Morbid Symptoms:

An Interview with China Miéville

benjamin noys and timothy s . murphy

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new can-
not be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
 — A ntonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

China Miéville is a leading author and critic of weird fiction. His Bas-­Lag novels — 
Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) — are
central works of the New Weird. Miéville has also written a body of critical work
defining, analyzing, and critiquing weird fiction, and this interview is focused on
his role as a critic of the weird. We conducted the interview by e-­mail during the
summer and fall of 2015.
Special issue guest editors Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy:  We would
like to begin with the question of the generic form of weird fiction. Weird fiction
seems to lie in an uncanny space between science fiction and fantasy literature.
You have been highly critical of the valorization of science fiction as “rationalist”
estrangement at the expense of fantasy, regarded as “escapist” (Miéville 2009a,
244). What place does weird fiction hold in the erosion of this boundary?
China Miéville:  I’d certainly agree with the implication that haute weird fiction
peaking in the 1920s seems to be a rebuke to that distinction. Which obviously
isn’t to say at all that the distinction is “meaningless” or “imaginary,” that it post-
dates the weird, nor that there aren’t plenty of real-­enough protocols “separating”
SF [science fiction] from fantasy [f], as marketable subfields, self-­perpetuating
trends, (overlapping) readerships, and so on. The question, though, is at what level
they exist as such: whether they’re distinct sets with fundamentally different epis-

Genre, Vol. 49, No. 2  July 2016 

DOI 10.1215/00166928-3512333  © 2016 by University of Oklahoma
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temologies (and perhaps concomitant “escapism” versus “engagement”), as many

