Paulo Coelho, in amongst his thoughts on the insanity of SOPA, shares the idea that all writers are only recycling four stories.

First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey.

I collect ideas of this kind. Aristotle said there were only two stories, Comedy and Tragedy. We know quite a lot of what he thought about the latter, but his ideas on the former have been lost for some years. Arthur Quiller-Couch devised the rather Man centric seven plots of Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man against God, Man vs. Society, Man in the Middle, Man & Woman, Man vs. Himself. Also weighing in for the number seven is Christopher Booker, who puts forward a convincing argument that all plots revolve around the conflict between humanity and our selfish ego, only then to ruin it by trying to argue that all 20th Century literature represents the capitulation of the the self to the ego. George Polti outlined Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations including Deliverance, Pursuit, Disaster, Revolt and thirty two more. Perhaps my current favourite has recently been republished in Plotto : the Master Book of All Plots by dime novelist William Wallace Cook which represents a possible 1,462 plots. Wallace once wrote fifty-four novels in one year. Take that NaNoWriMo fanatics! In probably the most famous typology of story, Joseph Campbell trumped everyone by declaring there was only one plot and naming it the Monomyth, thereby determining the formula for almost every Hollywood blockbuster from Star Wars to The Matrix, Toy Story and The Dark Knight.

Image via Wikipedia

Are these theories actually of any use? No idea. I like reading them, and from a commercial perspective the Monomyth has proved to be a horrendously successful formula for very, very, very profitable stories. But I completely understand the writers who cover their eyes and ears the moment any mention of this kind of idea appears, for fear that it will forever pollute their original voice.

Are there really only two, seven, thirty six or however many plots? Again, who knows. I’d love to argue for the infinite mutability of story, and I’m sure I could quite convincingly. But at the same time stories, however diverse they appear on the surface, are all made from much the same thing underneath. Some characters. A plot. A theme or two. Half  a dozen symbols. A bit of conflict to get it all going. And yet, much like the seven chords that make up all songs, the same elements used in much the same ways seem to yield staggeringly different and original results in the hands of each artist who picks them up. There may only be seven stories, but there are uncounted storytellers, and each one must contribute some unique spark, or the story will never take life.

Related articles

• Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots (brainpickings.org)
• Plot…The most important 4 letter word that doesn’t start with “S”or “F”… (kadja1.com)
• Everything they taught us about stories was WRONG (redpenofdoom.com)
• Some Tools for Beginning Script Writing (warrentwilkinson.wordpress.com)
• The Magician King, or How to be a Hero (Except in Narnia) (theparish.typepad.com)

• The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
• Embassytown by China Miéville (Tor)
• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker Books)
• The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone)
• Osama: A Novel by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

There are two additional categories for best debut and best cover, information here, both strong shortlists but I want to focus attention here on the best novel category. Because not only is this a strong shortlist, but an important one for fantastic literature, because it really asks the question of how seriously we take ourselves, or expect to be taken by others.

This has not been a good year for SF awards. The Hugo and Nebulas both came under criticism for shortlists primarily determined by partisan fan factions rather than quality writing, and the British Fantasy Society awards literally collapsed under the weight of their own nepotism. Earlier comments on this issue lead me in to a protracted argument with John Scalzi through the medium of Twitter. John didn’t seem to think having awards shortlists full of bad books was a problem because, you know, quality is just a subjective issue and people have different tastes and any suggestion that more than a few of these books were were incredibly lightweight was ‘kvetching’.

So the Kitschies shortlist leaps out as actually doing that thing that awards should do, which is awarding the best work in their field. And in those terms I doubt there will be a stronger shortlist in any award for fantastic literature this year.

Jesse Bullington’s work came to prominence after an unusual call for attention through Jeff Vandermeer, and his two novels to date have established him as one of the most talented prose writers out there, shaping incredibly dark worlds of deep moral uncertainty. The Testament of Jessie Lamb became one of the few works of science fiction ever to pick up a Booker prize longlist nomination in 2011. Embassytown is a novel I’ve already heaped praise upon in The Guardian for its treatment of radical political themes through the lens of SF metaphor. Osama : A Novel has placed Lavie Tidhar in the top rank of todays SF writers for its intelligent and complex examination of post-911 politics, filtered through a Philip K Dick influenced alternative reality. But much as I like these books, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd is quite simply a masterpiece, continuing Ness’s powerful exploration of themes of violence and male identity, and probably deserves to win any award shortlist it finds itself on this year.

