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This is one of my favorite times, the liminal space between one year and the next. For most people, this time for intense thinking and planmaking runs from Christmas through New Year's, but at MIT this period is extended through the beginning of February. (Yet another reason I love it so much here at MIT.) According to MIT tradition, January is what's known as the Independent Activities Period, or IAP – originally founded (according to legend) in the 1960s as a way for students to take off and protest the Vietnam War all at once, instead of disappearing for random weeks out of the year. IAP has since evolved into a sort of micro-semester crammed in between the autumn semester and the spring semester, a month set aside for students (and faculty and staff) to enroll in courses they might not otherwise have a chance to take, to go off and tackle an externship somewhere, or to simply recuperate from MIT's normal grueling demands. (Another local legend likens an MIT education to drinking from a fire hose, which is truer than might be comfortable. This is, not coincidentally, why my friend Eitan named his new startup Firehose Games.)

I love this time not just for its interstitial nature, but because of the time it affords for reflection and planning. Years ago I launched a personal initiative called the Personal Improvement Project, or PIP (no relation to Fallout 3's pip-boy 3000, although I'm half-expecting a real one of those to show up at CES this week). This is the time of year when I mourn all the stuff I didn't get done in the previous year, and plan furiously for ways to achieve more of those goals in the year ahead. 2009 was a wonderful year, a crazy year, productive in ways I hadn't planned for, but, alas, rather unproductive in the ways that I had. Read the classics? Not so much. Get out of debt? Yeah, no. Get back in shape? Hells naw. To a certain extent, that's the nature of the universe – life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, man plans and God laughs, yadda yadda yadda.

This year, though? This year things are going to be different.

What Happened?

First, why did things go so wobbly in 2009?

For starters, in 2009 I got married. In 2010, I'm not getting married. This should help. Don't get me wrong – I loved getting married, but I love being married much more. For starters, being married is much cheaper than getting married. Further (and, perhaps, better), it's much less stressful. These are two hallmarks of a good marriage – if being married is cheaper and less stressful than getting married, you're doing something right. (Note that this most likely ceases to apply once kids become involved.)

Second, in 2010 I was racing like mad to prepare for applying for Ph.D. programs at the end of the year. Again, not so much. I finally wound up postponing applying to Ph.D programs for another year, which was an intensely difficult decision to make (at this rate, I won't be Dr. Long until I'm in my 40s), but it was the right thing to do. Being a grad student is a wonderful state of existence, but it's not a very lucrative one, and stepping right into that after just investing a bunch of money in my wedding was going to be a nightmare. So, the whole doctorate project is going to have to be pushed back until the fall of 2011 or even 2012.

Third, I took on a lot in 2009. Not just the wedding (although that was big enough), but also a whole mess of travel (Singapore, Germany, Los Angeles, Brazil, Pittsburgh, Austria, Florida, San Francisco...!), joined the Executive Board of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, took on a whole mess of projects at work (including writing my first video game) and am now in the middle of launching Playful Thinking, a new series of short game studies books published by the MIT Press which I'm co-editing with William Uricchio and Jesper Juul. Woof.

So, yes – all of this meant that life in 2009 was hectic as hell, and didn't leave a lot of time for reading, exercise, and not spending money on plane tickets. Fortunate or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it – but not at all a bad thing!

It's a new year now, though, and I'm reconsidering a number of the decisions I made in 2009. (Not the marriage. I'm keeping that one.) Primarily, this year I'm planning to buckle down and do a lot less traveling for conferences. I may do some more traveling for my consulting work (which is directly tied to the whole paying-off-debt thing) but for the most part I think this is the year I really need to write. On a larger scale, though, if you'll permit me to swipe and modify a line from Hollywood, it's starting to feel like 2010: The Year We Make Contact Up.

Need A Little Time To Make Up

The primary meanings of the phrase "make up" deal with either imagination or reparation, which is why this is such a timely phrase right now – and in some kind of weird micro-macro fractal reflection, this applies not just to me, but for all of us, particularly us Americans. For me it's going to be a year of writing (imagination) and paying down debts (reparation), but the whole world is going to have to use 2010 as a year of great imagination and reparation while we reimagine what the next wave of existence is going to be like, and as we pay off the disastrous debts we've incurred during the previous wave.

Right now, it feels like pretty much the whole damn planet is wondering the same things. What is the post-recessionary global economy going to be like? Is it reliant upon new energy sources and green-collar jobs? Is it a post-oil existence? Will America decline while other countries ascend? Will our new planetary society be more of a global village, will it be more hyperlocalized – or is it, in some weird anti-Venn diagram, simultaneously increasingly both? (Based on what I've been seeing during my travels, that gets my vote.)

Those of us in the media industries are worrying about slightly different things. How will the combination of recessionary economics and new technology change the media universe? (I've been thinking a lot lately about Borders' nosedive and the well-intentioned, if ill-executed, Barnes and Noble nook.) Further, in the 21st century, does 'digital' still have any great meaning? What happens when we push past that – what is 'post-digital', and what will post-digital media, entertainment and storytelling be like? One of the things that excites me about transmedia and comparative media studies is that they may be inherently post-digital; we no longer get so hung up on the explicit divide between the analog and the digital, but examine the unique advantages and affordances of each, which enables us to capitalize upon these features as they increasingly blend together – which sure seems to be the way we're going.

Profitability Sustainability Is King

One thing I wonder a lot about right now is whether the twenty-teens (damn, that sounds odd) will see a shift away from rampant profiteering and ridiculous, irresponsible spending and towards not just repaying our debts, but towards aiming for simpler, more sustainable levels of existence. One thing I've been wondering about for a long time is, simply, How much is enough? How does the cost of living in one part of the world compare to another? (I'm somewhat astonished to see that Boston isn't included in Mint.com's map of the world's most expensive cities.) How much is a house really worth? How much is a thought really worth, or an experience, or one's reputation? How do we handle value in an experience economy, or a reputation economy? (For some insight into the latter, check out the Whuffie Bank, where you can find me at my usual handle.)

What is a model for sustaining a good, solid lifestyle with a decent amount of enjoyment, a relatively high standard of living, a sufficient amount of thought and reflection, a decent reputation, and so on?

It may be me thinking about these things because I'm in my early thirties now and am obsessing over things like families and houses and careers and so on, but it's clear that the 21st century models of success are not the same as the 20th century models. Do you have to have Gaimanesque levels of success as an artist to have a nice house and writing studio in the American midwest? Do you need to go all Hollywood and make ridiculous piles of cash to "make it"? Plus, what's an unsustainable business model for guys like me now? My model has always been to hit the trifecta of consulting-writing-academic, but given today's hyperaccelerated demands, is that still sustainable?

It's possible that the proper response (the "mind like water" response for you GTD-heads out there) to our current scenario is "less is more", or, to put it another way, "less is more sustainable." On my way into campus this morning, there was an episode of The Diane Rehm Show on WGBH where (I think) Allen Sinai, the chief global economist and president of Decision Economics, bluntly stated that we Americans have to get used to a lower standard of living. I think he may be right – as Trevor Butterworth and his 'slow word' manifesto, the 'slow food' movement, and scores of others seem to be indicating, we are on the brink of a society throwing up its hands and surrendering to the impossibility of the ever-increasing demands for more, more, more. The recession may be an overcorrection to the fiscal irresponsibilities of the last decade, but it may also be a chance for many of us to catch our breath and rethink what "enough" means to all of us. You don't need a McMansion to be successful, but you do need enough to live comfortably and, hopefully, put your kids through college. So what does that cost now? How do you get it? And how do you get it without going insane?

