we have been here a relatively short time–or one minute and seventeen seconds on the twenty-four-hour Earth clock. This may make humans also seem relatively insignificant, but, going past Lovecraftian times, it seems our significance in the Anthropocene has made some heady gains.

Kiernan’s stories are punctuated with various themes, but among these also are paleontological discoveries and mysteries–bringing the deep time of historical artifacts and mythologies into modern literature. Some examples of this are the discovery of a trilobite-like fossil in Threshold and the Greek Sirens mythology in The Drowning Girl, of which Tor.com’s Theresa DeLucci says, “India Morgan Phelps, aka Imp, becomes obsessed with an 18th-century painting and a girl named Eva, who might be a muse, a mermaid, might be feral, might be a ghost, or might be another delusion of Imp’s damaged mind.” Threshold‘s frail-looking heroine Dancy Flammarion extends through a few of Keirnan’s stories and often tangles up with creatures of myth, of the wild. Then there’s The Red Tree, in which a new tenant in an old house discovers its previous tenant’s obsession with an gnarled old oak on the corner of the property.

In an interview with Charles Tan, at the San Francisco Signal, Tan discussed Kiernan’s story “Fake Plastic Trees,” which appeared in the anthology After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Kiernan notes:

Generally, I dislike science fiction as a predictive medium, but certain outcomes seem almost inevitable, given the present course of our civilization. Here, obviously, I’m referring to stories that focus on more realistic threats – ecological collapse, global warming and climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, and so forth. So, yeah, I can say I feel a responsibility to write this sort of fiction, as a warning, and especially as a warning to YA readers. They’re inheriting a pretty messed up world, and they need to know where it might be headed, and how they may be able to avoid the very worst of the consequences of their predecessors’ actions. Maybe they’ll be smarter than us.

Karin Tidbeck

Karin Tidbeck is a Swedish author whose weird fiction is inspired by folklore and her social anthropology background. She writes into her stories a strong sense of Swedish landscape. Her anthology Jagannath received a number of positive reviews. Stefan Raets, at Tor.com, said:

One of the most impressive qualities of Jagannath is its diversity. In terms of style, these stories range from gentle magical realism to somewhat terrifying Nordic-tinged mythical fantasy, from folk tale to mind-bending science fiction, from a faux non-fiction text about a mythological creature to something that reads like a collaboration between Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick. Some of these stories operate in the realm of the deeply personal, focusing on melancholy, dreamy family memories, while others are so alien that even the concept of family as we know it is no longer recognizable.

Bringing myth and folklore into the Anthropocene can help to express time as a carrier for artistic and cultural lineage. Formations of myth stemming from the unknown is both historical and modern–no matter era of technology and science–and is something fiction provides that often boring facts cannot. With a background in anthropology myself, I, however, was always completely enthralled by facts and documentaries of past and present cultures, and the myths forming within. It does not escape me that our modern scientific world coexists with myth, lore, and religion.

Alan Cheuse, at NPR, brings up some clues about Tidbeck’s strong folklore and place-writing:

As a Swede, she grew up in the dark tradition of Scandinavian folklore, a succession of moonless nights filled with the comings and goings of strange and menacing forest creatures.

In her novel Amatka, which takes in a dystopian agricultural countryside, something really weird is going on and the weather is wacky. There exist underground mushroom farms and bleak surroundings, what I like to call Ballardian, where sentient lakes freeze and melt at will.

Irene Morrison, in the LA Review of Books states:

The novel is based on a now-common science fictional premise in the age of climate crisis: when Earth becomes unlivable for reasons not fully explained, some find a way to escape and settle on a hostile alien planet. From this basic premise, Tidbeck launches a unique narrative that unsettles the social structures and ideologies underpinning European democratic socialism, in particular liberal humanism.

Note that a new version of Jagannath, published in English in 2012, is coming out in February 2018. The original version of Amatka, also published in 2012, was republished in the summer of 2017.

Jeff VanderMeer

The New Yorker calls Jeff VanderMeer “The Weird Thoreau” and the “King of Weird Fiction.” It’s not hard to see why. So many of his stories not only lie only in the evolution of what James Bradley called the New New Weird or the Ecological Uncanny, but he’s also a best-selling and award-winning author, so in that sense has guided us down the Anthropocene trail in storytelling and is reaching the mainstream. The first novel of the Southern Reach Trilogy–Annihilation–is coming out soon as a movie, directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Tessa Thompson, and Gina Rodriguez. The novel is a mystery, exploring a place called Area X, where strange stuff is going on, like a dolphin with human eyes and organisms writing on a tunnel wall. Unlike a poisoned landscape, as is often a trope in such fiction, Area X has been rewilded with purity (i.e. nature), as explained in the New Yorker article “Jeff VanderMeer Amends the Apocalypse,” by Laura Miller.

