Hyperstition & The New Weird I (Session 3)

Okay. All right. All right. Tony, are you echoing? Tony, are you echoing? No, let me... Okay. Try to talk on... Okay. All right, so hi everyone. So I'm just going to talk really briefly, just about kind of go over some of the stuff we talked about in the first course, in terms of what the new weird is. So just really briefly, one thing I mentioned before in the first course,

was how the weird initially was a sort of pre, this kind of genre before genres in a sense, and that it was a mix of different kinds of creatures which normally would have their own genre, or a mix of fantasy and horror, or a mix of adventure and fantasy and horror and a ghost story and adventure and whatever else. And that, of course, later on those get split into their own genres, and then quite some time later you have the new weird which sort of recombines them and then does sort of does different things with them or manipulates them in a different way so whereas you know

the weird was sort of defined by Lovecraft as sort of outer forces influencing us and suspending suspending the laws of nature and that that tended to have a certain kind of aesthetic and environment to it sort of invoked creepiness or fear or whatever but generally at kind of a slower pace and often involved quite a bit of world building which horror might not have necessarily but fantasy often does but also not necessarily so in that sense the new weird kind of puts all these things back together and

wants to do something that's a sort of mixing of genres but a sort of remixing of once together genres so the question there is what does that mean for the very notion of genre to begin with, if anything Is it just a free play of mixing different kinds of strange creatures together and then telling a story normally, or does that actually force the writer, force the creator to actually think about genre and think about what the recuperation of different worlds means for that genre or not?

so in the introduction to the new weird several of the authors that are touched on by their Vandermeers by Jeff and Anne kind of point to some of the things people have done that have done in the new weird that kind of set them apart from who their you know their sort of ancestor would be in the original weird you know, Ligotti is very often he's very often compared to Lovecraft but, you know, despite the fact that he has all these kinds of creatures and mythos and things at his disposal Ligotti is actually very restrained you know, Ligotti is very much interested in

sort of internal effect, the sort of how a mind can sustain these kind of weird you know, weird and strange circumstances, but often in a very specific way you know a story where someone just gets harassed by a clown puppet in a drugstore it's kind of it's about scribbles on paper and strings coming from nowhere it's very specific or Chano Mieville being another huge figure of the new weird and he by his own admission and again in the introduction he just crams everything together and it just explodes and he adds, you know, ten new entities

and all these kinds of things. And the question there is that since his stories and his writings tend to be so political, you know, is there kind of... There's almost an inverse of Lovecraft in some regards in terms of this explosion of things, this kind of absolute, you know, hyper-pluralism of entities has a kind of political use, at least aesthetically from Yaville, and maybe beyond that. And then the other person to touch on, I think, would be Mervyn Peake as a sort of ancestor to Michael Sisko. Sisko being somebody, both of them being kind of fantasy authors

in a really, really broad sense. I don't know if anyone's read Peake's stories or not, but they're kind of like if you took Tolkien and removed all the magic and replaced all the happiness and adventure with sarcasm that would essentially be what Mervyn Peake is like I think they're really great books, the Gorman Gasp trilogy, so everything is kind of this like beaten down empty castles where people just kind of fumble around and do weird stuff and Sisko is sort of the inheritor of that tradition I think because he kind of takes these fantastical elements in this very poetic language which is also very important to Peek and really looks at how you can kind of just go off

in this kind of fantasy genre as idealism kind of turned in on itself and how these kinds of fantastical ideas just kind of become mundane and absurd in a very specific way so Well, I mean, that's mostly what I want to ask and kind of put out there in terms of people to think about and think about when we talk to Jeff as well. And is this, you know, when you put all this kind of stuff back together, is it, you know, is there a sort of creative desire to then restrain it in a very particular way without it just seeming like it's a remix of the scene? just a return to the same repetition with a difference or whatever, in a more positive

sense? Or does it allow itself to be redirected in a very particular political or aesthetic way otherwise? And with that, I'll let Tony step in. Okay, I guess. So with that frame, I think I'll just talk a little bit about the way that we both thought about how this class will go. Am I no longer echoing? Is that good now, Ben? Okay. And so the basic structure, I think, of how we want to do this class, we've invited Eleanor, actually, to prepare a little bit of words, about 10, 15 minutes for a general contextualization of Southern Reach, the trilogy.

