Is this the conclusion to a new manifesto?

I guess it’s going to have to be; I have an essay on VanderMeer and genre that I plink away at occasionally where it might fit nicely…

I’m team weird but have a lot of love and respect for SF. I guess I’d be interested to hear whether you think science fiction just sort of hit a limit or whether it had an inherent flaw. Thinking of your writing on uncertainty and the sense of “this world is not right” that weird fiction excels at

Is there something about science fiction for you that can’t quite duplicate that same sense of the world being wrong? Is it that in a sense relies too much on realist principles (even though it takes place within a second world ) for the most part?

Good question! Lots of weird fic draws in sf elements, of course, but yeah, especially if we take a Suvinian approach to sf emphasizing a “possible” novum rooted in realism, it’s exceedingly rare (not impossible!) for the author to then emphasize the unsettlement at the heart of the weird

To oversimplify: might most SF be a displacement in time [that promises a better/worse but stable reality], whereas the weird is a disruption at the heart of the symbolic order, the inability to make sense of (any) historical happening? In psychoanalytic terms, fantasy vs. psychosis.

I like that! I like the time-based def for SF although I might pick at “displacement” there - that would imply an affective weirdness that isn’t always there. Would be interesting to investigate that with/against the weird disruption…

Found myself wondering, have you written about M John Harrison's Kefahuchi tract novels?

I’ve somehow never written about Harrison at all (or read the KT novels, even), but I’m hoping to fix that next year

Oh you are in for a treat.

Weird fiction is just science fiction with a coat of paint

Science fiction is just weird fiction with unnecessary explanations

Hey I kind of see it, but honestly, how is the explosive growth of Weird Fiction unlike the way everything became YA after Harry Potter became a bestseller? The finer you slice the genres and invent ones that overlap others, the more meaningless they become.

Unless you correctly view them as modifiers rather than categories.

weird fiction is also dead; long live weird fiction!

Stranger aeons and all that