Making Up Is Hard To Do

Anyway, that's what I think 2010 (and maybe 2011 and even 2012) will be all about – more so than ever before, at both the micro and macro levels. How do we make up new answers to these questions, and how do we make up enough for our previous errors and indulgences to return to a more stable and sustainable footing? It's not going to be easy, but that's, again, the nature of the universe.

But life is good. And even if things get crazy, life gets better. Here's to a wonderful 2010 for each and every one of us. Onward and upward!

I've just returned from a wonderful whirlwind trip to Los Angeles which found me first attending Indiecade in Culver City (where I got to hang out with my friends Doris C. Rusch, Josh Diaz, Brenda Brathwaite, Celia Pearce and Tracy Fullerton - and where, thanks to Brenda, I got to meet John Romero, which was very cool), paying a really terrific and insightful visit to USC's game lab (thanks, Kurosh!), touring LA first with my best man Talon and his wife Sara and then with Henry and his wife Cynthia, and then finally giving a relatively brand-new talk on designing migratory characters for transmedia stories in Henry's transmedia class at USC.

I'm now back in Boston, backlogged and trying to fend off a cold (stupid planes). There's been a number of interesting transmedia-related articles and things popping up across the web while I've been traveling. Here are the ones that have struck me as the most interesting:

• Massiverse Launches Dragons vs. Robots. Like pirates versus ninjas, dragons versus robots is one of those concepts that hooks you as soon as you hear it. Whether or not Massiverse can pull it off is anyone's bet - but they seem to be listening closely to what Henry and the rest of us academic types are advocating, so this should be interesting. My favorite line in Dean Takahashi's writeup: "[Transmedia storytelling is] sort of like going fishing with a lot of different kinds of lures in the water." I hadn't thought of that particular metaphor before, but it's absolutely perfect. More about Dragons vs. Robots can be found here, here.
  
  
• Muse and Transmedia. John Griffiths ponders about how the promotional efforts for the rock band Muse might be read as a transmedia story. I'm not quite sold; this still feels more like a traditional advertising campaign and less like a piece of deliberately plotted transmedia planning. Still, Griffiths is right to consider about the potential for such things. Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero ARG could definitely be read as a transmedia planning campaign, and I'm sure there's a case study to be found in the promotional campaigns for U2 and/or R.E.M. in there somewhere.
  
  
• J.C. Hutchins' Sword of Blood transmedia extension is a quilt. Well, a PDF of a quilt, anyway – but it's still extremely cool. A premium subscription model might have delivered an actual quilt, which would have been a terrific example of diegetic artifact as transmedia extension. (I'm still convinced that clothing and textiles are an as-of-yet largely untapped realm of possibilities.)
  
  
• The Upside-Down World of New Media. This brief post from Scott Crawford ponders how transmedia storytelling is an inversion of the brand platform planning model traditionally found in advertising. I'd like to see Crawford return to the subject and expand on what he thinks transmedia storytelling could gain from studying traditional brand platform planning – there's at least one long, solid essay in there.
  
  
• A Transmedia Exercise. This assignment from Malcolm Ryan's Game Design workshop at the University of New South Wales in Australia seems to be more about solid worldbuilding than about leveraging the unique advantages of transmedia storytelling, but it's a great way to get students thinking about it.
  
  
• What is Branded Content? Tubefilter assembles an interesting panel of four experts who seek to tease out exactly what 'branded content' is - and, at the end of the day, sums up their insights thus: "In a world where even the lines of real life and fiction are starting to blur though 3-D and augmented reality technologies, brands and content must work together to create holistic experiences that extend beyond the :30-second spot - and even beyond the delivery platform itself - to form an emotional bond with viewers. Brands and content creators must also realize that old rules no longer apply. They need each other. Content creators need brand sponsors to bring their vision to life and fund a quality production, and brands need content creators to substantively connect with consumers. But none of those things can be achieved without trust. And nothing influences consumer behavior more than an experience that moves them - and a brand they can believe in." Well said.
  
  
• Transmedia Storytelling, ARGs and Civic Engagement. Bonnie Shaw at Echo Ditto provides a solid snapshot of where and how transmedia storytelling, ARGs and civic engagement are cross-pollinating one another - and how it could be improved.
  
  
• Seven Projects Selected for Power to the Pixel Pitch. I've gotta admit, out of all of these Brand New-U sounds the most intriguing to me.
  
  
• Hush on Click 2009. Shoot, it sounds like Click 2009 was the place to be last week - I would've loved to hear what Jason Zada had to say about transmedia, and I would have really enjoyed seeing Michael as the master of ceremonies!
  
  
• Faris Yacob on transmedia planning, the future of brand communication... You know, the usual. And, as usual, Faris is sharper than razors.
  
  
• Anthony Zuiker at the HuffPo. "We can no longer make the audience come to us. We must go to the audience and re-invent ourselves based on behaviors that will never return to the old regime. It will be the convergence of multi-media or trans-media, consuming content 'specific to the device,' that will win out going forward. Our attention economy is shrinking while our attentive economy is changing. And while no human being can verbalize with certainty when our behavior shifted, we must realize there has been a shift in the first place if we hope to keep up with it. It's no longer the wild wild West but the global network of the technological revolution that will shape our consumptive future." I'm still not crazy about the term 'digi-novel', but Zuiker definitely gets it.
  
  
• BBC does transmedia with new horror story The Well. Victoria Jaye, the acting head of fiction and entertainment multiplatform commissioning, will be speaking at FoE4 here at MIT in November. I can't wait to grill her on this one. And I bloody love this quote from writer Melvin Burgess: "A ghost story is perfect for [transmedia], because at the heart of every ghost story is a mystery waiting to be solved - a back story, about how the horror arose and others in the past who have brought it back to life."
  
  
• Levi's launches an ARG. This sounds suspiciously like the work of a certain cyborg anthropologist I know who's currently doing some work there at W+K. Amber, is this your doing?
  
  
• Joe Digital's take on "Transmedia 360". I was with them right up until they name-dropped Lord of the Rings; I'm trying to figure out if they're referring to the additive comprehension Neil Young was trying to slip into the LOTR game from EA, but the article is pretty vague.

I'm not even going to go into the big ones here – like Don "The Design of Everyday Things" Norman on transmedia as co-creation, or Kathy Hansen's proposal for how to use transmedia storytelling in job applications. Those are both posts on their own, which I'll sketch out as soon as I have some time.

Woo-hoo! Waker, the game I wrote for GAMBIT this summer, just won the Bytejacker Game of the Week competition, beating out two really impressive other games, Station 38 and Alchemia – and by a pretty wide margin to boot. Check out what the players themselves had to say at the 5:05 mark of the video clip!

I'm currently in Los Angeles, having coffee while I wait on my best man to finish up a quick audition before we head off for Las Vegas. Therefore, I would like to take this brief minute of downtime to make a couple of blog posts I'd been meaning to publish for a good long while now. First up, several teaching gigs in the field of Comparative Media Studies that I myself would totally be applying for if I already had my Ph.D. I'm posting these partly to help support the field, but also to demonstrate that comparative media studies as an academic discipline is exploding. O brave new world, hey?

