New weird

New weird (or, more pretentiously, New Weird) is an SFnal genre.

Nick Mamatas, 2004:

And New Weird? Well the thing to know if one wants to understand the New Weird is this: China Mieville, the prime exponent of New Weird (though it was M. John Harrison who coined the term) is under the discipline of the Socialist Workers Party (GB). The "New Weird" is his attempt to place his own fiction and some of the fiction contemporary with it within the party's political perspective. ... Well, I agree that "weird fiction" is a useful taxon, but I think China makes the same error that proponents of slipstream do. They draw genre boundaries far too narrowly, usually no tighter than some notional Lakatoian hard core of genre, and declare anything that falls outside their abritrary center to be transgressive or at least "New". And again he ends up doing some gymnastics: in the interview China told me that Jeff VanderMeer isn't New Weird because Jeff breaks the fourth wall and thus refuses to surrender to the Weird.

Michael Cisco, 2004:

For the sake of keeping ourselves in circulation, we might provisionally describe this as a tendency toward more literarily sophisticated fantasy. In bookstores, Fantasy means the Piers Anthony/J.R.R. Tolkein section; the word is an abbreviation for a standard content, like a brand. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Alice in Wonderland, The Golden Ass, Gulliver’s Travels or Naked Lunch are not shelved there, although they are all fantasies. This has everything to do with selling books, making sure the buyer finds what he or she is looking for, and reflects no judgement with regard to the literary status of this or that work of fantasy. A certain amount of work is produced specifically for the purpose of stocking shelves in the Fantasy section, where the index of novelty is best kept low. The serendipitous constellation of contemporary fantasy writers that belong to or generate the “new weird” seem generally and in varying proportions to blend the influences of genre writing and literary fantasy, and to weave in non-fantastic signals as well.

Wikipedia, 2007:

The New Weird is an avant-garde literary movement or literary genre that may or may not be presently in progress. The writers involved are mostly novelists who are considered to be parts of the science fiction or speculative fiction genres. The only author all critics agree on as a "New Weird" writer is China Miéville, who self-describes as such. ... [A] loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird who consciously attempt to move fantasy away from commercial, genre clichés of Tolkien epigons.