And after, we'll have a little bit of his discussion, and then followed by Jeff Vandermeer is going to join us at 7 o'clock. So around that time, we'll do about 20 to 30 minutes where we can all ask him whatever questions we want, the other about New Weird, about his writing, about what he knows, about any of these things. And then we'll follow up with just a further discussion about these sort of genres, or the books that we're reading. So with that said, I would like to invite Eleanor, if she could come and say a few things. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, fine.

Okay, good. I can't hear myself. So this is going to start with... This might be a little under 10 minutes. I haven't actually timed myself reading it. I'm really sorry. No problem. But the first part will probably be a lot of stuff that Ben actually just said. so and then the second part has anybody not read the second two books in Southern Reach in the Southern Reach trilogy I have not, I've read only Annihilation you have not, only Annihilation, okay then I will not there's like a sentence that's kind of massively spoilerific so I will just not say that sentence

alright so I don't mind spoilers. Okay. Alright. So without further ado, I guess. New Weird is Dead, declares Jeff Vandermeer at the end of his introduction to the New Weird Anthology co-edited with Anne Vandermeer and published in 2008. This might get a little confusing because there's, and I'm sure many of you know this, there's two anthologies. There's The Weird and The New Weird. And one is massively smaller than the other. So I'm going to say The New Weird for, you know, their titles are actually pretty distinct. So The New Weird was published in 2008, and The Weird was published in 2011.

So The New Weird is dead. Long live the next weird. At multiple points in this anthology, different authors refer to The New Weird as haunting, a ghost, a thing that by virtue of being defined has probably been killed. But then, writes China Meaville three years later in the after weird to the follow-up collection, The Weird, the weird is neither holy nor holy, it is holy. This is, I will copy paste this into the sidebar because it's all homophones. In this book is a weird canon, he adds. But this is certainly no literary canon trundled onto deck to blast all interlopers out of the water, to paraphrase Terry Eagleton. No, quoting again Mia Ville,

The weird is an affect, we know it when we feel it. The weird is dead, but the weird cannot die. The uncanny only opens borders, widens horizons, and refuses to be pinned down. that is, if it's really left home at all. The New Weird is often described as an inherently mixed genre, which Ben was talking about earlier, this kind of, or the weird, weird fiction is kind of this pre-genre that is, you know, as I said, inherently mixed, whose only consistent qualities might be in a balance between, and this is quoting Vandermeer talking about Meaville, pulp writing, visionary surreal images, and literary influences. But then again, only perhaps,

since this is referring specifically to Meaville's work, which is notable for reaching an unusually wide audience, as kind of as a precursor, many have noted, to the Southern Reach trilogy. In addition, the new weird often fixates on the uncanny in blatant grotesqueries of body horror and the creeping dread of increasingly authoritarian state systems, but if you've noticed my hedging language, this is because I am trying to describe weird fiction without delineating it. These are things weird fiction might do but are not required to do to qualify. In fact, perhaps the only thing weird fiction is required to do is, well, be weird. That is, to generate a sense of the uncanny, of creeping dread, to help us learn, as the fairy tale goes, how to shudder without being didactic.

and then that there's a part from that I'm just going to copy paste instead of reading from the introduction to the weird compendium that I don't remember if it was Ben or Trump put in the on the classroom so this is from that introduction what have I done sorry alright um So, so far in this course we've discussed the development and expansion of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and its impact on fiction and philosophy, but I think it's important to note that while a number of New Weird authors do specifically cite Lovecraft as an influence,

formative or not, Vandermeer has repeatedly, and in my opinion pretty convincingly, disavowed and argued against Lovecraft's importance both for his own work, Vandermeer's own work, for the growth of the genre. So here's one of his more sort of polite arguments. There have been much more scathing comments that he's made. And so in that piece he writes, this is indeed a golden age for weird fiction, but not in the sense of looking back to a golden age. A mode of fiction that eats itself, that becomes cannibalistic, cannot be said to be progressive or innovative in any real sense. It is with that in mind, that and the desire to spotlight non-Anglo, non-traditional weird

stories that the Vandermeers chose the stories included in the weird anthology. So this will be another link. Scott Nicolay has written a very lovely, although I hesitate to say thorough, since looking up at what I have written, I am reminded that this is a canon, but not the canon. history of the weird renaissance that contextualizes Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy. So this is a really great piece. So in this piece, Nicolay repeatedly points out that this might be a history, but there are no clear lines of descent, no obvious traces of lineage that could lead one to easily bracket off selections of novels as, oh, this, this is the weird.