MIT: Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Comparative Media Studies

MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies seeks applications for a tenured position beginning in September 2010. A PhD and an extensive record of publication, research activity and leadership are expected. We encourage applicants from a wide array of disciplinary backgrounds. The successful candidate will teach and guide research in one or more of the Program's dimensions of comparativity (historical, methodological, cultural) across media forms. Expertise in the cultural and social implications of established media forms (for example, film, television, audio and visual cultures, print) is as important as scholarship in one or more emerging areas such as games, social media, new media literacies, participatory culture, software studies, IPTV, and transmedia storytelling.

The position involves teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, developing and guiding collaborative research activities, and participating in the intellectual and creative leadership of the Program and the Institute. Candidates should demonstrate a record of effective teaching and thesis supervision, significant research/creative activity, relevant administrative experience, and international recognition.

CMS offers SB and SM programs and maintains a full roster of research initiatives and outreach activities [see http://cms.mit.edu]. The program embraces the notion of comparativity and collaboration, and works across MIT's various schools, and between MIT and the larger media landscape. MIT is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer.

Applications consisting of a curriculum vita, a statement of teaching philosophy and experience, a statement of current and future research plans, selected major publications, and names of suggested references should be submitted by November 1, 2009 to:

Professor William Uricchio
Director, Comparative Media Studies
MIT 14N-207
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

Miami University of Ohio, Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Comparative Media Studies

One or more tenure-track assistant professor positions in comparative media studies, beginning August 2010. We welcome applicants from a range of disciplinary backgrounds; the position will be a joint appointment in a developing program in comparative media studies and another program or department in the humanities or social sciences.

Expertise in one or more of the following areas is desirable: history of media; technology and culture; creative non-fiction, documentary, and journalism in digital contexts. PhD by date of appointment.

Candidates should submit a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, three letters of reference, and a sample of recent scholarship to:

Professor Richard Campbell
c/o College of Arts and Science
143 Upham, Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056

Review of applications will begin on October 26 and continue until the position is filled.

More information on this position can be found at http://www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?JobCode=175392319.

Middlebury: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Comparative Media Studies

The Film and Media Culture Department at Middlebury College invites applications for a tenure-track position in Comparative Media Studies beginning in September 2010. Appointment will be made at the rank of Assistant Professor; Ph.D. preferred, A.B.D considered. The successful candidate will teach courses on the cultural impacts and influences of media technologies, new media as aesthetic forms, and additional contributions to the program's curriculum in film and media criticism, history, and/or production. Expertise in one or more of these areas is particularly desirable: online video, social software, videogames, new media art, digital media pedagogy, transmedia convergence, media and the environment, or global media. We welcome applicants from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, but the successful candidate should be comfortable teaching in a humanities-centered program anchored in film and media studies as part of an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum.

Candidates should provide evidence of commitment to excellent teaching and scholarly potential. Send letter of application with a statement of teaching and research interests, curriculum vitae, and three letters of recommendation, at least two of which must speak to teaching ability, to:

Professor Jason Mittell, Film and Media Culture Department
Axinn Center
Middlebury College
Middlebury VT 05753

Applications must be received by November 2 to ensure full consideration.

Please forward as appropriate, and see http://go.middlebury.edu/media-search for more information.

Middlebury College is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to hiring a diverse faculty to complement the increasing diversity of the student body.

According to the article on io9.com, "Each book is encased in a uniquely numbered burlap bag, featuring a special forward by Ray Kurzweil, behind-the-scenes art, an extensive collection of stills from the film, commentary from director Shane Acker and producers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, and a DVD of the original short film by Shane Acker which inspired the full-length feature."

The catch is that only 999 of these books were made, which strikes me as sort of a tragedy. Such a project seems to be absolutely loaded with opportunities for additive comprehension, so ensuring that less than a thousand would-be fans have access to that enriched experience seems like a missed opportunity. (As readers of my Master's thesis, Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company know, similar art books were released as transmedia extensions for both Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.) Still, in this day and age, I'd be utterly flabbergasted if some version of the same content didn't appear either online or in the inevitable collector's edition of the DVD.

Waker is a puzzle/platform game set in the world of a child's broken dream. As the Waker, the player uses both mind and reflexes to solve puzzles, creating platforms to form a safe path through the dream worlds. Forming the paths, however, is the trick - it is up to the player to figure out how to create each path, and to manipulate the Waker and the world to travel safely through each level. With dynamic obstacles and three difficulty modes, the game offers continuing challenges even for experienced players, while allowing beginners an easier path to the end.

Waker was developed in tandem with Woosh, its abstract variant. Waker offers the same gameplay as Woosh, but also includes a rich narrative and a story that is reflected in its art and cutscenes.

I'm also thoroughly grateful for the opportunity to write a GAMBIT game (complete with the apparently all-too-true-to-the-industry "Can we have this tomorrow?" experience) and for the not-very-true-at-all-to-the-industry experience of being able to perform the role I'd written. If you're half as much of a fan of Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Mike Mignola's Hellboy as I am, I recommend that you go and give Waker a shot. (Hey, it's free and it runs in a browser window – what's stopping you? Go! Play it now!)

Heh. I still get a grin on my face just thinking about that whole experience. I've got a new GAMBIT project in the works for this fall, so I'll keep you posted!

Update (9/1/09): Flytrap Games just published a really funny writeup of the game titled Agile Spirit Cat Required for Mental Roadworks. These guys really got what I was going for:

Dreaming is more hazardous than most people suspect. Every time you sleep, a path forms behind your dreaming self to guide you back to the waking world.

On occasion, however, that path breaks, leaving the dreamer to stand forever stark naked in front of the sixth form girls while Billy Connolly plays the banjo. Or whatever private delusions are appropriate to your particular mental setup.

Fortunately, a ruptured dream path can be repaired by a Waker - a sort of Druidic cat entity which puts us in mind of the mog from Coraline. As one such Waker, players of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab's latest puzzle-platformer must collect "wisps" to restore a lost soul to consciousness.

I am, as they say, well and thoroughly chuffed. (I wish we'd thought of that Billy Connolly nightmare. That would make a thoroughly horrific bonus level.)

Update (9/2/09): Waker is getting even more press! Lewis Denby of Resolution magazine in England makes the following observations:

This odd little pairing is more than a bit interesting to talk about. Woosh and Waker are puzzle/platform games developed by Poof Games for Gambit, which is a collaboration between MIT and the Singapore government. Woosh and Waker are part of an experimental, educational project, to see how players respond to different presentations within videogames.

Launching each game doesn't immediately throw up too many similarities. But dive into the game proper and you'll realise they're both exactly the same in terms of the mechanics and level design. The difference? One presents an anthropomorphic character and introduces a story. The other sees you guiding a bouncy ball around the same platforms, only with a backdrop consisting purely of abstract art. There's no plot to be found.

It is, of course, very interesting to consider which side of the fence you fall on. Do you prefer the abstract visual beauty of Woosh, or the more evocative, story-driven presentation of Waker? Do you prefer guiding a living character, or a blissfully unaware rolling ball? But what's particularly brilliant for the player is that both are excellent, seriously clever games. Try them both out, and have a think about the difference in your approach to each one.

Meanwhile, Bart at bontegames.com gives the game a one-line notice, but a user calling itself Lichen Fairy says this in the comments: "The ending is beautiful. The game-play can be a bit frustrating at times but I love the story." Thanks!

