Black Gate

In his for the most part disdainful observations of science fiction as a cultural phenomenon, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, Thomas Disch characterizes Ray Bradbury, among other notable genre authors of the post- WW II generation, as being in “affluent decline” by the 1980s, suffering from “the literary equivalent of repetition compulsion” (122). He also rues that SF is a young man’s game, not because it is physically exhausting, but because the marketplace focuses on a largely juvenile audience in terms of intellectual temperament, if not actual age. Established authors such as Bradbury who remain successful within the genre do so because they have a “permanent mind-set that is ‘forever-young'” (213). I don’t think this is meant as a compliment.

I can only wonder what Disch may have thought of Bradbury’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize special citation. But, I have to admit he has a point.

Quick, name any Bradbury fiction written after the 1960s that had remotely any affect on you similar to The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Dandelion Wine (1957), A Medicine for Melancholy (1959) or Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)?  And if you weren’t a baby boomer reading any of these works at the so-called golden age of wonder, i.e. 12, and most likely male and most likely a bit of a nerd, during an era roughly contemporaneous to their publication, give or take a decade, you probably have no idea what the point of the question is.

As an aforementioned male baby boomer nerd whose reading of The Martian Chronicles in the fifth grade weaned me off of Hardy Boys books (for further details about this awakening, see this), Ray Bradbury is why you’re reading this (go ahead, blame him). Bradbury was my literary hero, though, for me, these days he’s something of a faded hero. The problem is that I’ve grown up, while Bradbury seems stuck in perpetual small town adolescence, a side trip to Europe or Mars or Los Angeles notwithstanding. For some readers, sometimes you can’t go home again.
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It might seem weird that people once got worked up about this stuff (and, maybe they still do and I’m just not paying that much attention anymore), but about five years or so ago (that’s 35  in dog years and  paleolithic ancient history in Internet reckoning), people were getting worked up about “The New Weird,” whether it was a bona fide genre subcategory and/or movement, who its practitioners were, and who the hell cared.   At least it was better than arguing about whether cyberpunk was dead and whether slipstream was literary science fiction, or literary fiction that stole from science fiction.

Now, along come the Vandermeers —  both of whom have dogs in this hunt, Ann as editor of the presumably now defunct Silver Web magazine and currently at the helm of Weird Tales and Jeff as the author of City of Saints and Madmen, among other works, associated with The New Weird milieu and, if recollection serves, one of those who at the time thought the whole discussion about  the classification kind of pointless — with  The New Weird anthology. Theirs is an interesting approach.  This is more than a compendium of stories that tend to share a theme; rather, it is a kind of snapshot of a fixed era (with one exception) of excitement  — possibly mixed with some confusion —  of authors breaking ground from traditional fantasy and horror and mixing it up in very intriguing, though sometimes incomprehensible ways, whose time, the editors seem to suggest, has past.  “New Weird is dead.  Long Live the Next Weird.”
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