Comments
“This is a cool, charismatic, up to date, and innovative collection of writings and discussions of the perhaps unexpected but definite connection between weird literature, film, ecology, the Anthropocene, and climate change. It tackles these complex subjects in a way that feels fresh and interesting, without being dogmatic or preachy. In addition to all of this, the collection is, as any academic writings should be, erudite, insightful, diverse, and significant.” – Berit Ellingsen, author of Not Dark Yet 2015), a collection of short stories, Beneath the Liquid Skin (2012), and Une Ville Vide (2013).
“Paradoxa continues to intrigue, speculate, analyze, and challenge. The weird world just got weirder and we need all those things more than ever.” – Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014) and The Jane Austen Book Club (2004).
“This issue of Paradoxa is at turns surprising and unsettling, satisfying and very chewy. Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman have put together a timely primer for navigating our own bizarre moment in global history. The pieces in ‘Global Weirding’ form a kaleidoscope through which we can look at the narratives and mythologies swirling around this charged epoch, if to then step more carefully into the relentlessly oncoming future.” – Christopher Schaberg, associate professor of English & Environmental Studies at Loyola University New Orleans, author of The End of Airports (2015).
“‘Global Weirding’ was a term invented in 2010 that tried to sidestep post-truth assumptions about ‘global warming,’ the kind of thing that got lunatic politicians carrying snowballs into senate hearings. Surely everyone could agree that the weather has got seriously weirder—unpredictable, chaotic, menacing. Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman have commissioned a bunch of smart people to cross-fertilize this idea with that other crucial weirdness of the 21st century, the increasing cultural centrality of ‘weird fiction,’ once an overlooked, interstitial mode of pulp writing but now ever more visible in literature and visual culture. We hear from China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, the transatlantic leaders of the New Weird, and Timothy Morton, leading ecocritic just now turning to reflect upon the resources of the weird. A vital and timely intervention into unfathomably strange times.” – Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck, University of London, author of Science Fiction (2005), The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012), and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015)
“A beautifully coherent and taut collection, ‘Global Weirding’ brings together leading and new voices in SF/F studies to examine the Weird in the era of climate change and unpredictable weather events. Interviews and an impressive set of essays open up productive lines of enquiry for this important cognitive framework. From uncanny futures of human extinction and the slow violence of hyperobjects, to weird gamification, from Lovecraft’s legacy on post-Pinochet contemporary Chilean literature, to the ecohorror of First Nations’ slipstream with their elk-like Cree monsters—this is a rich set of insights and essential reading on the Weird in the 21st century.” – Caroline Edwards. Birkbeck, University of London, Founding and Commissioning Editor of the open access journal of 21st-century literary criticism, Alluvium, and Founder and Co-Director of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH).