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This paper aims to analyse the story "Biopolítica", by Luis Carlos Barragán Castro. After a presentation of the Colombian writer and his work, the manuscript reflects theoretically on the notions of New Weird -supposed story's genre- and symbiosis, in addition to discussing the misunderstandings surrounding anarchism. Indeed, Barragán's text offers an original and updated vision of anarchism thanks to its treatment trough the symbiosis's theme. This union between both concepts is the object of the textual analysis that is proposed later and whose purpose is to problematize the construction, in the story, of a utopian community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is at the intersection of Posthuman thought, Gothic narratives, and the New Weird mode where "Two Houses" from Kelly Link's Get in Trouble (2016) can be framed. In the story, six female astronauts alternate years of hibernation and moments of wakefulness in search of a habitable planet. The House of Secrets spaceship is controlled by the AI Maureen. Isolated in space, the astronauts amuse themselves by telling ghost stories. Through the stories, the reader is gradually dislocated from the recognizable landscape of a technologically plausible speculative fiction story to be plunged into a Gothic world of murder, haunted houses, and ghosts. The purpose of this paper is to trace the intersection of Posthuman thought and Gothic characteristics in the story to discuss the slippery relationship between what we believe we are and what we actually are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool addresses issues of privilege and globalization in strikingly original ways. Part of the distinctiveness of Infinity Pool comes from the daring science fictional conceit around which it is built, and part comes from its willingness to explore extreme sex and violence in ways that tilt into body horror. In addition to collapsing the boundary between sf and horror, Infinity Pool undermines binary oppositions of all kinds, suggesting that the kind of binary thinking that defined the world system in earlier eras can no longer be maintained in an era of neoliberal capitalist globalization. Infinity Pool, though, demonstrates that the collapse of these binaries is not necessarily a good thing. Ultimately, the extreme nature of this film helps it to conduct a critique of the extreme nature of the global neoliberal system that dominates the world of the early twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite winning numerous literary awards, Caitlín R. Kiernan's work has received little critical attention. Scholars have focused onKiernan's reworking of H. P. Lovecraft's influential weird fiction and have discussed Kiernan's pioneering work in New Weird fiction and short fiction. As astute as much of the critical work is, none of it addresses the cornerstone of Kiernan's fiction: trauma. This essay considers Kiernan's novel The Red Tree as a queer American gothic novel dealing with trauma and its lingering effects on its witnesses. Through its complex, fragmentary formand its use of dreamsequences and unconsciously produced narratives, the novel invites readers to witness and consume Sarah Crowe's trauma while loosely theorizing the relationship between trauma and queer temporality and spatiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel" is a book that explores the growing presence of nonhuman beings and entities in Anglophone literature. Divided into four sections, the book examines various aspects of twenty-first-century Anglophone novels, including nonhuman poetics, the relationship between the human and nonhuman, biocentric communities, and the negotiation of reality. The book aims to analyze how recent novels depict nonhuman characters, challenge human-centric narratives, and raise ethical questions. The review specifically focuses on Ambelin Kwaymullina's Young Adult trilogy, The Tribe, which successfully incorporates nonhuman perspectives without anthropomorphizing them. Kwaymullina's use of language, imagery, and Aboriginal beliefs creates a unique worldview that emphasizes interconnectedness between all beings. [Extracted from the article]

The contemporary ecological condition is one of 'global weirding', a term coined to describe both anthropogenically changed worlds and the experience of dwelling within them. In this paper, we foreground New Weird fiction as a progressive literary style, distinct from its problematic roots, with conceptual import to human geography. Through attention to the New Weird's treatment of difference, dis/orientation and ecological relation, these texts provoke geographers to foster a speculative ethics suited to a weirding world. In suggesting this ethical approach, this paper contributes to emerging debates in geography concerning ambivalence, disorientation and affirmation/negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the New Weird Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer is highly attuned to the difficulty of processing and representing extreme alterity. Its particular focus is his Southern Reach trilogy and the forms of weird encounter it describes. The article proposes a 'mysticism of the unhuman', and explains why it pertains to the encounters depicted in VanderMeer's