The "New Weird" is the "Current Weird"

This week I read some stories from Three Moments of an Explosion.

            The first short story, Three Moments of an Explosion, offers what I think is a really perceptive view of the future. Mieville manages to fit in a great amount of speculation into only two pages. The idea that one day even decay will be turned into advertisement was an ironic idea that I found very entertaining. One would think that no company would want to associate themselves with rot and decay, and yet it could very well be a brilliant untapped marketing idea. It’s truly a weird idea, and yet no weirder than how we advertise nowadays. Once we exhaust all the advertising space on the nonliving, perhaps we will move onto the living?

            The death defying stunt in the second section is reflective of our current adrenaline-seeking culture. This section makes you consider whether in the future, immersive fiction such as books, movies, and video games will be enough to satisfy our desires for action and adrenaline. Or, will it just never be enough until there is a chance you could literally kill yourself doing it? In this section, this adrenaline-junkie culture is still something of a counter-culture, but its intensity is clearly exponentially higher than today’s counter-cultures. What must the mainstream culture be like to induce such a frightening counter-culture?

            The horror in this story comes from the question of our unknown future. It is impossible to know what the future will be like, and this in itself is frightening. Even more frightening is the knowledge that a bad future must develop sometime in the present, and yet we are essentially powerless to change as long as we have no idea what exactly it is that leads to our downfall. The only option seems to be to sit and wait as the world gradually grows worse. Or, perhaps it has already gotten worse, and yet like the people in Three Moments of an Explosion, we just take our reality for granted.

            The second story in the collection runs even further with the theme of “fear of the unknown.” In Polynia, giant icebergs float innocuously over London. There is danger in this, and also beauty. It’s implied that the existence of the floating icebergs is a sort of karma for global warming. There is ultimately no explanation, and no resolution. The icebergs are just there one day, and they stay there. After a while, people stop questioning them, and they become a normal aspect of life.

            Similarly to the first story, this story offers a question about our present. Is there something hovering over our generation with the potential to kill us that we have gradually ignored, or accepted as a way of life? All the signs here are pointing to climate change, but it could just as well be a symbolic representation of pretty much anything.

            These stories, while discussing a future or an alternate reality, do much to comment on the present.