fans and theorists claim, or clots clustered untidily on a single continuum, like
barnacles on a submerged girder. That would be my opinion. As it would that that
clustering isn’t fixed and occurs not according to some Manichaean essence but
various, and variously epiphenomenal, criteria, including some inherited “com-
mon sense,” the vicissitudes of marketing, and so on.
By contrast to the either/or model, the monstrosities of weird fiction are alien
beings and/or gods, subject/objects of radically advanced tech and/or radically
magic, material and/or (im)material, disobedient of physics. And they’re writ-
ten, generally, to invoke horror — bad awe. I think this a torqued iteration of the
sublime, which locates them within the SF/f tradition.
There can be a danger, I think, of a sort of crudely arithmetic critique of the
traditional “SF versus f” heuristic, of simply listing the (numerous) texts that
don’t sit easily in one or the other camp as if that, itself, is a counterargument.
It isn’t (though the existence of such texts and traditions is clearly relevant to
that counterargument). That’s obviously inadequate. (There’s a lot of mea culpa
here — many years ago I went through a brief period of doing more or less that,
simply using the term weird fiction for any and all writing of the fantastic, SF,
f, whatever. It was a confused and failed attempt to take seriously precisely this
“rebukal” nature of weird fiction vis-­à-­vis the given distinction.)
I think to make traction with the idea of weird as a counter-­t radition, let
alone an embedded critique of the mainstream tradition, including the separa-
tion, our approach to the various fantastics has to be about more than its furni-
ture (spaceships, ghosts, monsters, monsters of variegated kinds) — though again
that’s not irrelevant. What are more interesting are questions of what the fiction
(furniture and all) is relating to and how. So, for example, for me, what’s come to
be particularly important about the weird in its countervailing relationship to both
supposed antipodes of the “SF-­fantasy” nondialectic is precisely the relationship
I mentioned to the sublime and — concomitantly — to the “rational.”
The weird and its monsters are destabilizing of the narrowly instrumentalist
“cognitive” “rationality” often associated with SF in the Suvinian model: within
the stories, in their very quiddity they regularly drive observers insane. But they
don’t really do so by fantasy’s “magic,” nor by any returned-­repressed Gothica,
but, rather, by ineluctably evidencing the already unknowability of the universe
itself. Weird manifestations are synecdoches for that a-­human(ist) totality that
once seen can’t be unseen. The human mind is obviously incapable of encom-
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passing that real — and indeed within this fiction, is blasted by it. This weird, qua
manifestation of a bad sublime, is a kind of nihilist telos of rationalism rather
than its rejection.
The post-­ and antigothicism of weird fiction I mention, by the way, is one
reason I’m unpersuaded that the weird deploys, articulates, or is located in an
uncanny, an unquiet disavowed, as you posit in passing. Instead, I see in it radi-
cal alterity, a never-­avowed-­nor-­disavowed — an abcanny (Miéville 2012, 381).
So I think that weird fiction has, as a minimum, a powerful claim to be a coun-
tervailing countertradition, present from early in the development of “genre,” that
can be read not as a returned repressed but as a specifically modern(ist) rebuke
to the tendency to inflate a contingent if marketized distinction (SF “vs.” f )
into a philosophical firewall in the literature of the fantastic.
Guest editors:  We have posed this issue around a tentative distinction between
the “Old Weird” and the “New Weird.” In your discussion of weird fiction for The
Routledge Companion to Science Fiction you suggest that trauma is the condition
of weird fiction in its emergence, especially World War I, and then after 1940 we
find work that is “post-­Weird” (Miéville 2009b, 513). How would this distinction
work with or against ours?
CM:  I can’t do without the notion of “post-­Weird.” The contours of (in particular)