texts. It explores the instances of mystical annihilation that feature in the trilogy, an analysis that evolves into a discussion of the relationship between mysticism and horror. This leads into a discussion of linguistic representation, suggesting that approaches by philosophers of language and natural theologians to certain paradoxes surrounding ineffability can illuminate aspects of VanderMeer's mythos. Although aspects of VanderMeer's 'Area X' may escape human language and cognition, it is nevertheless able to convey information about itself. In exploring how this transmission occurs, the article turns to the notion of recognition, circling back to earlier discussions by asking whether an annihilation of alterity is required for linguistically incompatible beings to recognise one another. The article concludes that VanderMeer answers this question affirmatively, but that his stance is not necessarily pessimistic with regard to the possibility of establishing recognition between human and unhuman inhabitants of Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With few exceptions, China Miéville’s oeuvre is built out of urban imaginaries. Miéville’s cities are dynamic and dialectically conceived spaces; their key element, where most of the action takes place and most of the energy is invested, is the slum in all its variations, generating and providing the primary setting for the weird horror at the heart of Miéville’s imagination, for the attenuated but omnipresent utopianism both obscured and enabled by that horror, and for the space for thinking them through together. Steampunk and the New Weird have incorporated the city into post-genre fantasy in new ways. In particular, they propose an alternate genealogy of the urban fantastic in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism that both repudiates the slum as a space of recidivism and resistance and locates alternate possibilities within its alien confines. What Miéville and other contemporary writers recognize as newly available to us from the nineteenth century is not only the slum’s vast image-storehouse of suffering and horror, but also its radically new epistemology. Miéville’s New Weird has found a way to locate and spatialize not only the uncanny, but also the repressed abcanny, the known and knowable truths of capitalism, now so familiar to us that they circulate everywhere in the culture industry as dystopia and post-apocalypse. The abcanny is that which is not, and never was, and never can be part of our imaginary or imagined by us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether the twenty-first-century resurgence of H. P. Lovecraft and weird fiction can be read as a conceptual parallel to the Anthropocene epoch, taking Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's The Age of Lovecraft as a starting-point. The assumption is that the two 'ages' are historically and thematically linked through the 'monsters' that inhabit them; monsters that include-- but are not limited to--extensions, reproductions, and evolutions of Lovecraft's writings. Preoccupied with environmental issues such as global climate change, the twenty-first-century imaginary has conjured monsters that appear to have much in common with early twentieth-century cosmic horror stories. Considering the renewed interest in Lovecraft and the weird, such developments raise the question: what can (weird) monsters tell us about the Anthropocene moment? This paper maps the 'monstrous' in the discourses emerging from the Anthropocene epoch and 'The Age of Lovecraft' by considering (new) weird narratives from contemporary literature, graphic novels, film, TV, and video games. Mindful of on-going discussions within ecocriticism, philosophy, and critical theory, the paper discusses a handful of unconventional texts to investigate the potential of the weird for expressing Anthropocene anxieties and for approaching nonhuman realities from new angles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matters of politics and human history tend to be rendered meaningless when the climate crisis is described as a release of inhuman forces and/or something so complex as to be sublime. Why seek political power when the scale of climate change appears to dwarf human agency? Why adopt an historical perspective when the implications of global warming seem to stretch into deep time? Against these trends, this essay examines recent developments in weird fiction that move beyond some of the impasses afflicting the environmental humanities. More specifically, this essay turns to the ecological imaginations of Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom and John Langan's The Fisherman. Each title ends menacingly with the promise of rising seas, but not before they illustrate crucial links between climate change and our racist and patriarchal status quo. Stressing, after China Miéville, the abcanny quality of this status quo, these fictions chart a new path forward for the genre in the aftermath of the New Weird. Indeed, climate-oriented weird fiction renders visible the unequal experience of climate change, connects the crisis to ongoing histories of trauma and exploitation, and critically addresses common reactions, from the paralysis that arises when encountering the sublime to the misperception that this