In different ways all of the books on this shortlist demonstrate what it is that is truly great in fantastic literature. They are all great books by any definition. Books with heart and soul, and also with meaning. Books we can find insight in, and learn about what it is to be human, even in a world as weird and strange as our own, and which use the metaphors of fantastic literature to create that insight. They are intelligent works of fantastic literature, that deserve to be recognised and rewarded as such.

Fantastic literature is a broad church. Many of the congregation are there for a bit zombie apocalypse or steampunk adventure. And that’s OK. Really it is. A world where every novel had the intellectual heft of Mieville would be a hard one to enjoy. Absolutely true. But when it comes to awards, are we really doing ourselves justice by lauding popcorn novels with major prizes? I’m going to fully enjoy John Carter of Mars when it hits our screens, but I would be profoundly disappointed if it took the Oscar for best movie or the Palm d’Or. And I would start to take those awards less seriously, then ignore them all together, if films without any substance won them often. Awards stand or fall on the basis of the quality they reward. Some of SFs major awards may be falling by that measure. But it seems new awards are there to replace them.

Related articles

• What the Booker prize really excludes (guardian.co.uk)
• Tor.com 2011 Readers’ Choice Awards Update 01/12 (tor.com)
• Why Science Fiction is the literature of change (damiengwalter.com)
• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness: review (telegraph.co.uk)

Listen to the Guardian books podcast: Science Fiction now and tomorrow.

Today’s Guardian books podcast, which I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in alongside Lauren Beukes, Alaistar Reynolds, Jeff Noon and Michael Moorcock, asks if 2012 is the year Science Fiction enters the ‘mainstream’. Beukes upcoming novel the Shining Girls, recently purchased by HarperCollins, is one of a number of SF novels to win a major advance from a mainstream publisher this year. Terry Pratchett‘s Snuff became the fastest selling adult hardback novel since records began, SF imprint Gollancz have signed three six figure deals this year alone, and the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones has reinvigorated epic fantasy. Following on from the British Libraries major SF retrospective, it seems SF is poised to dominate the popular consciousness of 2012.

Image by untitledprojects via Flickr

Our discussion for the podcast touched on a range of reasons why SF is growing so quickly in popularity. One argument is, of course, monetary. In hard economic times SF might represent a safe bet for publishers. But then the work of writers like Beukes is far from safe or traditional. Perhaps SF itself has changed, with writers like Beukes and China Mieville among many others producing work which defies the cliches and stereotypes that repel so many from reading the genre. And surely social media plays a part, where a tremendously loyal and tech-savvy fandom are able to shout far louder for the books they love than the relatively luddite world of literary fiction.

But I would argue there is something more of the zeitgeist to SF’s new found energy. Perhaps more than any other literary genre, SF responded to a 20th Century that was driven by wave upon wave of technological change. For millions of readers SF became a trusted guide to a world being transformed by scientific discoveries so fundamental that the world of 2001 would have made little or no sense to the people of 1901. The physical changes have been vast, but psychological impact has also been vast, and there the literature of SF: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, have all emerged as ways of exploring the psychology of our changing century.

I have no doubt that the changes ahead of us in the 21st century will make the 20th seem positively pedestrian. And from the ever growing popularity of SF, I believe many other people feel the same. SF is no longer an emerging literary genre. It is established and here to stay, although its appearance may, in deed will, change radically. And more and more people recognise that, while it has its roots in the pulp and the popular, SF provides one of the best ways of examining the rapidly changing world around us. Because, once one strips surface appearance of SF, the rockets and rayguns and swords and sorcery that define Sci-Fi in the popular imagination, once the furniture of genre is carted off, the literary heart of SF is the metaphor.

