Inside Amazon.com

This week Tachyon published The New Weird, an anthology edited by me and my wife Ann. It consists of reprints and over 100 pages of original fiction and nonfiction encompassing everything, well, "New Weird." What is New Weird, you might ask? This is a question we actively explore in the book, which includes commentary from editors, writers, and others. In 2000, China Mieville published Perdido Street Station, a mix of fantasy, SF, and horror that did some cool new things, crystalizing the idea in readers’ heads a new kind of "weird" fiction had arrived on the scene. This kind of edgy, urban fantasy partook of influences like Clive Barker and his Books of Blood but also the work of New Wave writers like J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and M.J. Harrison.

A raucous online discussion archived here punctuated the creation of the term "New Weird," and we’ve even preserved some of that lively debate in the anthology. Contributors include Mieville, Harrison, and Moorcock, of course, but also a plethora of other great writers like Jeffrey Ford, K.J. Bishop, Hal Duncan, Felix Gilman, Sarah Monette, Kathe Koja, Jay Lake, Paul Di Filippo, and Thomas Ligotti. You can find more information, including a web exclusive, on the publisher’s page for the anthology. We’re also running a contest where you can win a copy of the anthology, along with tons of other cool stuff.

From an insider’s point of view, one interesting aspect of the anthology concerns the creation of the cover. We all wanted a clean, modern look, but also to convey the idea of something fantastical, bizarre, and intriguing. When I saw Mike Libby’s work at the Insect Lab, it seemed to fit perfectly (and Amy Monn created a great cover using it). The beetle portrayed above is close to the original that inspired us to contact Libby and commission a piece specifically for the anthology. Of course, Libby works with many kinds of beetles. Here are a couple we also considered as prototypes for the cover, each of which, I think, conveys a different mood. The one on the left seems like more of a Steampunk beetle, while the one on the right could well be a delicate but popular young adult/Harry Potter fantasy beetle.