abcanny force is just comeuppance for past crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to explore the recent resurgence of interest in ‘weird fiction’ from Arthur Machen in the 1890s via H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s to the rise of the New Weird in 2003 and beyond in the works of China Miéville, M. John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer. It aims to provide an overview of its slippery genre status, existing as it does in the interstices of gothic and science fiction, decadent and pulp fiction. But it also recognizes that the very slipperiness of the genre insidiously undermines any fixity of definition, constantly shifting boundaries and defying the act of ever being fully ‘introduced’. An orientation in this emergent field is also about acknowledging disorientation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China Miéville's Iron Council (2004), as one of the major texts of the New Weird, is a prime example of weird fiction; as a novel concerned with the establishment and extension of territorial and economic boundaries, however, it is also a western in its thematic ethos, its aesthetic sensibilities, and its preoccupation with notions of the frontier. This article explores the social boundaries of the titular train, the Iron Council. Using Judith Butler's notion of the social abject and the materialized/ dematerialized body, the article first looks at the abjected bodies of the Remade and how they are discursively and socially constructed, finding parallels with the queer figures in the novel. It then uses cyborg theory to theorize the ways these abjected bodies can be rewritten and recuperated (made to matter, in Butler's terms) and examines the ways in which the novel troubles notions of stable ontological and social boundaries, blurring distinctions among human, animal, and machine and locating, in this dissolution, the opportunity for transgression and revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though popular in Italy, France, Germany, and Spain, and widely considered to be the most important modern Italian sf writer, Valerio Evangelisti is almost totally unknown in English-speaking countries, as the ten novels of his Eymerich cycle (plus ten other novels belonging to different genres) have not yet been translated into English. But Evangelisti's fiction is an interesting specimen of the slipstream trend, and his novels based on the historical figure of the Catalan inquisitor Nicolas Eymerich represent a most interesting case study for all those interested in the dynamics of genre hybridization. Moreover, his exploration of the possibilities of cross-genre fiction has taken place in a cultural context quite different from the British and American ones. A synoptic analysis of the novels in the Eymerich cycle can thus be productive for all those interested in the ongoing debate on the border areas of slipstream, New Weird, and Avant-Pop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bruce Sterling recently criticized the fiction of Steve Beard as "being based in quote, Theory, unquote" and that this academicism is ineffective for slipstream fiction. This article suggests that Beard's novel, "Digital Leatherette" (1999), is not slipstream fiction but rather an intervention in New Weird fiction. Beard employs the conceptual structure, the rhizome, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as the diegetic framework for his novel. The result is an assemblage of fictions that refer to a constitutive narrative; yet, this unified diegesis remains eclipsed and unnamable. Digital Leatherette confronts H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror in an age where the "inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents" is more of a formal axiom than aphorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of the book "The Etched City" by K. J. Bishop and "Iron Council" by China Miéville. The books feature a recognizable motifs from the genre of the Western which includes gunfights, outlaws and ghost towns. The books utilize the violent scenes, harsh settings, and American roots of the Western genre as provocative inroads into broader issues of identity and social change.

This article offers a survey of theories of slipstream writing, a literary phenomenon that has been variously conceptualized as a school within science fiction, a literary interface between sf and mainstream or postmodern fiction, and a new fantastic genre aligned with a range of other such modes. Providing an overview of slipstream manifestoes and essays by Bruce Sterling, John Clute, James Patrick Kelly, and John Kessel, the article presents slipstream not as a fixed body of texts sharing certain aesthetic parameters but as a discourse intimately connected with the issues of sf's inherent generic instability and its mainstream legitimation. I also locate slipstream in relation to other boundary discourses within the broadly understood literatures of the fantastic such as the New Weird, Fantastika, and New Wave Fabulism, cross-border categories with which slipstream frequently shares literary territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the "Oceanic Weird". We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana's neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]