Rather, in this delightful, fungal, mushrooming conceit, Nicolay compares the weird novel to a fairy ring with a circle of hybrid and exotic bull eats growing too amorphous to define, and ultimately resulting in new, new weird novelists popping up all across the meadow. So, and also, Caitlin R. Kiernan, in an interview with Jeff Vandermeer, said a very similar thing that if she lists her influences, there are too many to count, and only about a third of them come from weird fiction, if that. So this growth and change, Nicolay suggests, is due in large part to the changing market conditions from the early days of the pulp magazines and then their decline to the expansion

of small presses, mainly thanks to the internet, which I suppose we can also all thank for being gathered here today. But Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy has changed even that, Nicolet argues, being Lovecraft-free, accessible, and published by a major publishing house for, I'm just going to say FSG because I can't actually remember how to pronounce their name. It's drawn in readers hungry for mystery, for revelation, and for that weird affect that Nieville previously pronounced. The weird is the new noir, he concludes triumphantly. So there's actually a lot more to that piece that's really worth reading, so I didn't just tell you everything that happens in it. And to switch gears quickly, and probably rather disruptively, just a brief description of the relationship of his book to my project.

The first chapter of my dissertation is going to be about the weird fungal environments of his fiction, which I am arguing suggest a model for an environmental consciousness predicated not on the distinction between man and nature, but on total immersion, Stacey Alamo's Transcorporeality, which if you're not familiar with it, is the realization that human corporeality, and this is a quote, is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world. And while that sounds very kind of kumbaya-ish, I actually think it's a very useful model precisely because it is adamantly not celebratory.

And in fact, one of Alamo's major case studies is the increase of cases of chemical sensitivity disorders in the last 25 years or so. So this idea that affects and spores and all sorts of things just move through our bodies and affect our bodies. And so this project seeks to explore the affective aspects of this realization, from staggering disorientation to queasy comfort, from threatening revulsion to the resurgence of desire, and how they're presented or produced aesthetically. And so what role, I'm asking, might disorientation, disgust, and other uncomfortable bodily affects play in an environmental or cross-species ethics?

And so my favorite example is the blobfish. And does everyone know what the blobfish is? Has anybody seen? I'll post a link to a blobfish. It's a deep-sea fish that lacks both a swim bladder and a hard skeleton. and when it's raised up from the extreme pressures of the deep ocean, its body collapses, which turns it into a jelly-like mass with the face of an irritable old man. So this creature embodies perhaps the ultimate challenge of conservation. How and why should you preserve a creature so depressingly revolting? So the kinds of narratives that provoke a similar effective response to the blobfish are most likely uncanny ones. And so how might that response be used to construct a non-anthropocentric ethics?

So Area X, which is the setting of annihilation, and Jeff Vandermeer, I don't have the link to it, but has a great piece about how the Everglades were very important for his construction of Area X. It's an unsettling overgrown wilderness. Yes, thank you. It's an unsettling overgrown wilderness haunted by disaster and strictly monitored by ominous governmental agencies. Thirty years prior to the events of annihilation, an event of some kind occurred in a forested space on the coast. I say the southeastern United States, but I'm not actually sure about that. If anybody has quotes for that, that'd be great, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

That became labeled as Area X. a border manifested that nothing living and certainly nothing human or human made could pass. But at some point, through methods that have not yet been made clear in Annihilation, a hole appeared in this physical and metaphysical border through which the Southern Reach, this governmental agency, began to send expeditions. And in Annihilation, a group of four women, a biologist, a psychologist, a surveyor, and an anthropologist are sent on such an expedition. Area X has thus far resisted scientific examination, and this is ostensibly the 12th Expedition. So, and this is where the spoiler comes in. So I'll, you know...