horror tout court were ineluctably changed by haute weird. Popular (and indeed
un-­ and less popular) culture was fundamentally changed by what you, Ben,
indispensably termed the “Lovecraft event” (see the introduction to this issue).
After it, weird appurtenances, concerns, aesthetics spread virally.
So, for a simple example, many of even the brash creature features from the
1950s to today, and at a more degraded level even the most banal and deadened
advertisements, which I think it would be tendentious to recruit to a weird tradi-
tion in any deep sense, nonetheless feature the sort of protoplasmic and tentacular
monsters that are the direct descendants of weird. And those are examples which
are, if you like, much more “post-­” than “weird,” which abjure anything like the
ontological insecurity that Rhys Williams (2015), rightly I think, sees as distin-
guishing the weird. There are also countless texts that are much closer to that,
that are, to varying degrees, more directly “weird” than just, or as well as, “post-­”
(including, and self-­consciously, [Jorge Luis] Borges).
As regards “New Weird” as a counterpoint to “Old” (what I’d term haute),
I’m mindful that we are using the terms in somewhat distinct, if overlapping,
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ways. In my schema it’s more contingent and fleeting than the post-­Weird, and
I think more bounded and generically located than in your usage. I suspect my
“New Weird” is a subset of yours. For me it’s a cluster of texts, proliferating after,
give or take, 1999, canonized — and I’d moot epitaphed — with startling speed in
[Ann] VanderMeer and [Jeff] VanderMeer’s 2008 collection The New Weird. If
you like, I see it — having briefly been an enthusiastic insider — as much more of a
(sub-­sub-­)genre than, per post-­Weird, as a condition. New Weird is itself of course
post-­Weird, but it’s a small subset thereof (though an unusually self-­conscious and
self-­consciously weird one).
Given that categorization, I have some skepticism about the extent to which
New Weird specifically, as I’d use the phrase, whatever joys it may have brought,
could perform any kind of deep cultural transformation, and/or Aufhebung
(sublation) on weird itself. I don’t think it could weird the weird. And — unlike
post-­Weird — I think it’s had its moment.
By contrast, compare, for example, Clive Barker — who I’d suggest is the
horror writer with the best claim since [H. P.] Lovecraft to be an “event.” There
are clearly many theses to be written on the Barker event’s reintroduction of the
(estranged, queered, abjected, fetishized) human body as a locus of horror after
the weird’s radical rejection of it. Nonetheless, Barker is, I’d propose, an aes-
thetician who is clearly post-­Weird. In point of fact, I think that precisely in his
relationship to the body, to social memory, to eroticism, and to yearning there’s
a strong case to be made that Barker’s relationship to the Lovecraftian weird is
not unlike that weird’s relationship to the gothic before it — one of respectful
deep-­structured rebuke, countervailing countertradition, constitutive contradic-
tion. In that it’s constituted by that weird with which it wrestles, it’s post it, a
post-­Weird radical queer response to the testerically homophobic cultural abjec-
tification and pathologization of the body during the AIDS panic, with all its
disavowed fetishism of “transgressive” sexuality, its somaphobic biotrauma, its
putrid moralism, and so forth. For all their horror, Barker’s beautiful/monstrous/
hypnotic/lubricious/liberating/dangerous bodies (not to mention their by-­now-­
rather-­overdetermined BDSM [bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism] appurte-
nances) remain a beautiful and strangely moving counterblast. (See also the work
of experimental music group Coil and various others.)
All this may — to get to the final element of your question — relate to the
question of societal trauma. Obviously, these literary fields are overdetermined,
and given the scale and totality of what [Leon] Trotsky (1937, 19) calls the “social
 A N I N T E RV I EW W I T H C H I NA M I É V I L LE 203