The game has even been picked up in Italy, where a post from indievault.it describes the game as follows:

Benvenuti nel mondo dei sogni... Waker, sviluppato dai ragazzi di Poof Games, vi proietterà in un mondo onirico, nelle sembianze di un waker, una sorta di guardiano del dolce dormire simile a un gatto. Il vostro scopo sarà quello di ristabile il continuum del sogno di una bambina, permettendole così di risvegliarsi da un sonno ininterrotto. Dovrete intraprendere un viaggio lungo tre mondi, ciascuno dei quali è formato da molteplici sottolivelli che garantiscono un'esperienza non certo da mordi e fuggi.

Or, if Google translate is to be believed:

Welcome to the world of dreams ... Waker, developed by the young people Poof Games, we will project into a dream world, in the form of a waker, a kind of guardian of sweet sleep like a cat. Your goal will be to restore the continuum of the dream of a child, enabled it to awaken from a sleep uninterrupted. You will need to undertake a journey across three worlds, each of which consists of multiple sub-levels, offering an experience not by hit and run.

This is awesome – and they're still coming!

Update (9/2/09, again): Perhaps the biggest and best review of Waker just went live – check out Daniel Archer's glowing profile at JayIsGames!

Waker is a project born from GAMBIT, Singapore-MIT's game design lab, and the multidisciplinary input shows. The art and animation invoke the phantasmal in such a way that it's not hard to believe that this idea could have been hauled from the same place dreams come from. Little touches breathe life into the Waker and the world, like the blinking of one eye at a time should you let the creature sit still for a few moments. The music is softly whimsical, the same way a child's dream should be.

While the writing sets up the game quite marvelously, what with the Wakers and the Dreamtime and associated fantasies, the story starts to fade as the game progresses, being delivered to the player in short injections between one world and the next. It's a tad disappointing to have the developers weave all this vibrant lore about what happens when the lights go out, only to have it squeezed into the cracks. It would have been nicer to see the story dovetail with the gameplay more smoothly, but there's still a lot more creativity at work here than your average puzzle game.

...While the game might be short for those who attack it head-on, it's certainly a trip worth taking, and the dazzling visuals coupled with the imaginative tale of the Wakers marks this game as one of the most innovative puzzlers to date. Now don't let me keep you, for there's already a child lost in the slumber, hoping for someone, anyone to show them the way home.

Well? The Waker is waiting.

You can't see it, but I'm throwing devil horns in the air. It's true that the story only appears in little bits between the worlds, but given the time constraints and the massive workload on Poof's shoulders (they made not just one game in eight short weeks, but two! Two, people! Two!) I can safely say that Poof kicked ass. Way to go, guys!

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to join my friends Maurício Mota and Mark Warshaw of The Alchemists (also here) as an invited speaker at the Descolagem lecture series in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our hosts were Roberto "Beto" Largman and Marcia Oliveira, the founders of the Descolagem series and two genuinely warm and wonderful souls. (For example, Beto and I had a really fantastic discussion about the Spider-Man comics and films, video games and video game television shows, and the merits of various e-mail clients in the car on the way to the airport on Sunday, and I'm now coaxing him to come up for Futures of Entertainment 4 in November so we can continue the debate.)

The event was positively brilliant. The venue for the event was called Nave, or the Núcleo Avançado em Educaçáo - which was a public school that had been adopted by Oi Futuro, a division of one of Brazil's largest phone companies that is dedicated to the advancement of arts, education and culture. Nave is the kind of school that I would have dreamed of attending, if I'd known such a thing were possible - walking in, I was struck by how much the place resembled a design studio or an arts gallery more than a school. The space for the event inside of Nave was equally breathtaking: Beto and Marcia had arranged for a space about the size of a small indoor basketball court to be decorated with really impressive pixel art and dozens of LCD displays, with a digital campfire made up of about a dozen smaller displays arranged in a tower in the center of the floor. Surrounding the campfire was about a hundred bright red beanbag chairs, with four bigger beanbag chairs set up on one side for the four of us speakers. The result was the coolest classroom I'd ever seen, with multiple video cameras recording the event, casting us onto the LCD screens around the room so everyone had a good view, and streaming it online both into the overflow space in the lobby and across the Web into homes around the world. When we first walked in, the screens were all displaying the same video footage playing on the campfire, so there was a brief and unsettling sensation of walking into a burning building, but then we settled into the beanbag chairs and we were off to the races.

Me at Descolagem, courtesy of Emerson Alecrim

After Beto introduced us, Maurício kicked things off with a long, passionate description of the nature of transmedia storytelling, how he came to discover Henry Jenkins, C3 and our work, and how he saw transmedia storytelling having an impact on Brazil. (Luckily, the hosts had given Mark and I headsets so the translators could give us the English versions of what Beto and Maurício were saying.) After that, I was up, and I gave a revised version of my transmedia lecture, including a new section on how transmedia storytelling can be used in education. This was an even more advanced version of the talk I gave at Carnegie-Mellon earlier this year, but I was in the weird position of having to go faster than anticipated (since we started late due to a technical glitch) but having to talk much slower than usual (to accommodate the unfortunate translator). The results were a little more wobbly than I would have liked, but people seemed to have loved it and were excited by it, and that's what's important. After I was done, Mark rounded out the show, telling tales of his experiences as a transmedia producer on Heroes and Smallville and giving the audience a taste of what The Alchemists are cooking up now. We ran really late, but a bunch of people stuck around to talk with us afterwards and no one seemed particularly pissed, so, all things considered, I'd definitely call that talk a solid win.

As for the rest of the trip, although the weather was mostly gray and rainy, Maurício proved himself as a terrific tour director. He and his friend (and fellow Alchemist) Rafael showed Mark and I around town, pointing out sites both publicly interesting (the Christ, Sugarloaf) and privately important (the parts of the city where Maurício's family lived, fantastic places to eat and shop and walk). We gave another presentation at one of C3's new partner companies that was also terrifically well received, we joined Maurício's sister and girlfriend at a late-night samba concert in the shadows of an ancient aqueduct that was mind-blowingly cool, and we ate an unbelievable amount of really, really great food. (I'd always heard that Brazil has great beef, but I come from the middle of cow country in Ohio, so I always blew that off. I can now say that, yes, Brazil has some damn great beef.) On Sunday the sun finally came out, so I got to spend a little time walking along the beach near our hotel in Ipanema, which was just down the street from Copacabana. Those songs will never be quite the same to me again - they will now sound even better, now that I've seen these places for myself. The beach was amazing, with enormous waves crashing in, islands and massive tanker ships off on the horizon, and the mountains wrapping around the edges of the bay. Dozens of characters wandered the beach, including one guy who looked for all the world like he was ranting about the coming apocalypse in Portuguese while people practiced the apparently global standard reaction of ignoring him, and a group of four guys were playing a variant of volleyball that I can only guess was a form of futbol practice, since none of them were using their hands. (Imagine a weird cross of soccer, volleyball and hacky-sack and you'll get the gist of it.) As my last minutes in Brazil ticked away before I had to leave for the airport, I sat on the beach and watched the people, the mountains, the city and the waves. I felt the cool breeze on my skin and the sun on my face and I chuckled about how blessed Maurício, Beto and Marcia were to live in a part of the world where this was their winter.