So I just say, it's just about how this is ostensibly the 12th Expedition, but that becomes really questionable later. So here, Vandermeer pairs the trappings of scientific empiricism with the uneasy relationship between the fictional Area X, which is a kind of rewilding, a reclamation by nature of the human environment, and the real Florida Everglades, which are themselves an embattled site for conservation. The ecological underpinnings of Vandermeer's novel have prompted one writer into a fascinating analysis of Area X as a massive exercise in what she calls eco-mimicry. So this is Madeline Stone's essay at Medium, which is worth a read.

And at the climax of Annihilation, the biologist descends into a topographical anomaly, a structure which she calls the tower and the rest of the expedition calls the tunnel, to encounter an alien horrifying creature who, it appears, has been writing religious phrases. the walls of the anomaly in living ink glowing and growing fungi. This writing brings to mind Ben Marcus's or William Burroughs' language virus, although the virality is not so much in the language itself but the ink. As it turns out, the biologist has accidentally immunized herself to hypnotic suggestion by her breathing in the spores, and as this entity begins to colonize her body, she is able to survive area X.

Other incidences suggest that the biologist's immunity was kind of predated her exposure to Area X, but which I don't think necessarily calls the effect of the spores into question, but rather emphasizes the placement of her body within Area X, which is a very sort of, I think, important question in Vandermeer's work, is the way that bodies place and belonging are enmeshed with each other. So here and in the Ambergris trilogy. So at one point, and this is I'm wrapping up here, a couple months ago Vandermeer tweeted that there are no dreams in any of the novels, which considering that there are at least

three occasions where dreams are recounted, if these images that bombard the characters and their sleep and their waking hours are not dreams, then they might be reverberations through time of Area X's effects and perhaps the kind of time looping or nodding that we discussed a few weeks ago. And Ben, I don't know if you've been thinking about this, but I was thinking about your piece on that. So I don't know if maybe I've brought up some interesting points for discussion. If you have any questions, I don't know that I'm the best person to respond to them, But if you have questions maybe about the pieces that I've linked to in the sidebar, we can talk about that.

So my questions about Area X are whether or not anybody thinks that the ultimate events in Area X, if you've read all of the novels or even just the events in Annihilation, are part of a negation of ethics. I can explain that question unless it's immediately clear. And whether or not, going back to Ben's earlier comments about, I think it was Ben, China Meaville's politics, is whether weird fiction or speculative fiction in general is politically conscious, whether it should or shouldn't be, or just individual works are. And then finally, what makes these texts hyperstitional?

right that's it so can you see couldn't you actually say just a I'm sorry I know you just muted but can you say just a little bit more about the negation of effects what do you mean by that yeah of ethics I'm the gays are not a an X ethics I'm mainly that oh is that clear or it's clear yeah I think I can now gauge what you're saying okay thanks does anybody have any comments or any office

oh ethics okay No, please explain. So go ahead and explain. So that... Basically, my impression is that what's going on in these novels negates any kind of a priori system. Priori? Sorry. I'm one of those people who reads words and doesn't hear people say them so I can never pronounce things correctly but a priori system and so ethical behavior might be possible but it's not something that can be fitted to a system

that has somehow been worked out in advance but rather one that's constantly emerging I mean mainly I'm thinking about the owl in the final book and the I don't know about annihilation itself I guess maybe an annihilation itself the biologists immersion into the environment and the way that kind of know begins to develop in that book does that does that make sense more sense to

me it does I'm just not sure and exactly what you mean by negation of of this of an ethics or is it a it's a chip it's a transformation yeah X maybe okay the other question you asked the second question was whether weird respect of the fiction is is politically conscious does it need to be should it be I mean that just seems to be yeah that just seems to be a really I'm I'm I'm I don't know if you saw this whole, you know, I'm sure you saw this whole thing about the Lovecraft bust as the World Fantasy Award. And, like, how Lovecraft is this?