lie,” if what we go looking for “to explain” such literary moments is trauma, we’ll
find it, wherever we turn our eyes. But we have to be able to distinguish levels
of catastrophe. The ruptures informing “New Weird” were hardly so epochal as
those of the First World War, hence nor so directly or widely culturally genera-
tive: if the thesis that the war is the black sun under which haute weird unfurls is
correct, that makes that weird one of many cultural forms to do so, pulp cousin
to dada and surrealism, modernism(s) in general, and so forth.
In my formulation, New Weird, by contrast, was a moment more self-­
conscious in genesis and in locating itself within literary traditions, with all their
relative autonomy, deploying weird tropes as part of a (then-­)burgeoningly con-
fident and exciting geek culture (one which seems to have progressed almost
instantly to Thermidor) as a short-­lived and, if anything, rather optimistic engage-
ment with an expansion of politics and culture post-­Seattle. New Weird’s sub-
version, that you identify, of Old Weird’s traumatized/horrified response to the
alien and hybrid it moots, its celebration of it, feels to me inextricable from that
early naughties moment of political-­cultural excitement. Quickly closed down in
the political sphere, but in the mediated and laggard cultural arena, there was a
palpable sense of aesthetic potentiality, that generic nostrums were not just not
ironclad but were there to be fucked with, that a degree of open experimentalism
was an expression of a wider horizon.
We might moot that it was an approach not nearly traumatized enough.
Another world was not, it turned out, possible — not then. But another genre
appeared to be.
Failure isn’t the worst crime, particularly in art: still, though. “New Weird”
(as I use it) is an engagement that failed (politically certainly — culturally, too, I’d
say, though that’s arguable). To that extent — and again, not at all to deny some
of the great work that appeared as part of it — not only was it always going to be
prone to the kind of mannerism and/or kitsch that’s always bedeviled weird, but
it was never going to be so stark, or starkly symptomatic, as its haute ancestor.
Perhaps the more unmediatedly symptomatic art is, the more clearly it
expresses a deep grammar of cultural trauma, which is to say of history, and
the more powerful and generative. (Here’s one of the things that might unite the
Barker and Lovecraft events.) That’s part of what gives it its power even when — 
sometimes because — the technical skill of a particular practitioner is lacking. I
suspect the sense of Lovecraft and other haute weird fictioneers as somehow akin
to “outsider artists” is an expression of this.
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In my model, New Weird doesn’t have the painful historical echoing func-
tion in nearly so direct a way. Unlike, incidentally, Barkerian body-­horror, which
is an astonishing and vivid expression of the political trauma of its own context.
Guest editors: You have argued that weird fiction can be defined by a new
“Monsterology” — the “Tentacular Novum” (Miéville 2008, 105 – 12), the emer-
gence of a new biohorror of the “tentacle” detached from any traditional mon-
strosity. Reflecting on this argument, how do you think this summarizes the “Old
Weird,” and how does this “materialist” horror respond to the crisis of modernity?
CM:  Culturally popular monsters — monsters with traction — obviously have
and will always express, in mediated ways, the conditions and traumas in which
they were thrown up. To put it in crude terms, the traditional folkloric monsters — 
vampires, werewolves, for example — may have been adequate to the task of
expressing certain anxieties around, say, sexuality, foreign capital, the bacillus
of rural uprising, but they were wholly too familiar to express the total, sys-
temic crisis of modernity. The gothic-­inflected returned-­represseds won’t do in
the trenches.
My argument is that there were two levels at which completely new figures
of horror, monsters, had any chance at all of doing the job of cultural refraction
in the context of this sort of shattering total crisis. One was overarching and
fundamental — what was necessary was precisely that newness. I think the sud-
den proliferation of hitherto unseen monstrous figures in a startlingly short space
of cultural time is an expression of that. It’s hard to remember now, precisely
because our monstrous culture is so very post-­Weird, how extraordinary these
figures were. Their role, at this level, was to be like nothing that had been seen
before: one of the key elements of their tentacularity and so forth is negative — it
is precisely not like the nature of monsters hitherto culturally seen.
I think that’s the primary driver. You can see writers during the early years
of the rise of weird — in particular [H. G.] Wells — auditioning various innovative
monstrous types. If you think of the baseline of monster-­genesis as chimerism, as
taking bits from one animal and putting it on another and/or in an “inappropri-
ate” location, what we see them doing is avoiding those creatures the components
of which have become familiar and looking instead at elements from creatures
(largely) unplumbed by the European monstrous canon. You see insects getting
auditioned — and many insectile elements survive in representations of weird
creatures — but what makes it to the top (most obviously in Lovecraft and Wil-
liam Hope Hodgson) is the cephalopod.
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That issue of historical cultural specificity is important: the octopus, for