The faster the world changes, the less familiar it feels, and the weirder it becomes, the more impossible the task of directly describing our experience of it. Instead, as generations of artists have done to explain the inexplicable, we reach for metaphors. In the 20th Century the metaphors of SF are perhaps the most powerful of all. Invaders from Mars as metaphor Britain’s Imperial invasion of the world. A metaphorical glass bead game that prefigured the computer. Big Brother and ‘one ring to rule them all’ as metaphor for totalitarianism and the march of the industrial world. The ghostly metaphor of ‘cyberspace’ that introduced us to the internet before we even knew we needed one. These metaphors, and hundreds more crafted in SF, have shaped how we perceive the changing world of last century. And now writers like Lauren Beukes, with her ‘animaled’ humans, are shaping the metaphors that will guide us through the century of change ahead.

Related articles

• Literary SF – To be, or not to be…. (rosieoliver.wordpress.com)
• Three Movie Deals for SF/Fantasy by Lauren Beukes, Cherie Priest, and Charles Yu (omnivoracious.com)
• Science Fiction is the most valuable art ever. Discuss. (damiengwalter.com)

Read more @ The Guardian

Related articles

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• ARTICLE: Retelling the Story: Rewriting Fantasy, History, and Myth #MWN (motownwriters.wordpress.com)
• September 7, 2011 Arthurian Fact of the Day (caridwen.wordpress.com)

(*) Bizarre, extraordinary, singular, surprising. Le Robert Dictionary

1 – Write the first sentence of a novel, short story, or book of the weird yet to be written.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Dark Lord in posession of a plot to destroy the world must be in want of a minion.

2 – Without looking at your watch: what time is it?

7:45

3 – Look at your watch. What time is it?

7:51

4 – How do you explain this — or these — discrepancy(ies) in time?

My time keeping device indicates the time via the screams of a minion, and he was a bit hoarse today.

5 – Do you believe in meteorological predictions?

Why would my weather minion lie to me, knowing, as it does, the unfortunate consequences?

6 – Do you believe in astrological predictions?

Piffling one! No aspirant may claim the title of Dark Lord without full powers of precognition and ambulatory divination.

7 – Do you gaze at the sky and stars by night?

The all seeing eye does not gaze. Glowers perhaps. Or probes. Yes, probes.

8 – What do you think of the sky and stars by night?

I am the Dark Lord of all I survey.

9 – What were you looking at before starting this questionnaire?

The dark heart of mankind.

10 – What do cathedrals, churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and other religious monuments inspire in you?

Only that it can be informative to study the techniques of ones forebears.

11 – What would you have “seen” if you’d been blind?

What would you have “seen” if ‘you had’ been blind. Pedantry is the pleasure of all Dark Lords.

12 – What would you want to see if you were blind?

Your mortal concept of sight means nothing to the awakened ones.

13 – Are you afraid?

*ahem* OK. A little bit. Just between us.

14 – What of?

Sometimes, when I awake from my eternal slumber, I worry that I won’t destroy the world. It’s a stupid fear I know, but it vexes me. What if I’m not evil enough? What if actually I’m quite nice, and might just be happier with a quiet job in a museum and a nice little house somewhere? Ridiculous of course. My destiny is a subject of prophecy. I can’t choose a quiet life, even if I wanted to. Not that I want to. At all.

15 – What is the last weird film you’ve seen?

After a particularly long day of dominating the mortal plane of existence I will, on occaision, instruct some among my minions to perform a popular entertainment of the day. You have not experienced culture until you have seen Avatar interpreted by terrified and highly trained minions. In 4D.

16 – Whom are you afraid of?

Paxo. Even Dark Lord’s fear a Newsnight grilling.

17 – Have you ever been lost?

I did once spend a frustrating afternoon in a service station McDonald’s near junction 8 of the M6, watching rain stream down the plate glass windows, receiving ever more apologetic text from a soon to be kept in agonising torment for eternity driver minion.

18 – Do you believe in ghosts?

Well, I am keeping you suspended between realms in order that we may continue this discussion.

19 – What is a ghost?

Describe your current circumstance.

20 – At this very moment, what sound(s) can you here, apart from the computer?

The weeping of minions.

21 – What is the most terrifying sound you’ve ever heard – for example, “the night was like the cry of a wolf”?

Joyous laughter.

22 – Have you done something weird today or in the last few days?

*raises eyebrow*

23 – Have you ever been to confession?

What full blooded Dark Lord has not been tempted to employ the services of a Man of the Light? But it’s not something we talk about at the dinner table.

24 – You’re at confession, so confess the unspeakable.