You know, they took a vote at the World Fantasy Convention about whether or not Lovecraft was the best representative anymore. I'm just thinking, like, what does it mean? what does it mean for speculative fiction to be politically conscious and whether that should, whether it has a responsibility to be. And I guess the kind of underlying question there too is not just politically conscious but progressive, which I think, I have definitely at points Vandermeer makes that implication but I also don't there's been other points where he's kind of

disavowed that too I don't know You brought up the quote where he's kind of when he's talking about HP Lovecraft he's saying it's non-progressive Yeah The one example that you're giving yeah, I think they're good questions does anybody perhaps any comments on that? even Ben? you know, I mean one thing yeah, the ethics thing is interesting especially in terms of in terms of annihilation

in terms of the Area X books generally especially because there is a sense at least in I don't know if it's really there I don't know how present it is in the first book like you said I think it's definitely there in the third book where there's a sense of like it's almost I don't want to say defeatism but there's kind of a sense I almost feel like there's a sense of well you know what we think we can get a hold of we really don't have any clue and therefore what we what we do is just always going to be an insufficient response to what we encounter I don't know if that's what you meant exactly in terms of the ethical question but it reminded me that I got, a few years ago

I got into an extended email argument with China Mieville about it actually was about ethics and politics and it was mostly because at what point do they appear and I think that's kind of a that's a big part of the Southern Reach books it seems like in terms of knowing, trying to know at what point do we become responsible for what we've done and at what point do you have to bracket off things and say we did this therefore we're more responsible for it in this way whereas if this is part of nature being really weird we can just insufficiently respond and try to put band-aids on it I was curious what you think about that.

I mean I think that the answer to that question might have a lot to do with what you think Area X is caused by. Because I think then, like what you were talking about where ethics and responsibility emerge or appear I mean becomes I think becomes really important mostly in terms of causality like where where you why you think area X has appeared because if it's been caused by any of the entities any of the human entities in the novel then pretty clearly the responsibility is on the

human entities right but if it's alien if it's alien and origin and alien and nature then with a responsibility I guess I don't actually have a I don't I don't know I don't know what what I haven't formed an opinion yet so okay Does anybody else have an opinion on this?

quiet of all the mutes. Hey, guys. Sorry to join late. Sounds great. Thanks for saying that. Hi. Well, I guess there's, I mean, another thing I wanted, I don't know, I kind of wanted to bring up with, in relation to what Eleanor was talking about, you were talking about the relationship with the dream. And I don't know, I just, it's not like I, I don't have a lot. I mean, I just pulled out this quote because I just really liked it, and I was hoping that I could share it with people. And this, I think, has a relation here. And I was wondering what you kind of felt about it. I think it's towards the end.

I'll find the actual citation and post it. But it's, we all live in a kind of continuous dream. When we wake, it's because in some events, And some pinprick even disturbs the edges of what we've taken as reality. I'm gonna post it really quickly. I think it's a very nice... I was kind of along the dream angle.

Am I alone in seeing the connection to psychedelic experience with this book? Keep going. I mean, it's fungal spores that speak to you about God. Yeah, okay. It seems kind of, you know, and, you know, kind of immunizes you against hypnotism. You know, it's kind of like the breaking open the head idea. You know, Aldo Huxley, Doors of Perception-y kind of stuff. So, I mean, you know, thematically and then also just like, you know, literally, you know,

mushroom spores cause you to see, you know, kind of like the unlifting of the, you know, strained perception. Then also, yeah, I think that kind of ties into these ideas of dream I don't know. I don't really have a it's more just like a I guess another question on top of the question. That's an interesting analogy. how would you like I guess the question when I'm at when I'm thinking of to ask

you is like how would you relate it to you like Eleanor is most quoting near the arm when which talking about this affect record the uncanny or so how would you in in this psychedelic analogy what's the and tell it yet the effects the atmosphere, the climate, the... Is it just euphoria? Um... I... I... well I don't think it would be euphoric. Like it doesn't... Um...

I'd have to... I'd have to... kind of, there is, like, I don't know, kind of, I mean, if we think back, you know, kind of, like, I think just, like, the notion of ethics still maintains a lot of kind of theistic, like, thinking, you know, and that's why a lot of ethics, you know, kind of seems to, It's difficult to justify without a God figure kind of holding it all together. the project of ethics

has been kind of trying to figure out a substitution for a deity that, I mean, I don't know, if anyone's familiar with like a late 19th, early 20th century, a French philosopher wrote, Ethics without obligation or sanction. Has anyone read that work? Who is it written by? Ethics of obligation and sanction.

without obligation or sanction. Guyao, I'm spacing his first name, G-U-Y-A-U. And so that kind of tries to divorce it. He specifically sets it out in a world that's not either optimistic or pessimistic. But I think that is kind of the same way like the idea of the negation of ethics. So there's still maybe a guide to how it is good to behave without having threat of sanction or impending obligation.