I finally arrived back in Boston yesterday morning, tired and glad to see my fiancée again, but also really happy. Brazil was amazing, the Brazilians were wonderful to me, and I'm glad to have made so many great friends while down there. I'll upload some photos to my Flickr account shortly and see what I can do about uploading my slides. Meanwhile, you can see some photos of the event on Flickr by searching for photos tagged with 'descolagem', which will turn up things like this terrific set by Emerson Alacrim; you can see what people have been tweeting about the event by searching for #descolagem at Twitter; and I'm sure video clips will be popping up somewhere. I also have a couple interesting things afoot, so hopefully I'll have some more interesting posts coming up here on this blog in the near future. As always, stay tuned!

A few months ago, I had the honor of organizing and moderating a keynote panel for the sixth Media in Transition conference here at MIT. Our title (and topic) was "The Future of Publishing", and MIT World has just published the video recording of it online. I've embedded a copy of it here (all 94 minutes of it, be warned):

My honorable speakers are described on the site as follows:

Small Beer Press, Gavin Grant's boutique Massachusetts publishing company, "is still in the business of producing paper objects." But new technologies are transforming his work in several ways: He licenses some books via Creative Commons; releases others as downloads in a variety of ebook formats (generating these can be an expensive "hassle"); and deploys social media, in the form of blogs and Facebook-enabled communication, to publicize and attract passionate readers to the firm's website. Grant sees Amazon and its Kindle as a bully driving readers toward best sellers, and is interested in the "hyperlocal" possibilities of the web for publishing: finding readers for his one-of-a-kind publications, and inviting them to peruse his non-mainstream book lists.

Agent Jennifer Jackson describes some intriguing direct marketing activities made possible by the web, including author-produced book trailers on YouTube, and an online media project undertaken by clients and other authors: a website consisting of episodes for a fictional TV show. Jackson also maintains blogs that she hopes provide "transparency" about her end of the business, a way to bridge "the great divide" between agents and authors. Her authors are concerned with digital piracy but Jackson feels wide distribution of an author's work ends up generating more sales over time.

Robert Miller's frustration with the trade publishing model -- in particular, astronomical advances to authors, and book return rates of 40% -- led to HarperStudio (a Harper Collins offshoot). His notion of "starting something from scratch" involves making digital and physical books available simultaneously to the reader. His first offering is a collection of previously unpublished pieces by Mark Twain that are available as individual books, or in discounted bundles with audio books and downloadable books. He celebrates the reduction in production costs in moving to digital, but he's wary of the small but rapidly expanding ebook market, which he anticipates will impose a "downward pressure on prices," a loss of revenue that will negatively impact his business.

Bob Stein envisions a wholesale evolution of the essence of books, from objects to "a place where readers and sometimes authors congregate." His Institute on the Future of the Book hosts experiments in publishing, such as one where an author essentially blogs and moderates responses around a particular subject. Readers could someday collaborate with dead authors, adding chapters to finished books, for instance. He sees ebooks as transitional: "The experiments which have to do with increasing sales of book are interesting, and will prolong publishing but won't invent the future of how humans work together to increase our knowledge, which is what publishing used to do." These new expressive forms won't emerge quickly. It took 300 years after the invention of the printing before the first novel was written, he notes, but inexorably, "we're shifting the ways humans communicate with each other."

My panelists delivered on the promise of the topic beautifully, providing terrific insight into the state of the publishing industry and what the future may have in store for all of us. A sort-of follow-up to the talk will be going down in November, when none other than Jeff VanderMeer will be coming to MIT to speak on a similar topic, which he addresses at great length in his upcoming book Booklife (Oct. 15, 2009; Tachyon Publications).

Added bonus: I now have a profile on MIT World. Next stop: TED...

This weekend is Readercon, one of my favorite conferences in the world and, although this is only my second, one I've all but sworn never to miss. I love the people, the panels, the bookshop (especially the bookshop) and the level of conversation that happens here, wide-ranging debates that cover everything that has to do with fantasy, science fiction, horror and other genre-esque types of storytelling.

Yesterday I had the immense pleasure of getting to meet Peter Straub, who edited a collection of short fiction last year called Poe's Children: The New Horror. This text was one of the bases for a paper I wrote for the American Comparative Literature Association conference this spring at Harvard, which was accepted but, due to a travel and scheduling snafu, was never presented. As it turns out, I'm glad I didn't, because after talking to Straub yesterday it was revealed that the book's subtitle, "the new horror", was tacked on by the marketing department to move copies and wasn't an assertion of a new movement after all - which, as it turns out, appears to also have been the case with the term "the new wave fabulists", which was tacked on to Straub's edited issue of Conjunctions. Although the panel Straub was on spoke extensively about the prevalence of dread as a mechanic in horror, when I asked if they had seen an uptick in the amount of dread-centric horror after 9/11, the answer was a largely unanimous no – although there has appeared to be a rise in the amount of ghost stories where the ghosts don't realize they're dead, which can either be read as a type of mechanic for trying to parse surviving 9/11, a la 'survivor's guilt', or as the result of such cultural blockbusters as The Others or The Sixth Sense.

I asked Straub if he would be so kind as to allow me to interview him over e-mail, which he graciously agreed to do, so at some point in the future I'll publish the results of that conversation somewhere. Until then, though, I'd like to archive my original essay here in all of its wrongheaded glory. As you'll notice, this was written A.) when I thought that I was going to be presenting at the very end of the day on a Friday night, B.) as a more-or-less transcript of what I planned to say, and C.) while I was still attempting to chart out the differences between the New Weird, the New Horror, Slipstream and Interstitial. Since writing it, I've changed my mind about almost all of it.

Let me stress that again: this essay is almost completely and utterly wrong. Still, it's that very wrongness that makes me think that it may serve as a great place to spark some Readercon-esque conversations. So have at it! Shred it, disembowel it, go to town. Perhaps some insight might be gleaned from its autopsy. For my part, I'm about to shower up and go hear John Clute speak about the possible origins of the superhero in literature.

God, I love Readercon.

FROM HORRORISM TO TERRORISM: THE NEW WEIRD, THE NEW HORROR AND THE WAR ON TERROR

I. Introduction

Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming, and I'd also like to thank the ACLA in general and Juan Ramos from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in particular for including me in this discussion. I recognize that it's been a long and intellectually rigorous day, and that my talk is the last thing standing between you and either dinner or a growler of beer over at John Harvard's, so again - thank you.

The title of this talk is "From Horrorism to Terrorism: the New Weird, the New Horror and the War on Terror." A great deal of what follows is still largely preliminary and somewhat nebulous, so please - I heartily welcome any and all feedback, suggestions and counterarguments that can help me direct this Prolegomena on a Future Criticism into a stronger direction or future research.

Since the turn of the millennium, literature and culture have both taken a marked turn for the strange. Texts like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Magaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones> all take elements of the fantastic or the supernatural and weave them into what would be considered otherwise "mainstream" literature. Meanwhile, "genre" fiction is busily attacking the same borders from the other side, with authors such as China Miéville, Peter Straub, Jonathan Carroll, and Jeffrey VanderMeer taking pickaxes and shovels to these distinctions. What is going on here?

This paper will examine whether or not it is possible to read all of this genre-bending as due to a combination of, first, 9/11 and the War on Terror, second, a form of post-millennial confusion, and third, an increased degree of comfortability with decategorization in our culture, by way of considering four interrelated new splinter groups within the larger genres of fantasy, sci-fi and horror: the New Weird, the New Horror, Slipstream, and Interstitial.