‘Damn me father, for I have done good! I have fed and homed a number of kittens, and allowed my minions moments of peace and freedom!”

25 –Without cheating: what is a “cabinet of curiosities”?

Why would I not cheat?

26 –Do you believe in redemption?

ahahahahahaha

27 – Have you dreamed tonight?

Only of power.

28 – Do you remember your dreams?

No. I make them real.

29 – What was your last dream?

Destroying the world. Then I woke up and destroyed the world.

30 – What does fog make you think of?

Fog.

31 – Do you believe in animals that don’t exist?

I must be careful what I believe in, as it will automatically come to pass.

32 – What do you see on the walls of the room where you are?

Let’s just say it involves numerous minions in various states of discomfort.

33 – If you became a magician, what would be the first thing you’d do?

Reverse Paul Daniel’s and Debbie McGee’s costumes.

34 – What is a madman?

Someone who believes in an objective reality that does not conform to their every whim.

35 – Are you mad?

I bend reality to conform to my every whim.

36 – Do you believe in the existence of secret societies?

They make an excellent entree.

37 – What was the last weird book you read?

Every now and again a writer or two dedicates their being to my service as a minion. They amuse me with the contents of their puny mortal minds which I have them labour for year upon year to record in words. At least, watching the manuscripts burn is amusing. I would never read one. How funny! Reading the hopes and dreams of a minion. Ha!

38 – Would you like to live in a castle?

Funny you should say that…

39 – Have you seen something weird today?

*raises eyebrow*

40 – What is the weirdest film you’ve ever seen?

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. Creepy or what?!

41 – Would you like to live in an abandoned train station?

I…have never considered the issue.

42 – Can you see the future?

I can see your future.

43 – Have you considered living abroad?

If by abroad you mean in parallel tiers of reality, then, no.

44 – Where?

The problem with pan dimensional travel is that wherever you go you find British people. I mean honestly, if you make it to the eighth tier of transcendence do you really need a traditional english breakfast and a pint of lager? Apparent you do if you’re from Essex.

45 – Why?

oh all right then. I’ve always quite fancied a backpacking trip to Valhalla. Satisfied?

46 – What is the weirdest film you’ve ever owned?

Ah ha! I am indirectly responsible for the Transformers movie franchise and Pearl Harbour, following the transfer of Michael Bay’s soul to my possession. ouch! stopping kicking me!

47 – Would you liked to have lived in a vicarage?

I had much more fun living in a vicar.

48 – What is the weirdest book you’ve ever read?

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. A post-modernist satire on the absurd impossibility of writing an epic fantasy in the 21st century, surely?

49 – Which do you like better, globes or hourglasses?

Globes of course, to better peruse my possession. And hour glasses make me nervous. Like I’m always late for something.

50 – Which do you like better, antique magnifying glasses or bladed weapons?

Ah ha! The former, because they allow me to better see the impact of the later.

51 – What, in all likelihood, lies in the depths of Loch Ness?

You do not wish to know, I assure you.

52 – Do you like taxidermied animals?

heh heh heh heh…that made me think of something I did with a few minions last week. *snort*

53 – Do you like walking in the rain?

That…oh my…my memories are flooded with the aroma of fresh cut grass after a thunder storm in late summer. Walking across the open fields of an idyllic countryside hand in hand with a young maiden who loved me with all her heart as droplets of moisture tumbled from the sky on to her beautiful, upturned face. Then sacrificing her. So, yes.

54 – What goes on in tunnels?

You…don’t really want to ask me that, do you?

55 – What do you look at when you look away from this questionnaire?

My favourite minion Tony. He seems…agitated.

56 – What does this famous line inspire in you: “And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.”?

*blank expression*

57 – Without cheating: where is that famous line from?

I do not appreciate your attempt to outwit me, for which you will suffer in agony for eternity.

58 – Do you like walking in graveyards or the woods by night?

See question 53. Replace maiden with gentleman.

58 – Write the last line of a novel, short story, or book of the weird yet to be written.

He loved Dark Lord. (Inspired by Orwell)

59 – Without looking at your watch: what time is it?

9:08

60 – Look at your watch. What time is it?