And I think maybe that gets back to the negation of ethics question. and now I need to figure out how that goes back to the psychedelic. Okay. So it seems like that's... I mean, did I answer to you, like, Adia, when you're talking about this non-anthropocentric ethics? or do you want to return to Eleanor's? Yeah, can you hear me?

Yes. Yeah, just because, so Eleanor brought up the example of the blobfish, and she said it was the best sort of aesthetic example of these narratives that evoke the uncanny and that allow for this production of a non-anthropocentric ethics. That's exactly what she said. I have it here in my notes. So I want to go back to that. I'm just really intrigued by that. What does she mean by a non-anthropocentric ethics? I mean, I think Elna's project is really fascinating. There seemed to be a sort of a scission between the notion of a negation of ethics and then this notion of a non-anthropocentric ethics.

I mean, is ethics even possible beyond the human? I mean, I'm just not really sure what... I mean, I think Ben and Elner are probably the best people to answer this. I mean, is there a non-human ethics? I mean, is it not just a dog-eat-dog world after we're taken out of the equation? I don't know. Somebody respond. Well, I'd just like to say, you know, in Emmanuel Levinas' Ethics' First Philosophy, he designated the other, I think, first. Maybe Lacan said it first, I can't remember, but Derrida ran off with it. But it was very much an impossible and almost inhuman otherness.

Yeah, but this is the guy who talked to a dog. Can I just stop you there? You know the famous story about Levinas not regarding the dog as the other? This is a famous example of him when he's in a concentration camp and a dog comes up to the fence, and he doesn't even regard the dog as the other. So for most... Sorry, it's sort of like, continue.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Hello? You can hear me? Yes. Okay, good. Sorry, it's hard to know. Yeah, so it's just this famous story of Levinas. I did my BA thesis on Levinas, on De la Véjeune, on Escape. Awesome. So I'm very familiar with his work, and I loved him as a thinker until I sort of came across this story where he didn't even, you know, animals don't even figure in his philosophy of the other, which is sort of exemplified by this story of him and this dog. I think it's Derrida that talks about it. So that's, I guess, why I'm interested in Eleanor's response, particularly in relation

to the blobfish and how she thinks it relates to Vandermeer, Ligotti, Eyal's Weird Fictions and how this would produce a non-anthropocentric ethics. What is a non-anthropocentric ethics? I mean, I want to know what that is. Right. Yeah, of course, Levinas was directly anthropo-organized, but I think there's something interesting in the way that the impossible or the other is, or I think some of these inhuman inclinations and current trends, you know, have parallels back there, but I agree, I'd like to hear more as well. Yeah, no, and I think you're right, and I think Eugene Packard does a good job of talking about this at Dark Materialism. I don't know if you've heard that talk, it's available on Backdoor Broadcasting.

goes into the kind of weirdness, the new weirdness of, Packer goes into the new weirdness of Levinas' notion of Iliya, you know, in the darkness there is something. You know, so it's definitely, you know, it's really along the lines of what we're talking about here and exactly what you said, but there is that failure to address the figure of the animal or, you know, the entity that is the animal, so that's what I'm interested in, just asking Elner about. So maybe Elnor, is he available? Or Ben, maybe? Could you pop up? Elnor? Might have... Ben's fine. But she's back now, too.

Ah, Ben. But she missed... Um... Yeah, should I talk? I don't know. what's a non-antropocentric ethics is there such a thing can there be such a thing so I miss the whole discussion about Levinas sorry it just dropped the call so I don't know maybe someone already said that but there is there was although at one point Levinas did talk about like the the the others face not necessarily being a human face. Apparently, editing later, his emphasis there was on face and not human. And so some people have used