example, the weird animal absolutely nonpareil, is not an innovation for the Japa-
nese or oceanic monstrous traditions. The later cross-­fertilization or, better, glo-
balization of the tentacular, whereby Japanese (for example) traditions of (often
violent) eroticized tentacularity and the “Anglo-­American” weird tentacularity
meet and combine is an inevitable part of post-­Weird. But I think haute weird’s
tentacle is, in fact, very different from the Japanese teratological tentacle. (I think
for a start it is startlingly unsexualized in most and the most important cases.)
So I think probably the most fundamental “fit” of the tentacular and more
generally the octopus-­like with the monstrous needs of late nineteenth – early
twentieth-­century Anglo-­American culture was that it hadn’t been there before.
This gave it a sublime polysemy and an estranging shock: it does not belong
where it is seen, and the world depicted is wrong for its presence.
At the same time, in classic overdetermined fashion, that “abstract” func-
tionality is conjoined with the “concrete” metaphoric efficacy of the materiality
of the octopus for the anxieties of the times. Its protean nature, its shapelessness,
its powerful grasping reach all lent themselves to the kind of reactionary (often
white-­supremacist) racialized anxieties of ideology, and of monopoly capital, as
well as for the more shapeless anxieties of a general crisis. Lovecraft’s (1999,
146) oscillation between mentions of Cthulhu and “serious native unrest,” for
example, is a slight updating of the kind of “yellow peril octopus” of cartoons of
the 1880s and after — Cthulhu, though, while clearly inextricable from that kind
of racism, isn’t, I think, reducible to it. It is also the creature of the non-­Euclidian
geometry that articulates a catastrophe of all certainties so total that it extends
into ontology.
This historically unique simultaneity of metaphoric precision and evasion is
visible in Victor Hugo’s [(1866) 2002] vatic shriek of octopus horror in The Toil-
ers of the Sea, where the monstrous devil-­fish is described in a rolling blurting
vomit of changing images, is defined by its utter instability and by its isomor-
phism with any other thing. Though none, I think, are so beautifully and hallu-
cinatorily precise, nor do they zero in so perspicaciously on the octopus in par-
ticular as the animal zero point of alien formlessness and heuristic evasion, there
are various other examples of a cephalopodic protoweird— [Herman] Melville’s
[(1851) 1991, 276] invocation of the shapeless “great live squid” in Moby-­Dick;
Wells’s [(1897) 2000, 170] extraordinary predatory squid “Haploteuthis ferox”
of “The Sea-­Raiders,” of which all we can hope is that “they have returned now,
20 6 GE N RE