Opposite to nature taking over, his most recent novel Borne looks at mysterious ecology, and a future world where things have gone wrong due to the kinds of poisoning of a landscape we see in other ecological weird fiction–something human-caused. The novel has a biotech-rich landscape with a big bear that flies around scaring everyone, and a cuter, more adorable little creature named Borne developing a child-mom kind of relationship with the main character Rachel. I wondered if the word borne, being the past participle of bear, played into the juxtaposition of these two biotech creatures Borne and Mord (the bear).

It’s no secret that VanderMeer is deeply ensconced in biology (many of his family members are scientists, and he has talked often about being inspired by place–see his talk with poet Lorna Crozier, for instance).  When I spoke with the author in April of 2016, we talked a little about his background and his concerns about climate change and other environmental issues. When I asked how dark ecology entered his novels, he replied:

It came about kind of naturally. I’ve always explored weird real-life biology in my fiction, especially in the context of fungi, which often seems alien in its details. These are in a sense transitional forms, between animal and plant, that are incredibly complex and which we don’t quite understand in all of that complexity just yet. So often it’s not that you go out to explore ecology through weird fiction, but that the weirdness of the real world suggests certain impulses in your fiction. The Southern Reach is just the most personal exploration, and thus the dark ecology content probably is more intense and more front-and-center. This is largely because the setting is highly personal—North Florida wilderness—and certain elements, like the (at the time) seemingly endless spiral of the Gulf Oil Spill that kind of took up residence in my subconscious.

We also talked about climate change as well, and how his novels tackle it. He said:

I was determined that because the entire premise of the trilogy—this encounter with something comparable to a hyper object like global warming, something seemingly inexplicable—was so engaged with these issues, I didn’t want to be too direct. So there aren’t many direct conversations about ecology or pollution or these other issues. It’s just always there, even when it seems like it’s not, pulsing in the backdrop.

Not being direct, not being didactic, seems to have worked very well. Jeff and his wife Ann edited the huge tome The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, referenced often in this series, and so he’s been a great guide for this branch of literature. VanderMeer has some other interesting projects coming up, so I’d recommend watching for them.

China Miéville

China Miéville’s stories introduced me to the “new weird,” of which there seems to be no definition that everyone is pleased with–so I won’t try to define it here either, though it seems to have something to do with weird authors breaking tradition with previous tropes, crossing genre boundaries, and sometimes writing about newer urban landscapes. I will distinguish it from the “new new weird” that James Bradley mentioned, in my introduction above, in which we look also at the ecological uncanny and alien worlds in the Anthropocene. Where these new and new new weirds might intersect is in their sense of morality. The New Statesmen, in the article “What is the ‘New Weird,'” by Michael Moorcock explains some traits in the new weird:

The New Weird produces mostly urban fantasy with a moral point and, at its best, it combines the virtues of visionary fiction and horror fiction, political satire, literary fiction and even historical fiction.

Miéville writes science fiction, fantasy, urban surrealism, and nonfiction. A prolific author in every sense, his novels range from steampunk tech to fairy tale to noir to young adult to political to RPG-like fiction, and more. His thoughts, like other authors mentioned in this series, veer into the modern world of environmental catastrophe as well. In the Salvage Zone, he wrote an article called “The Limits of Utopia,” where he states:

The stench and blare of poisoned cities, lugubrious underground bunkers, ash landscapes… Worseness is the bad conscience of betterness, dystopias rebukes integral to the utopian tradition. We hanker and warn, our best dreams and our worst standing together against our waking.

Fuck this up, and it’s a desiccated, flooded, cold, hot, dead Earth. Get it right? There are lifetimes-worth of pre-dreams of New Edens, from le Guin and Piercy and innumerable others, going right back, visions of what, nearly two millennia ago, the Church Father Lactantius, in The Divine Institutes, called the ‘Renewed World’.

I came across a new genre term–salvagepunk–after reading his novel Railsea. The L.A. Review of Books, in the article “Living in the Wreckage,” by Zak Bronson, states:

Railsea provides an example of what Miéville and Evan Calder Williams have termed salvagepunk, a genre of postapocalyptic fiction that ranges from the post-oil catastrophe narratives of the Mad Max series to the collage aesthetic of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). In these works, characters attempt to survive by picking through the waste of the Earth, combining and repurposing objects and ideas from the past based on their value within hostile environments.

I’m currently reading his anthology of works titled Three Minutes of an Explosion, and am struck by the variation of his storytelling. I read somewhere that he wanted to write a novel in every genre. Out There Books discusses each story, and one of them, which I found to be peculiar but brilliant, “Polynia,” is referred to by Out There as being weird fiction with “elegiac musings on climate change.”

The author also has his own list of top weird fiction at The Guardian (from 2002).

Paul Kingsnorth

When I began reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast, published in paperback last year, I felt that agitation alive mentioned in Part I of the series. A hermit exiles himself out on a cold and rainy moor, and every sensation he feels or struggles through is echoed in the wind, the rain, the rugged landscape. The narrator’s history is hinted at, but we’re not absolutely sure of anything. Having experienced the wildest wind on the North Atlantic coast, with loud rain and blasts of air that shook window shutters all night long, I understood that hyper-power of nature and found myself folding into the story as if I were there. If the author can draw you in like that from the start, it is already a good story. I’m not sure if Beast is considered weird fiction by its author, but it’s surreal, makes you uncomfortable, and its main character goes through a surreal experience. It is a loose sequel to Kingsnorth’s previous novel The Wake–both  trips into harsh landscapes and exile. The author is also one of the founders of the Dark Mountain Project–“a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it.”

