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" "New Weird—along with the other mo(ve)ments of which it’s some kind of cousin, the Ratbastards, the Interstitial Arts, the New Space Opera and others—reflected a major cultural shake-up. Soon, though, if not already, those groups will have their epigones, and will probably be the very fantasy mainstream they were railing against. At which point, doubtless, some new punkass radicals will come along and subvert us all, by writing about hobbits.
China Miéville (born 6 September 1972) is a Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus award-winning English fantastic fiction writer.
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There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.