9:08

Reading through The Marriage Plot I am able to see where other readers have highlighted passages. I find this really quite interesting. It would of course be much, much more interesting if readers could share comments on the text directly through their Kindles. We may read books in isolation but we love to talk about them together. Books are about our shared human experience, so it’s good and natural that we want to exchange thoughts about them. Take it a step further. Think about the commentary that accrues around a text over the years. Reviews. Academic studies. Reader comments. Author interviews. Social media gives us the technology to connect all of these materials directly to the text. That’s incredible added value, which has hardly even begun to be tapped.

The publishing industry has been chronically slow in exploiting the unique added value of user generated meta-content around the product they publish. Particularly as it provides an absolutely compelling solution to the problem of piracy. Only the authorised text allows you both to read commentary, and to comment upon the text. Readers are in effect paying not for the book, an increasingly worthless product, but for entry to the community of the book’s readers, an increasingly valuable experience. My prediction is that the first players to provide a seamless commentary and meta-content system for published texts will gain an advantage in the game of modern publishing. It will almost certainly be Amazon, unless the major publishers suddenly gain a gift for innovation they have previously lacked.

Related articles

• Jeffrey Eugenides talks about ‘The Marriage Plot’ and pokes fun at literary theorists (3quarksdaily.com)
• Reading is alive and increasingly electronic (reuters.com)
• Shelf Talk | If you like Jeffrey Eugenides, try these (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

The novel that raised Haruki Murakami to literary superstardom ranges across the seasons, but the heart of its meaning is found in winter. When 30-something Toru Watanabe hears a fragment of the titular Beatles track after a long airplane flight, his memories are returned to his days as a young student and his love affair with the beautiful but damaged Naoko. Toru walks beside Naoko for the last time in the snow-blanketed woods surrounding the mental institution where she is undergoing intensive therapy. Shortly afterwards Naoko commits suicide in that frozen landscape, and while Toru’s life continues, a part of him remains forever wandering in winter.

Read more at Guardian books.

The pugnacious @gavreads earlier tweeted the following definitions, distilled from this IO9 report on a talk between Margaret Atwood and Ursula K Le Guin…

“could happen (speculative fiction), couldn’t happen yet (science fiction), could never happen at all (fantasy).”

No, much as I respect both Atwood and Le Guin, this is just nonsense.

Firstly, speculative fiction is absolutely and definitively a catch all umbrella term for all imaginative fiction. It is not any kind of distinct genre in itself, and it was ABSOLUTELY NOT IN ANY WAY begun by Jules Verne as Atwood claims. That’s the kind of thing an ignorant but intelligent observer, which is exactly what Atwood is, would say knowing that its credible enough to sucker people in.

Secondly, this falls in to the tired old rut of defining science fiction and fantasy as different things. Which in turn is just pandering to the beardy science fiction fans and their group delusion that they aren’t just indulging the same fantastical tendencies as everyone else because they happen to base their fantasies on New Scientist magazine instead of germanic mythology. Science fiction is one among many brands of fantasy, and that’s the end of the matter.

THERE WILL NEVER EVER BE ANY POINT IN THE FUTURE HISTORY OF MANKIND WHERE WE CAN UPLOAD OUR CONSCIOUSNESS TO COMPUTERS. IT’S A FANTASY METAPHOR EMPLOYING TECHNOLOGY IN A PURELY SYMBOLIC WAY.

Taking that metaphor literally makes it absurd and meaningless, which is the generalised effect of forgetting that science fiction, while possessing a number of distinguishing characteristics, is nonetheless still a form of fantasy.

That is all.

It’s a truism that science fiction, however distinct its vision of the future, is always just as much a reflection of its present. The golden age of SF writers, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke, predicted near futures of a colonised solar system and an era of engineering marvels from robotics to space elevators. But, viewed through a historical lens, their futures say far more about the cold war politics of 1950s America than the post-industrial world of 2011. If science fiction provides a record of the hopes and fears of each generation for the future ahead, what do contemporary SF writers say about today?

Read more in The Guardian

.

(I was too ill to link this from my blog when it was published on The Guardian online, so here it is now.)

I am forced into speech because men of letters refuse to act without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing the publication of this tome – with its dangerous unearthing of such potent weird tales – and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable. But the hitherto ignored evidence – the madness of the many authors contained in its pages and clearly inhuman determination of its “editors” – must surely count in my favour.

