1. Why this renaissance of weird fiction, why now?
2. The last two movements of note in spec fic were New Weird and mundane SF. Both leeched off the zeitgeist, revealing truths about our changing perspectives of the world. Life is messy and grotesque, and we are unlikely to ever leave this planet. These insights still hold good even if the mainstream of escapist spec fic has bypassed them and moved on from these passing trends.
3. Just as the New Wave saw spec fic become self aware about its existence as an Art, so Weird fiction sees horror/fantasy become aware of its existence in a universe that is absurd and far stranger than human minds can grasp.
4. Is reality becoming more permeable? Is that why so many more writers are turning to dark, cosmic terror fiction? Even if the actual number is minuscule, what is significant is the pace and exponential growth of the trend.
5. If the universe is truly incomprehensible, truly meaningless and it were to become self-aware, what would it feel? Is this not what drives puny humans into conditions labeled ‘insanity’?
6. If we are part and parcel of the universe, maybe prophecy, vision and hallucination are all ways in which the universe is expressing itself. Fiction is the stories the universe wants to tell.
7. Then all this means that perhaps the universe has woken up. Is screaming out its meaningless, its inchoate randomness and unknowability. And some who profess our writerly Art are tuning in on this frequency.
8. Enthralled, we voice the universe.
9. It starts with a whisper, a murmured surmise.
10. It moves from vague intuitions and a stock sense of reality, through detours unexpected into a sudden opening out of scale, like the cosmic waste on the other end of the telescope suddenly coming into focus.
11. This is what we are revealing as we mirror the universe. As we mirror ourselves. As above, so below. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm.
12. Any literature that imposes meaning must be abjured,
13. Any theory that claims literature imposes meaning must be repudiated.
14. In thrall, we are a universal voice.
15. Then plot is a lie. Resolution is a lie. Hero’s journey a non-starter, the film-script diagrams of the beats of storytelling are all trash, so much irreal raving.
16. In visions of beady eyes staring out of navels, of mountains that fly and skies that fall to earth, of people with clocks for faces and stethoscopes for limbs, in visions of prisoners chained in arenas for the delectation of weeping gods, in these absurdities and more something is revealed. It is no more real than anything else; and that is its point.
17. What pretends to realism is nothing of the kind.
18. What aspires to the breakdown of the mind and all its scripts is authentic. Cherish it.
19. Voiced, the universe is in thrall.