and returned for good, to the sunless deep out of which they have so strangely
and so mysteriously arisen”; even [Alfred Lord] Tennyson’s [(1830) 2007, 7] “The
Kraken,” which dies precisely as it rises out of the dark to the surface, where it is
“once by man and angels to be seen” — susceptible to analysis.
Obviously there’s no necessary relation between any particular monster and
any particular social anxiety. With a slight kink of cultural history, the same job
could have been done by insectile monsters, or arachnid, or even vegetable ones,
or whatever — and indeed, as I say, traces of those candidates are still visible. But
in part I think by a kind of aesthetic Darwinism, the overdeterminedly efficacious
cephalopod became the weird animal exemplar, and fairly quickly, I think, that
led to a self-­replicating tradition.
Guest editors:  Continuing from your discussion of “weird fiction” you also write
that “a disproportionate number of its writers have distinctly reactionary aims”
(Miéville 2009b, 511). Lovecraft’s racism is the obvious example, which you’ve
discussed (Miéville 2005), but Arthur Machen’s support for [Francisco] Franco
would be another, as would a general reactionary approach to modernity and a
desire for reenchantment in the face of Weberian rationalization. How essential
do you think this politics is to the “weird effect”?
CM:  Machen’s astonishing and grotesque snuff fantasies of sadistic misogyny,
too. Obviously there’s the question of the overt and conscious politics of the
writer and the politics of their work. In the case of a lot of weird writers, the two
overlap very clearly, though as you’d expect there’s often a palpable contradic-
tion, or an easily discernable subtext. Lovecraft’s racism is well attested, and the
racism of his work is extreme and generative. One can still find, for example, at
the end of The Shadow over Innsmouth [Lovecraft 1999], in a story defined by an
utterly testerical and shrieking paranoia about miscegenation, a sudden yearning
for the jouissance of surrender to slip into that abject space between categories, to
be swallowed by the sea. Not that that’s a great surprise, given how supremacist
ideologies are so often overlaid on libidinal yearning for the disavowed.
But then it’s impossible for me to read Algernon Blackwood’s work, espe-
cially “The Willows” or “Wendigo,” let alone The Centaur, without being moved
by the incredible, palpable — though if not unconscious certainly not acknowl-
edged or explicit — queer longing that define them. (There is a distinct subtra-
dition of queer weird [and queer post-­Weird] about which there’s a lot more to
say than is possible here, and which I’m trying to think through.) So there his
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undoubted personally reactionary politics exist in the texts alongside a vivid dis-
sident drive. Again, there’s nothing surprising about that kind of coexistence.
I think my instinct is that there’s a clear affinity between such reactionary,
up-­to-­and-­including-­fascist politics and the haute weird (and indeed that con-
tinues today, especially among a lot of the nihilist “Dark Enlightenment” crew,
[Jean] Parvulesco and others). But I don’t think it’s inevitable. In part because I
don’t know that I think a “desire for reenchantment” automatically takes right-­
wing forms, though clearly it very often does, particularly at this moment of
reactionary modernism.
William Hope Hodgson, for example. Whatever his personal politics — which
I certainly doubt tended to the radical, but nor do they feel to me steeped in the
kind of high reaction that characterizes what Robert Macfarlane calls the “con-
servative heretic” (pers. comm., September 23, 2015). I’d go further: much of
his best work, above all “The Baumoff Explosive” (Hodgson 2009), which is, I
think, one of the great (shockingly unsung) literary works of World War I, is pre-
cisely great because it manages to ally the weird effect to an unbearably moving
nonchauvinist humanism, without surrendering nihilism. Indeed, it relies for its
power on a truly terrifying vision of a “Christ-­apeing monster of the void” (228)
precisely because we suspect that there is no aping, that this is indeed the true
face of Godhead, in the face of this war.
A sense of disenchantment, a yearning, a sense of trauma, of ontological
insecurity, of the antihuman universe, of nihilism, of bad awe and the balefulness
of the numinous — all these characterize the weird and clearly cut with ecstatic
reaction. But they don’t presume the reaction part of it, as the wonderful Hodgson
illustrates.
Guest editors: If the “Old Weird” was defined by the trauma of modernity,
in what ways might contemporary weird fiction be defined by the trauma of
postmodernity as, in Fredric Jameson’s (1991) sense, the “cultural logic of late
capitalism”?
CM:  I’ve been mildly surprised at how few attempts there have been to really
film a big-­budget haute weird movie — which if it was really cleaving to that
would be formally somewhat nostalgic now, given the inevitable sense of looking
back, but that’s not necessarily the worst sin.1 That may answer the question to

