This article was first published in Typebar Magazine!
It seems that the existence and merit of “weird fantasy” is becoming more broadly recognized. Works like Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series might be cited as examples but also other releases who have enjoyed broader-than-usual acclaim. These include The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera or The West Passage Jared Pechaček, among others. While these works are certainly still mostly popular within very specific circles, they have also been nominated for more general SFF awards and have been read by broader audiences (The Saint of Bright Doors, for example, was a 2023 New York Times Notable Book).
To be fair, similar works, like Jeffery Ford’s The Well-Built City or K.J Bishop’s The Etched City (a Typebar Magazine favorite), have enjoyed accolades for over two decades now. However, those accolades were almost strictly professional, earning both authors (and others of their kind) the dubious moniker: “a writer’s writer”.
It’s difficult to pin down exactly why there seems to be an increased appetite for a more intricate (and arguably more challenging) type of fantasy. Likely this is a result of many factors, most of them “external” to the genre itself and requiring a much longer essay than this one to explore. However, one very tempting and convincing explanation is that this new appetite is generated as a whiplash reaction to the tenacious presence of “traditional” fantasy in media in the last two decades (The Wheel of Times, Rings of Power, and Mistborn, to name a few). The ubiquity of standard fantasy tropes in both written and non-written media has created hunger for an alternative. Indeed, this desire for something else might be one of the simpler ways to define weird fantasy itself: an oppositional type of writing that undermines, reverses, or augments classical fantasy’s foundational tropes and habits of writing.
One of these foundational tropes is the contrast between the center and the periphery. This trope should be immediately familiar to readers of fantasy as it lies at the core of most of its foundational works. Most often, this idea influences the overarching structure of a fantasy story: the hero travels from the center and towards the periphery, often returning to the center at the end of the journey. The specific center is interchangeable; most often it is a city but it can also be a village, a kingdom, a neighborhood, and so on. This origin point is one end of a polarity; it need not be “good” necessarily but it’s always something, more than just a physical starting point but a thematic one as well, a stand-in for ideas like home, poverty, childhood, powerlessness, safety, and so on.
From this starting point, the journey occurs towards the periphery. The specific periphery is also interchangeable; it can be the “country”, the broader natural world, or a specific part of the world. This periphery is also more than just a location and represents the opposite end of the polarity established by the center. If the center represents and contains modernity or industry, the periphery represents and contains traditionalism or magic. If the center is warm and constraining, the periphery is cold and freeing. And so on. The examples, interchanging stand-ins for these concepts and binary relationships, are endless (and many can be given here, chief amongst them of course being J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings but also The Wheel of Time and Earthsea). The fact that the different examples of manifestations of these tropes are endless is what allows traditional fantasy to still be a fruitful and enjoyable genre; any successful genre must have fluid and complex tropes at its core, that allow variations on the theme.
However, configure as one might the relationship between the center and the periphery, the binary relationship itself is maintained. This relationship, which was inherited by fantasy from its roots in Romanticism, comes with its own baggage. It assumes that the lines between the center and the periphery are clear and “objectively” defined and, more often than not, that the center is productive while the periphery is regressive (things happen in the city while the country is eternally the same) or even destructive (the periphery actively threatens the center and its values). Additionally, it often subscribes to the Romantic ideas of the relationship between people and nature, casting its heroes as conquerors or observers of nature rather than active, interlinked participants in it.
These ideas are, of course, not objective and wholly political. They are products of and justifications for oppression and extraction from their heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries all the way to modern times. As such, the project to challenge and break down the binary concept of the center and the periphery outside of literature has been ongoing for approximately sixty years. It is part of the project of postmodernism and anti-colonialism. As part of this project, many binaries have been challenged. Under postmodern analysis, the political nature of this binary, the proponents of which insist is objective truth, is revealed. These ideas are not “discovered” as physical truths which exist a-priori in the world. Instead, they are generated by people in power to justify their control over society. They affect myriad fields of human existence like economic planning (where centers tend to be privileged in favor of peripheries but also vice versa, where peripheral suburbs dominate decaying urban centers), psychology (where nature is cast as either a primal fear or a healing retreat, an externality to be overcome or consumed), urbanism, industrial mining, and much more besides, shaping our lives like all aspects of power do.