According to Unsung Heroes in the UK, in the article “The Landscape Weird,” Gary Budden includes The Beast in the list of books covered, stating:

The landscapes we find ourselves in are not blank canvases. They are not simply the backdrops or stage sets on which we act our pastoral fantasies without ripples being made. Engage with place and it engages with you….The rural and wild landscape in these writers’ works becomes a place of threat, of mythic wonder, of hauntings and buried memory.” These possessed lands capture reader imagination well.

In the New York Times, in the article about Kingsnorth called “It’s the End of the World as We Know it, and He Feel’s Fine“:

When you ask Kingsnorth about Dark Mountain, he speaks of mourning, grief and despair. We are living, he says, through the “age of ecocide,” and like a long-dazed widower, we are finally becoming sensible to the magnitude of our loss, which it is our duty to face.

He has been accused of appearing to be too hopeless at times, but I don’t think that description is accurate. Like the Dark Mountain Project’s goals to tell real stories about and to ourselves, Kingsnorth knows that it is too late to save the world from climate change. We cannot turn it around (NASA), though maybe we can still mitigate and try to adapt to some of the worst effects. Having a realistic viewpoint of things does not mean your viewpoint is entirely hopeless. It just means you’re facing reality. The Anthropocene has also ushered in the age of what people now call “alternative” or “fake” news, which is really just an easier-to-swallow description than the word “lies”. We’re all allowed to have our opinions, but in the modern era, the allowance to not tell the truth about things has also become acceptable. Fiction can explore this, just as it looks at the nature around us and within us.

Conclusion

Where weird fiction and ecologically oriented fiction mingle produces what the New York Times’ Wai Chee Dimock described in “There’s No Escape from Contamination Above the Toxic Sea,” when reviewing Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne:

This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as well: wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a wager and a promise that what emerges from the 21st century will be as good as any from the 20th, or the 19th.

The evolution of such fiction has a stronghold in the weird, or as James Bradley called the “ecological uncanny.” Wilder. More reckless. More breathtaking. I like the description used, because it takes me to the wild. As a person who has spent much time in many mountainous and forested regions of British Columbia, away from cities and people, there’s a sense I get when out there–a sense of totally being alive. I feel the continual agitation alive referenced in the first part of this short series. I’ve had close encounters with bears. I’ve fallen and injured myself. In this country, you can see a bear in urban areas and not be surprised at all–even rare spottings of cougars. Imagine being out on the trail where everything is unpredictable. It’s this continual agitation alive that weird fiction brings too, and so reading is often like being on the trail, but without the sweat.

When the uncanny takes over a story, it lends a way to perceive and imagine beyond our cultural trappings. It opens us up to other possibilities. Weird stories can take any subject and bend it around into non-Euclidean geometry; they can make us question the sanity of the narrator, and in the meantime wonder if there is something really going on in the willows. Weird fiction has permission to go outside our usual perceptions. It allows us to ask more questions than usual. And to think of things non-linearly. This exploration is important now, especially in what we call the Anthropocene. A term was going around for a while–Anthropocene fiction–which, as fiction genres and tropes evolve, any of this kind of writing could fall into, whether speculative or literary. The places we live in now seem to be haunted, in that so many species are going extinct and landscapes change due to humans using more and more natural resources–from our only forests, rivers, oceans, lakes, prairies, tundras, deserts–everywhere–to consume more and more things. The original places symbolically become ghost-filled, and if we looked at the elements of them that memory rues, we might see them as also symbolically supernatural–or places that we no longer understand.

What’s next? Circling back to Tabas’s study, referenced heavily in part 1, he speaks of the Age of Asymmetry:

The Age of Asymmetry comes after the end of the world. That is to say that we who live in the Anthropocene no longer find ourselves capable of believing in the innocence of the sensual world that surrounds us. Our world has become weird, our reality horrifying. We are too aware that the apparent nothing that comes out of our cars when we start them is accumulating in infinitely minute particles in the atmosphere…The horror of the Anthropocene and the real of weird realism remind us of the inutility of trying to naively suture together the real and the Natural, even if this is clearly the ambition of most place-based writing and critical studies thereof. The weird expressionism of horror, in its striving to express the unnamable while leaving it dark, at least leads us towards a real appreciation of the difficulty of thinking and representing places, and indeed towards an appreciation of the way in which overlooking this difficulty fuels the destructive tendencies in our civilization. If ecology is the study of organisms and their relations to their environments—relations between objects and the other objects composing places around them—then being a realist ecologist is being sensitized to that which not only is visible but which is also withdrawn or wholly other; that which is reality but also ungraspable within all naturalist accounts of the ambient world.

The featured image is licensed for use and (c) Can Stock Photo / AlfaOlga

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