II. Possible Causes

In his introduction to a recent edition of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, one of the defining texts of what I'll be referring to as the Old Weird, the author China Miéville, one of the defining authors of what I'll be referring to as the New Weird, notes that the rise of the Old Weird was tied largely to the rise of popularity in fantasy and the supernatural following World War I:

The fantastic has always borrowed enthusiastically from premodern folklore, fairy tales, and myth, of course. Fantasy as a genre is a modern literature, however, born primarily out of the Gothic, a kind of bad conscience of the burgeoning "intrumental rationality" of capitalist modernity. "The dream of reason," as José Monléon persuasively points out (quoting the title of Goya's famous picture), "brings forth monsters." In essence, for fantasy to be fantasy, to break down the barriers that were keeping the irrational at bay, society first had to construct those barriers and thoroughly embrace the supposedly "rational".

Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, belief in the rational suffered a massive blow on the charnel fields of the First World War. Here were the rational, modern, capitalist powers, expressing their supposedly rational interests with an eruption of mechanized human butchery unprecedented in history. The scale of the psychic and cultural trauma of the First World War is vast - perhaps even "undescribable." The war smashed apart the complacencies of "rationality" and unconvered the irrationality that eclipsed any fantasist's nightmares. How, then, could the genre known as fantasy present anything that could compare with such horror? Certainly, its stock of werewolves and effete vampires were utterly inadequate to the task.

Fantasy responded nevertheless. At the low end of culture, in the pulp magazines (such as Weird Tales), weird fiction shared with surrealism a conception of modern, orderly, scientific rationality that was in fact saturated with the uncanny. (xiv-xv)

The second aspect of our contemporary culture that has likely set the stage for this postmillennial rise of the fantastic is, simply put, the inherent strangeness of entering into a 21st century that wholly failed to resemble the jetpacks-and-Jetsons future that we'd been sold in 1950s sci-fi. Although our current technology and global culture is changing more quickly than most of us can comfortably stay on top of, we're still a far cry from the utopian worlds posited by the World of Tomorrows found in Disneyland and the World's Fair. It's no accident that so many of our recent popular texts, such as McCarthy's The Road, have had a markedly dystopian flavor, and Barack Obama's recent campaign, if not his election, represents the desperate thirst that the American populace has for hope.

Still, the progress that we are making is reflected in the third component of this setup, a rampant rush towards decategorization. While I'm not arguing that this is anything truly new - in fact, the 'truly new' is frequently achieved by the reconfiguration of existing components into new combinations - our modern day and age is one of increasing comfortability with blurred boundaries and hybridities. Part of this is likely due to the marked push towards multiculturalism and race- and gender-equality of the last forty to fifty years, but another part is likely to be the rise of the Internet and the rise of mass global popular culture.

Genres exist in part as a function of taxonomies, enabling academics, booksellers and readers to sort works into rough categories for shelving and examination, but what the Internet enables is a much looser, messier form of sorting - due to limited space, in a library or a bookstore, a book may traditionally be shelved in one place and, thus, under one category, but a system like Amazon is freed of such spatial constraints, and thus enables books to be sorted among a much broader (and arguably much more organic) set of lines. In a rigid system, works like those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, or Italo Calvino might only be found in literature, but in a system like Amazon, such works might be more organically clustered with more traditional 'genre' works with whom they are engaged in this intercultural exchange - which is arguably the other primary reason for such genres to exist. Rather than simply sorting them under the more general banner of 'literature' in a physical library or bookstore, online works can be frequently discovered due to the form of conversation in which they are engaged. Traditionally, it took some degree of research to discover the links between the aformentioned Marquez, Rushdie and Calvino, but a young person just setting out to discover their tastes in literature in this day and age can discover such intercultural and intergenerational dialogues incredibly quickly and easily due to algorithmic recommendation systems such as those developed by Amazon and Google, or simply via the vast myriad of personal recommendations and links created and posted by an ever-increasing number of people online. Better yet, this very participatory culture enables individuals to not only seek out the most esoteric of conversations, as evidenced by the rise of such things as slash fiction or Twitter fiction, but enables them to engage in those conversations themselves almost instantly.

So, given these three things, in the abstract it is possible to see how 9/11, this post-millennial confusion and the rise of decategorization may have subconsciously set the stage for the revival of the Weird and the fantastic in the popular taste, and how the culture was ripe and ready to be sold stories of our current real world made strange. Unfortunately, the manifestation of these very same factors also make proving this hypothesis almost impossible - and, in fact, this very tendency towards decategorization makes examining the new fantastic problematic.

The second part of this paper will examine the new schools of the fantastic that are currently flourishing and engaging in this very conversation. Taking samplings of different parts of the culture has the same affect as medically sampling parts of a body - if, say, an excessive amount of thyroxine is found in the blood, then the thyroid gland has some explaining to do. Examining such an overactive thyroid gland may then in turn reveal the root cause of the hyperthyroidism, which may be an environmental cause. Similarly, examining popular culture right now shows an excessive amount of fantastic and horrific elements - so if we turn away from the fantastic-tinged mainstream literature and examine what's happening right now in the genres of fantasy and horror, we may get some inkling as to what's driving the larger cultural shift. When we biopsy these genres, what we find is four roughly similar movements engaging in a huge amount of experimentation and engaging in a philosophical conversation that proves extremely telling. These four groups are The New Horror, the New Weird, Slipstream, and Interstitial. Due to space and time contraints, I'll only delve deeply into the New Horror and the New Weird, but I'll touch lightly upon both Slipstream and Interstitial as areas that should be known about in this conversation and that should prove fruitful in future research.

III. The New Weird, The New Horror, Slipstream and Interstitial

III.I. The New Horror

On Halloween 2008, the fantasy and science fiction author Jo Walton posted an entry called "Halloween Special: Why I hate horror" to Tor.com, in which she declared: "...What horror readers want is blood, right away, rivers of it, and scary stuff too, immediately, even before you care about the characters." The resulting flame war was inevitable: in the comments to her post, the novelist and essayist Nick Mamatas dryly retorted, "Ah, now I know! I also look forward to future posts in which I am told what I like in a meal, and in a sexual partner." What Walton was describing might be deemed the Old Horror, which certainly still has its place (as evidenced by the seemingly incessant SAW series of "torture porn" films), but, as Mamatas points out, it's certainly not the whole story. In fact, said Old Horror may be, if not giving way to then at least making some room for, what the horror novelist Peter Straub dubs "The New Horror" in his 2008 anthology Poe's Children.

Straub may be an excellent anthologist and novelist, but he's not much for making clear declarations. As with his 2002 guest-edited issue of Bard College's literary magazine Conjunctions, subtitled "The New Wave Fabulists", Straub sets out a few broad brushstrokes in his introduction and then lets the work speak for itself - which was primarily made up of works that treated genre subjects with a more literary approach, a la the original New Wave movement in sci-fi and fantasy from the 1960s and 1970s. In his foreword to Poe's Children, Straub follows up on Conjunctions by sharing more fantastic/horrific work of a more literary bent, describing a new current horror Renaissance led by authors such as Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman, who Straub argues have more in common with John Crowley and Jonathan Carroll than with the authors who made up the previous horror boom in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Link's story "Louise's Ghost" centers around two adult women both named Louise who are dealing with the eccentricities of the modern world - the first Louise is dealing with a child who wears only green clothing, eats only green food, and endlessly tells tales of her previous life as a dog. The second Louise is dealing with the ghost of a large naked man who keeps appering in her apartment, but the story is less scary than it is poignant - Link is using the supernatural tropes of fantasy and horror to tell an intimate, if odd and definitely stylized, story about what it's like to be a woman in her twenties and thirties.