Enter weird fantasy. In seeking to challenge this thematic polarity at the base of traditional fantasy, weird fantasy becomes, like all works of art, a political project and a postmodern one. It attempts to draw our attention to the ways in which stories about centers and peripheries might be told differently. Through these stories, we might also come to think differently about these ideas and relationships in our own lives. When you read about a city that’s alive, your own city can become less a collection of inert matter and more an organism, interconnected and dependent. When you read about time flowing differently in a suburb, you might reconsider the parcelization of time and space in your own commute. The stories we tell open us up to new possibilities, new configurations of our future lives, and new perspectives on our current ones.
I’ve already cited both major examples I would like to use here: Jeffery Ford’s The Well-Built City (1998, 1999, 2001) and K.J Bishop’s The Etched City (2004). The latter is one of the finer, and more underrated, fantasy books published under the “New Weird” classification. The two protagonists of the book, the unlikely duo of the healer Raule and the rebel vagabond Gwynn, chart the winding, hazy, and fragmented streets of Ashamoil, a once-grand city now slowly decaying under the weight of its own history. Like many great cities of humanity’s past, Ashamoil straddles a fertile delta, the river providing a classic liminal space down which are transported not only goods and people, but magic, gods, and deep time. The city becomes a hive of not only conflicting factions, but also conflicting metaphysics, the lines between art, dream, and reality itself blurring as the story unfolds.
However, The Etched City actually provides us with an interesting challenge to traditional fantasy right from its get-go, before Ashamoil is even introduced: it begins in the periphery. Ask almost anyone who has read this book and they will comment on the bizarre first chapters of it. Raule and Gwynn start in the desert, not even “right outside” of Ashamoil - just a desert. A place in its own right, with its own features and challenges. It is where their partnership, forged out of hardship, is first formed. This fact on its own is not much of a challenge, more a structural difference. In a traditional fantasy novel, this partnership would then define the protagonists throughout their journey, perhaps tested and even broken (to later be repaired) but always extant between the two characters. But this is not where the challenge ends.
When Raule and Gwynn arrive in Ashamoil, they simply part ways, each experiencing the collapse of meaning inside of the city in their own way. For both, much of this collapse of order manifests in the flesh: Raule through her work as a nurse, and particularly her work as a midwife, and Gwynn as he falls deeper in love with what is probably the goddess manifesting Ashamoil to begin with. While each reacts to this breakdown in their own way, they share one fact: as bodies begin to transform around them, the city itself morphs and fragments as well. Where cities in traditional fantasy usually represent order and hierarchy (a slum usually delineated for anything messy that needs to happen in them), the desert in The Etched City, the periphery, is where things are clear and come together. Ashamoil, the center of the story, is where things come to fall apart, to be confused, and, from that confusion, to be altered in radical and weird ways. The city and the flesh, the protagonists and the place in which their story occurs, begin to blur. The more the characters attempt to understand, and especially Gwynn, the more they begin to be broken down, obscured, and transformed themselves:
As he followed the street, the drug in his system made it easy for a particular type of pleasure to come to him: that nocturnal enchantment or glamour in which the heart, seeking mystery, and the eye, loving obscurity, collude against the survival instinct’s desire to see everything clearly. Conflicting with his mood of wanting the world to alter in accordance with his whim came a reckless desire for exactly the opposite thing: to be bewitched, worked upon, altered by something stronger than himself.
The binary then is reversed and broken: not only is the periphery where the story starts, a structural change, but the center entirely disappears by the time the story is done. Especially in Raule’s story, who goes back to the desert. The periphery is the “node” which remains of the binary. The center, usually a stand-in for stability and rationality, might not even have existed to begin with and certainly cannot be trusted. However, the center is also the transformative force, the space in which the journey happens, not its beginning and eventual end. By moving through the center, instead of moving through the periphery like in traditional fantasy (think of the walking through nature in The Fellowship of the Ring), are the characters broken down and made anew. By focusing the story on how the center dissolves, The Etched City opens us up to the possibility that the centers of our lives are not where we come to rest and to be, but chaotic places of conflicting meaning where we become the people we are next.
Jeffery Ford’s The Well-Built City offers us a different sort of reconfiguration of the center/periphery binary. It is a series of three books, made up of The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond. Not just because of length but also because of the sheer volume of ideas, stories, and characters contained within the series, it’s much harder to provide a summary of its story. Instead, I will outline the overall progression of the protagonist, the “physiognomist” Cley, which is where the main point I want to make lies in any case. The Physiognomy introduces us to Cley at the peak of his prowess; he is a “physiognomist”, a high ranking mix of litigator, judge, and often gruesome executor of the will of a dictator, Drachton Below. In the first book, Cley is sent to Anamasobia, a town on the frontier of Below’s empire. There, he falls from grace and begins a convoluted journey back to The Well-Built city itself, Drachton’s capital, forged from his own dreams and neurosis.