The Weird. The first intimations of the terror awaiting the unwary reader must surely be the inhuman scale of the tome itself. Seven hundred and fifty thousand words are contained in its pages. The Necronomicon itself has not half as many! A hundred and sixteen of the century’s weirdest fictions; the transcribed ravings of those lunatic creatures known in the mortal tongue as “writers”. Algernon Blackwood. HP Lovecraft. Franz Kafka. Ray Bradbury. Jorge Luis Borges. Mervyn Peake. Angela Carter. Michael Chabon. Through these its emissaries the weird has penetrated deep into the very fabric of our reality. And now it threatens to tear it altogether asunder.

Few are there, even among even the true adepts of the weird, that might gather such a cohort of its mouthpieces in one tome. Few with the singular willpower to perform such a fell deed of sorcery. And but one, Ann VanderMeer, the witch queen of weird herself, and the muttering curmudgeon she keeps as her familiar, with the audacity to enact such devastating events. But the blame must rest with those of us who divined their purpose but did nothing to prevent it. Long have the VanderMeers mustered their forces, honing their editorial craft in the pages of the New Weird and Steampunk anthologies, reopening the cursed pages of Weird Tales magazine that had been long forgotten. They have gathered to their banner a warrior cult of weird writers in preparation for their onslaught against reality.

Do not be fooled by the tome-like appearance of The Weird. It is a mere illusion, formed to satisfy the limited capacities of your simian flesh brain and memetic mind structure. Open your third eye, gaze into higher dimensions of the multiverse, and you will see its true manifestation. Its pulsing opalescent body. Its beaked, gaping, chewing maw as it feeds upon reality itself. Soon the chrysalid will form, and The Weird itself will burst into the the world as a radiant winged moth of metaphysical doom!

I meant only to pry apart the covers, to take the briefest glance, deluding myself that my long exposure to the weird would inure me against the tome’s most potent effects. But the portal opened vistas of weirdness I had not dared even to conceive. The Hungry Stones of poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore and Eric Basso’s The Beak Doctor. I was shown the eruption of true weird in the work of otherwise mundane writers including Daphne du Maurier, Ben Okri and Joyce Carol Oates. And I could not ignore the ever more dangerous domination of the weird over the popular imagination of mankind through the work of its tireless servants Neil Gaiman, Stephen King and Haruki Murakami. I have no sense of how many were the days, the years, the infinities of time I wandered through the dimension of weird which this portal opened to me.

Above all else, I must warn you to fear the Miéville. His path has been prepared by the Moorcock and the Harrison and now he is among us, the anointed messenger of weird on earth! Until now he has been satisfied to bide his time, but in The Weird the full horror of his plans are revealed. For even as I record these words, the fragile tissue of fictionyou call “reality” is being eaten away by the weird’s greedy jaws and the ravenous hunger that it feeds, set free in our world by the VanderMeers through the portal of their giant tome. A sick fascination will lure the great minds of the literary establishment, wriggling and writhing like blind maggots to the brink of the portal, where the weird will infect them forever. The discourses of the academy will be replaced with insane rantings of the weird. The grand narratives of science, politics, history, that have for so long dammed the waters of reality, will burst open as the beliefs on which they were founded are undermined. And the Miéville will sit upon a throne of tentacles and look upon the the shivering masses of fandom in judgement. Only a few will be chosen to walk beside him in the weird realms beyond reality. Bow now before the Miéville. BOW! BOW! Oh help me Gaiman, my will has finally crumbled before the onslaught of the weird.

There is only one hope left for the billions who will suffer as reality collapses. Give yourself to the weird! Hurl your puny mortal body through the portal the VanderMeers have opened for you, join your lord the Miéville on the other side, give your heart and soul to the saints that stand at his feet, to the mad prophets that have prepared you for his coming. Open the pages of the new gospel of The Weird.

And for Cthulhu’s sake do not click this link.

Related articles

• Beware The Weird! (guardian.co.uk)
• The internet wasn’t weird enough. But now it is. Check out The Weird Fiction Review! [Afternoon Reading] (io9.com)
• No Metaphors Allowed: China Miéville’s Imagined Language (patrickcox.wordpress.com)