What separates these generations is not only an increase in the value placed upon character development over gore (spirit over splatter, if you will), but may also be a shift away from horror and towards terror, as the terms are described in the critic John Clute's 2005 short lexicon of horror, THE DARKENING GARDEN. According to Clute, terror is the revelation that the characters' normal, reliable world does not always adhere to the normal, reliable rules and actually has more wondrous and threatening creatures, places and things in it than one had imagined; horror, on the other hand, is when those threatening new elements actually make good on their threats and rend the characters limb from limb. Under these criteria, terror stories are more psychological and horror is more visceral. The authors in Straub's New Horror trip lightly along the fine line between genre and literary, thrilling the parts of the brain that quail at the concept of the unimaginable, that are disconcerted by the revelation that everything is not as it seems, that are spooked by the fear of losing their assumptions and sanities more than losing any mere life or limb.

In his 1981 textbook on the subject, Danse Macabre, Stephen King breaks down the mechanics of the genre into three tiers of effect: the lowest level is revulsion, the kind of nasty reaction triggered by the chest-burster in Ridley Scott's ALIEN movies or the very basest of human knee-jerk reactions - I mean spiders, snakes, cockroaches, and slimy things. Above that is horror, which, as King puts it, "invites a physical reaction by showing us something physically wrong". This is the kind of nasty that shows us the decapitated corpse, the zombie lover with the pretty bits falling off, that sort of thing. Above both of these, though, is terror - and terror trades on what the poet John Keats famously dubbed 'negative capability', or the capacity of the human imagination to fill in the pieces that are suggested in a text but not explicitly stated. Edgar Allen Poe was a master of terror, as evidenced in his short story "The Monkey's Paw", which King calls up as the ideal case study in terror:

"We actually see nothing ouright nasty... the paw, dried and mummified, can surely be no worse than those plastic dogturds on sale at any novelty shop. It's what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of terror. It is the unpleasant speculation called to mind when the knocking on the door begins [and] the grief-stricken old woman rushes to answer it. Nothing is there but the wind when she finally throws the door open... But what, the mind wonders, might have been there if her husband had been a little slower on the draw with that third wish?" (King 34)

It doesn't take much of a leap to connect the rise of this psychological type of terror story to the popular mindset and psychology of America (and indeed the world) after 9/11. Terrorist warfare relies on the same basic mental mechanics as terror stories - both rip away our basic assumptions of safety and rely on the capacity of the human imagination to do the rest; arguably, both are the most effective when the actual horror (the bombs, the dismemberment) never comes, leaving us instead in a perpetual state of apprehension. This may be why the 2000s have seen not only the rise of Straub's New Horror but also the rise of the New Weird, as described by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer in their co-edited 2007 anthology of the same name.

III.II The New Weird

Like the New Horror, the storytellers working under the banner of the New Weird are categorized largely by their attempts to break out of the clichéd molds of genre, but even that broad statement may be too restrictive. If anyone knows New Weird, it should be the VanderMeers - not only is Jeff himself a practitioner, but Ann is the fiction editor for Weird Tales magazine - and their anthology lives up to its promise. It contains examples of the New Weird from such practicioners as Jay Lake, Jeffrey Ford and China Miéville, academic reflections on the subject from Michael Cisco and Darja Malcolm-Clarke, and an extensive excerpt from the 2003 message board discussion between M. John Harrison, Steph Swainston and others that the VanderMeers herald as one of the definitive moments of the term (although the very first line of the book's foreword admits that the term dates back a lot earlier). Still, the book is something of a lovely paradox - many of these components offer explicitly contradictory points of view, which enables the VanderMeers to demonstrate just how messy a term 'The New Weird' happens to be. Unlike Straub, Jeff VanderMeer gamely suggests the following working definition:

New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-monent quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style and effects - in combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers or their proxies (including also such forebears as Mervyn Peake and French/English Decadents). New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary power on "a surrender to the weird" that isn't, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The "surrender" (or "belief") of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text.

This definition may indeed be too constrictive, given the debate that rages on only a few pages later (as Cisco jokes, "nothing could be more unenlightening or useless than a New Weird manifesto" (335)), but it allows us to see why China Miéville is so freqently considered the primary banner-carrier for this particular school of thought, despite his own efforts to distance himself from the term in later years. Miéville's books Perdido Street Station and The Scar are often held up as examples of the New Weird, both of which adhere to VanderMeer's "secondary-world" criteria, but Miéville's King Rat and even Un Lun Dun (which is ostensibly a YA book) also feel like New Weird, although they are set in our known universe. Instead of transporting the protagonist, a la C.S. Lewis, or explore a world wholly apart, a la J.R.R. Tolkien, Miéville's King Rat and Un Lun Dun start in our modern world and then reveal that the world around us is not what it seems - again, terror as opposed to horror in Clute and King's terminologies. This is why I take some issue with VanderMeer's insistence on the secondary world component of his definition - even in his own anthology, the works cited as influences frequently center upon our world made strange, but works cited as examples are almost all of a more sci-fi nature. This is clearly an area for future research.

Still, such a "true weird world revealed" characteristic isn't sufficient to qualify as New Weird - it's hard to think of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter as New Weird, and while Stephanie Myer's Twilight series may be the biggest-selling quasi-horror thing going right now, I suspect that has less to do with the newly-revealed cosmic terror of the unknown universe and more to do with being a young woman dealing with the newly-revealed cosmic terror of boys. The simplest explanation there may be that the primary flavors of those series are fantasy and romance as opposed to horror, but at a more complicated level, neither Rowling nor Meyer instill their readers with the deeply unsettling feeling that is frequently at play in New Weird works; even if VanderMeer doesn't explicitly state as much in this definition, elsewhere in the introduction he notes that "'Weird' refers to the sometimes supernatural or fantastical element of unease".

Interestingly, although Straub attempts to describe his New Horror in constrast to the splatterfests of the 1970s and 1980s, VanderMeer draws more of a straight line from horror to the New Weird, and argues that Old Weird actually serves as the ancestor to, well, Old Horror. VanderMeer argues that the lineage of New Weird goes something like this: Old Weird evolved into Old Horror, and the New Wave of the 1960s, cross-bred with the visceral, sticky 1980s horror of authors like Clive Barker, zapped New Weird into life. "In a sense," VanderMeer writes, "the simultaneous understanding of and rejection of Old Weird, hardwired to the stimuli of the New Wave and New Horror, gave many of the writers identified as New Weird the signs and symbols needed to both forge ahead into the unknown and create their own unique re-combinations of familiar elements." So, although his use of cosmic terror as opposed to visceral horror might be what set Lovecraft apart as the patron saint of Old Weird, New Weird may have no such qualms about the squelchy stuff - which, ironically, is the very component that Straub's New Horror plays down. So it's possible that VanderMeer's New Weird is actually the New Horror, and Straub's New Horror is actually the New Weird - that is, insofar as any of them agree on what is and is not New Weird, as it's difficult to note precisely what components of the Old Weird VanderMeer is saying that the New Weird rejects. If this headache-inducing carousel ride suggests anything, it's that both the New Weird and the New Horror seem to have emerged as a rediscovery of Lovecraft's Old Weird.