Memoranda sees Cley dive into those dreams, as he plumbs the depths of Below’s own consciousness to deliver a cure to one of his monstrous disease-experiments (Memoranda is by far Ford’s most elusive book, and one which I hope to dedicate an essay to in the future). Following this attempt, Cley finally tires of living in the ruins of The Well-Built City and its surroundings and sets off for The Beyond, the stretch of land on which Anamasobia was perched in the first book. There, he undergoes a transformative journey that sees the story split into multiple, and conflicting, versions, going so far as to recontextualize the two books that came before it. At the end of it, Cley is either a traitor to all he ever held dear or the savior of the same, depending on which version of the story you think is “real”, with Ford heavily hinting that they both are. The question then moves not to the “result” of the story but its process, the transformation of Cley himself and his internal world.
This review of the series’ structure allows us to compare and contrast it with Bishop’s The Etched City. Whereas in Bishop’s book relationships are forged in the periphery and dissolve in the center, in Ford’s work the two aspects have a dialectical relationship.. The Well-Built City and, since it was made from it, the psyche of Drachton Below himself, are the centers around which the trilogy revolves. The Beyond, both the geographical world around the city and the psychic frontiers eventually discovered by Cley (where time and space work under different rules than the ones enforced by Below), is the periphery. But both are “productive” - in the first book, both Cley’s sojourn into Anamasobia and his eventual return to the city propel his character forwards. Memoranda involves Cley diving into Below’s “center”, the core of his psyche. But the story has its narrative focus back in the geo-graphic periphery of the setting, in The Well-Built City’s ruins where people still struggle with Below’s horrors.
The last of the books, The Beyond, is a sort of dialectical synthesis of the center and the periphery in Ford’s story. In his journey into The Beyond, Cley begins by naively expecting a wild virginity from the world’s periphery. He keeps trying to “solve” it, much as he did the psychological puzzle at the base of Memoranda. Quickly, this approach causes him to become lost, tumbling through a landscape that conforms neither to the original and twisted rationale that The Well-Built City generated via Below’s will nor the open passivity that Cley had adopted in the wake of his fall from grace. Instead, in the periphery of The Beyond, something new is created, a perspective that both recognizes the crimes committed by Cley in his time as physiognomist and finds room to forgive and understand the man himself, to restore his will.
Ford shows us how center and periphery, city and frontier, need not be at odds within another: when Cley stops conceptualizing himself in relation to how these places supposedly must be, he finds new ways in which to experience them, and ultimately, himself. Ford is offering us a more complex sort of world, within which we are a mix of perspectives learned in both center and periphery, and where how we define what is important to us is more crucial, but still influenced by, where we do the defining.
The Etched City, The Well-Built City trilogy and the many other examples we have cited above, open us up to new possibilities for the relationship between reader, center, and periphery. Is the relationship between who you were in your hometown, where you grew up, and who you are wherever you live now really so simple as “past” and “present”? When we meet people who live in our metropolis, where we live in a suburb or a town, what sorts of subconscious exchanges of ideas and perspectives happen? Are we really at odds, as we are often depicted in mainstream media, or is there a possibility for a shared, weird (in the sense that it doesn’t conform strictly to logical divisions) perspective? What is the power of narrative and storytelling in forging identities like “coastal elites” or “heartland values” and how do these definitions serve those in power? And, lastly, and most importantly, what kinds of questions must we ask in order to resist these crude, reductionary divisions enforced on us by the stories that we choose to tell and to echo more widely in our society? How can we tell more interesting stories about our relationships to space, history, and our own experiences of them?
These are all questions and perspectives that weird fantasy can help us ask and the categories of center and periphery which I chose to focus on here are merely one example. For us to continue to forge more equitable and radical future imaginaries, we must have stories that help us envision and construct these imaginaries. While we are certainly limited by material conditions, we often find ourselves also limited in the stories we can tell about these conditions and the different configurations we might find for them. Hopefully, the current increase in attention to this sort of story will continue and help us think about our world as it really is: fragmented, weird, and brimming with potential for new, and unexpected, configurations.
Back to Essays