1. See “Trailer: The Call of Cthulhu Movie” (2015).

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some extent — what might characterize the iterations of the weird now are often
varieties of irony, which, justly, I think, has a mostly bad rap among a lot of criti-
cal artists. I’m not sure, but my sense is that weird played really straight in the
recent political/aesthetic context would have that embedded sense of nostalgia
which would be distancing; but played for gags, as in Hellboy [2004], Guillermo
del Toro’s film of Mike Mignola’s comic, visually in the boss battle at the end,
which with its tentacle enormity is probably the closest we’ve come to that echt
big-­budget weird film, and thus evading the nihilism or ontological insecurity; or
inevitably post-­Weird, rather than “pure(r)” weird — so, for example, Hellblazer,
the DC comic, the baddies of which are “traditional” demons that nonetheless
have a distinctly post-­Lovecraftian cast to them.
What would feel heightenedly the case in movies would likely be true, too, if
perhaps less vividly, with other media. My suspicion, in other words, is that the
fractured/ironic/distancing/simulacra-­y nature of “postmodern culture” militates
so contrarily against the weird sense of totality, the sublime, and of the bad awe of
the real that I sort of can’t imagine it in a particularly “pure” form — post-­Weird,
sure.
I’d be delighted and fascinated to be wrong — if there’s a not-­merely-­post-­
but-anti-­ironic New Sublime possible, I’m in. Particularly if it’s a Red one. The
recent increasing traction of — and, I’d say, though hesitantly, politically defen-
sible traction of — nonironic nostalgia and loss might mean that now weird texts
might be more of the moment than has been the case previously.
I suspect that the yearning for that sense of totality and authenticity as mani-
fest in particularity and locale may be what informs the “English Eerie,” as I
gather we’re supposed to call it (and with which like everyone else I’m newly fas-
cinated — the explosion of writing on this is giddying), of hauntological music, of
movies like A Field in England, of the return to Penda’s Fen, and so on. And while
this is obviously not haute weird, it’s certainly weird, weird-­inflected — indeed it
approaches the kind of weird-­hauntology syncresis that I once described as very
rare and hard to pull off. It’s interesting that for a lot of these cultural artifacts,
the weird inheres in form and in embedded reference, in texture, at precisely that
level of insecurity and trauma, rather than at the level of the “furniture” — the
shape of the monsters.
I think it’s precisely telling that that, which appears to be a reaction to post-
modern trauma rather than an expression of it, being a kind of anti-­postmodern
weird nostalgia, is neither classic weird nor classic gothic/haunting. Memory
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itself is en-­weirded here. There’s a sense in a lot of this work that the memory
which haunts the landscape is a weirdness. An abcanny uncanny. That is fasci-
nating and potentially very fecund. (Though of course also ripe for a precipitous
banalization.)
The mere mention of “Englishness” is enough to raise the hackles and anxi-
ety of radicals, and there’s still plenty of room in such stuff for Memory™ and
such, for the Matter of Albion to crop up at its most reprehensible, amenable
to occult bric-­a-­brac and woo-­woo kitsch fascist bullshit (think the right axis
of neoFolk, or Machen’s risible fucking bowmen). But it’s excellent to see how
many practitioners and interested consumers of such are assiduously and explic-
itly anxious to avoid that elision. An effort shoved forward by incredible prac-
titioners like the artist Ingrid Pollard, whose work embedding race and slavery
into the countryside snapshot reaches counterintuitively all the way back behind
Lovecraft’s back, reminding us that Cthulhu’s rise was coterminous with “seri-
ous native unrest.” If a lot of English Eerie is an abcanny uncanny, her racialized
reading of a rambler’s Britain, returning the repressed in the quietly weird land-
scape, is an astonishing uncanny abcanny uncanny.
Guest editors:  Contemporary weird fiction has tended to be defined by a politics
that celebrates the monstrous as a form of liberation from the normative demands
of gender, sexuality, “race,” and class. What do you think of this politics, and why
do you think there has been this “turn” in the politics of the weird?
CM:  As exemplified in Grant Morrison’s “Lovecraft in Heaven” (1998), among
others. Among the reasons people have turned to this, I’m sure, is a completely
justifiable horror at the toxic politics of Lovecraft himself, and his fiction, and a
desire to “reclaim” that aesthetic. Why would one oppose that? I mean, at a pro-
grammatic level the mere “celebration of difference” is a sort of more enthusiastic
version of “tolerance”: excellent as far as it goes, kind of, but strictly limited as a
radical program. That said, particularly as a counter to a weight of reaction, both
in the literary field and in the social world, it’s clearly not something one would
want to set oneself against.
Which isn’t at all to say that it is aesthetically (or politically) cost free. As per
some of the stuff above, one of the things that [it] is more or less inevitably going
to do is bleed out the nihilism, the insecurity. I understand that for a lot of this
stuff, the idea is that fluidity is an embraced, positive insecurity, which — fine.
But that catch-­in-­the-­throat element of the weird is surely inextricable from a
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more baleful iteration. I’m not saying that it would be completely impossible
to have a “celebratory” weird that indulged in the jouissance of the monstrous,
the protean, the formless, to use one of Hodgson’s favorite words, and that still
kept a genuine awe in play, one which wasn’t domesticated . . . but I think it is
extremely hard.
Which means, for me, that most of such work — which I’m not saying I don’t
enjoy — would bleed out the ecstasy by watering down the sublime into a kind
of picturesque, the weird political-­picturesque. Which to my taste deguts the key
weird element.
So can one have politically nontoxic weird that stays true to that sublime?
Certainly, but I suspect that it’s more likely to be found in a humanism and/or
empathy that wrestles with — and doubtless loses to — the bad numinous, à la
Hodgson: or perhaps some modern Brasserian radical can forge a kind of revo-
lutionary solidarity and plastic subjectivity in the face of Nihil. I don’t know,
but these would obviously be rather different ways of “celebrating” elision and
fluidity than the inversion of weird’s abjection of the protean that you describe.
That traditional abjection, as we’ve said, is inevitably suffused with more or less
disavowed yearning, in any case, to which this giving voice is both liberatory and
politically “progressive,” and, in its soothing of the estrangement, the testerical
conflict, the form of not just a humanizing but a dampening. And whatever our
political sympathies, for those of us who seek the numinous in the weird, that’s
a loss.

China Miéville is author of many works of fiction, including The City and the
City (2009), Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories (2015), and This Census-­
Taker (2016); nonfiction, including Between Equal Rights (2005) and London’s
Overthrow (2012); and essays. He has won the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Arthur C.
Clarke Awards. He is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage.

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