III.III Sipstream and Interstitial

Further complicating matters are the additional riders on this Merry-Go-Round: Slipstream and Interstitial. Slipstream, as defined by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel in their co-edited 2006 anthology Feeling Very Strange: the Slipstream Anthology, is defined as less of a genre and more of "a psychological and literary effect that cuts across genre, in the same way that the effect of horror manifests in many different kinds of writing. Where horror is the literature of fear, slipstream is the literature of cognitive dissonance and of strangeness triumphant" (xi).

Interstitial fiction, on the other hand, is described by Heinz Insu Fenkl in his introduction to the 2007 Interfictions: an Anthology of Interstitial Fiction as, by turns, falling "between categories" (iii), "not implicitly transitory" (iv), "[maintaining] a consciousness of the boundaries they hve crossed or disengaged with" (iv), "self-negating" (v) and transformative for the reader (vi). By deliberately and consciously situating itself in the interstices of existing genres, Interstitial art (for it embraces, if not pursues, cross-breeding with music, verse, and visuals) is inherently both experimental and unclassifiable, eternally emerging and forever outside, known only by being recognizable for what it isn't, and by its distinctively odd impact upon its audience. Which, of course, sounds an awful lot like both Slipstream and the New Weird - a fact that the VanderMeers attempt to address in the foreword to their anthology by simply sniffing that while the New Weird can lay claim to its ancestry in the Old Weird (never mind how much it seems to reject it), both slipstream and interstitial have "no distinct lineage" (ix). Further:

"First, while Slipstream and Interstitial fiction often claim New Wave influence, they rarely if ever cite a Horror influence, with its particular emphasis on the intense use of grotesquery focused around transformation, decay, or mutilation of the human body. Second, postmoden techniques that undermine the surface reality of the text (or point out its artificiality) are not part of the New Weird aesthetic, but they are part of the Slipstream and Interstitial toolbox" (xvii).

Unfortunately this isn't entirely the case - while it's true that Slipstream, like Straub's New Horror, doesn't draw upon the squishier aspects of horror, two of the stories in Feeling Very Strange do indeed draw upon horror tropes: as Kelley and Kessel describe in their intro, [Michael Chabon's] 'The God of Dark Laughter' reinvents Lovecraft, and [Kelly Link's] 'The Specialist's Hat' the ghost story". Which illustrates another point - each of these four genres tends to share a number of authors. Kelly Link appears in both the New Horror and Slipstream anthologies, is cited in the New Weird anthology as frequently considered a part of the New Weird camp, and is the recipient of the dedication of the Interstitial anthology; Jeffrey Ford has pieces in both the Slipstream and the New Weird anthologies; M. Rickert also has pieces in both the Slipstream and the New Horror anthologies; and Jeff VanderMeer himself appears in the Slipstream anthology as well as his own collection of the New Weird.

IV. Conclusions, of a Sort

Although each of these four groups go to great lengths to attempt to define themselves in contrast to the others, the simple truth seems to be that they're akin to siblings bickering over a parent's will - insofar as each of the four groups is exploring a more literary approach to traditionally genre subjects, and doing so through a mixture of revitalized traditions and new experimentation, all four have more in common than they would apparently care to admit. The only thing that all four volumes seem to agree on is that something new and exciting is going on within this space - but the question still remains: why is this happening now? And are these observances of common threads and burgeoning popularity in any way supportive of the hypothesis that all of this is due to, as I discussed in the first half of this paper, the combination of 9/11, a post-millennial unease, and an increasing comfortability with decategorization and hybridity?

In some ways yes, and in some ways no - again, the inherently mercurial and unclassifiable nature of these genres, anthologies and individual works means that getting them all to line up and support any common theme is a fool's errand. The New Weird in particular seems to buck and struggle against such a straightforward theory. VanderMeer's perhaps erroneous assertion that the New Weird must consist of stories set in an alternate universe seems to tilt more towards sci-fi and away from the cosmic nature that made Lovecraft's Old Weird stories so definitive. Rather than positing that our simple, safe world is a lie by making the real fantastic, a la Lovecraft's Old Ones of the Old Weird, the New Weird instead makes the fantastic more real. While this supports the possible culprits of postmillennial confusion and an increased comfortability with hybridity, it doesn't lend a lot of support to the idea of a shift from horrorism to terrorism. The New Horror does a better job of fulfilling all three criteria.

These are clearly areas for future research, drilling deeper into both the past of the Weird Tale (to test VanderMeer's assertions of lineage) and continuing to examine these four related testing grounds for genre-literary experimentation. It certainly remains intriguing how the fantastic is continuing to grapple with the realistic, and how the realistic is grappling with the fantastic. Even now, as we're trying to sort through our current economic disaster and straining desperately to believe in President Obama's promise of hope, even the language we use to describe our current situation is telling. Instead of another Great Depression, economists are referring to this as a "Great Correction", which is reflective of the terrifying realization that our world, again as Clute describes, "does not always adhere to the normal, reliable rules and actually has more wondrous and threatening creatures, places and things in it than one had imagined". When confronted with that realization, the human reponses are fear, wonder and hope - all three of which are currently to be found by turns in abundance in art and popular culture.

I suspect that we may already be seeing some of these elements fade as we grow increasingly comfortable with our positions in the new century, and as the War on Terror becomes the New Normal. We may already be seeing further movement away from the cosmic and a retreat towards the human-centric, as evidenced by the changed ending in Zak Snyder's 2009 film adaptation of Alan Moore's 1986 graphic novel Watchmen: apologies for the spoilers, but in the original story a villain-hero deposited a bioengineered "alien" monstrosity in downtown New York City, simultaneously killing half the city's citizens and ceasing all other wars on Earth by uniting all of humnity against this fabricated common enemy. In the comic, the "alien" bore more than a passing resemblance to an enormous squid, which felt an awful lot like one of Lovecraft's Old Ones; in Snyder's film version, however, the alien is gone and the attack is pinned on a relatively more humanoid superhero. The suggestion here is that the director felt the audience wouldn't buy something so decidedly unreal, cosmic, and completely Other as an Old One, so perhaps the impact of 9/11 is wearing off, and the unthinkable is once again becoming comfortably unthinkable. Still, I suspect that our comfort with hybridity and nonconformity will remain, if not flourish - if current trends continue, our cultures will only continue to grow increasingly interwoven and interconnected, and our emerging global participatory culture will facilitate the further growth of these conversations, cross-pollinations and experimentations.

As it is a Friday night, it feels only fitting that I should leave you with a song with your heads, as both an early start on the evening's festivities and as a way to sum up what I've been talking about here. Although it was written for a different war and a different era of confusion and change, the lyrics still seem oddly appropriate given how the New Weird, the New Horror and pretty much everybody else all seem to be still trying to parse the shock of 9/11 and a new millennium that hasn't quite lived up to its promise. To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, "There's something happening in here, what it is ain't exactly clear. I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down."

Thanks again for coming, and good night.

In this clip from the future (November 2009?) Henry sums up the basics of what he's been saying about convergence culture, transmedia storytelling and the Obama campaign.

I really like how the author describes the clip as a "viral-info-snack"; Henry would challenge the 'viral' terminology as part of his recent campaign to get us to start using the term 'spreadable' instead, but even so the very spreadability of this sucker is impressive. The flash and sizzle is a little much, but it's definitely a chewy bit of intelligent theory wrapped in a crunchy eye-candy shell.