Levinas to talk about non-human others, but I think Levinas himself was probably very, was indeed very resistant to that and didn't... It's a very non-human other or inhuman other, but at the same time I think he really was intent on insisting that it was a human. It had to be a human other. But, I don't know. I mean, I'm not, I'm very resistant to the idea that one philosopher has the end-all, be-all on his own work. But, but the, as for, I mean, I don't know, and that's the, the question that I'm asking is kind of a question that I don't

already know the answer to, that whether or not there can be a non-anthropocentric ethics. And at a certain point, you know, it might be what I'm trying to work for. And I think that the difference is between, that there actually is a difference between conservation ethics and a non-anthropocentric ethics, that there is a difference between what our system of behavior towards other other species than humans should be but also what that might mean to have it be non-anthropocentric and I have lost all of the things in the chat so I don't remember who it was it might have been James made a comment in here about

how it might demand destructive individually destructive behavior that are yet geared towards the survival of the system. I don't know if that... Did you mean ecosystem? Sorry, I've lost everything, so I'm probably poorly paraphrasing it because that happened right when my... I think it probably means consciousness. Yeah, okay. Probably, which brings it back to every week. His name alludes me for some reason. the guy who's talking about psychedelics Beckett yeah that brings it right back to his point which would be well James was talking about

obviously we're bringing it back to the notion of pure sort of animal being here and I think maybe James' metaphor of both possibly prompted by a Thomas Ligotti quote that I posted on Facebook earlier which is it's also a mystical notion the idea of getting rid of sort of any notion of individuality and sort of becoming one. You, Elner, I presume are more than familiar with this kind of, it's kind of a Gaia notion, almost, which takes it back, I don't know, I'm just trying to match the threads here. There was any ethics, planetary ethics. yeah and I mean one

are be I think the guy a hypothesis like was you know on the way to on the way to that but it's then you know disproved and critic critiqued and in in so many ways and it does seem very kind of fluffy now and so I'm not you know not entirely on board with that but at the same time and so I think this is where I'm I'm less focused on ethical systems then on the possibility I'll and aesthetics

love non-human representation that's for a something that's related to something like conservation that's not based on charisma I'm that's not based on the you know the large fluffy noble beasts that we see in our WWF a emails I'll but but the I mean and and and Stacy almost most recent project is actually very much in line with that, and that's on the deep sea ocean cataloging project, which I think is very interesting with the relationship to

the Southern Reach trilogy and to Annihilation specifically in that idea of what it means to catalog the unknown, what it means to attempt to know the unknown or unknowable, and whether or not that's either possible or worthwhile without being like a fetishization of ignorance so I mean I think this is a good time are to kind of cut the discussion for a little bit and I'm going to invite Jeff into the room I and I think what we can I think across the board it seems like this relate this idea of ethics

environments is is a big in in annihilation and also been interesting to all of us so we can all ask him whatever we want the format that we think we've we've sort of decided on is just a loose will just do a loose base discussion interview with Jeff where any of us just can ask whatever for whatever once if you speak your questions here and we can respond if you just want to type them. And then, yeah, we'll kind of just, I think, Ben will do a brief introduction for him or just introduce him when he joins and start off with some quick questions and then feel free to join him. So let me just let him know.

are there anybody that has questions currently once knows knows knows a question for yeah care I'm just going to read the side comments really quickly. Well,

we can continue discussion. Sorry for cutting it until he comes, if we would want to. Catherine is responding here to the psychedelic response. So maybe Beckett, if you have something there. The previous training and infection provides more condition. Can you set a minute? I'm doing this for my phone so I don't have the sidebar. Okay, so... Sorry, sorry. What Catherine is saying is she's talking about the basic implication of spore as psychedelic is that the truth it reveals could be just another version of hypnotism.

And like her previous training, she says, that provides more conditioning, a new set of limits for her thoughts. Limits that are in the interest of new ecosystem, maybe a version of sacrificing a quote-unquote life for our sake of system. the sacrifice of individuality that previous explorers have made ethics by contamination? Sorry, I'm getting an echo. Yeah, maybe the only real kind of...

And this is probably... Hello. Hi. Am I coming through okay? Yes. Welcome to our room. Thanks for having me. Yes, no problem. Ben? Okay. Well, hi, Jeff. I'm Ben. Hi. So we've been talking about the Southern Reach a bit, and we've been talking about Area X and about what just came up with. We're talking about what a non-human ethics would be or what the sort of place of ethics is in the book,

in Annihilation but also throughout the series. So maybe I think most of us are familiar with your work, at least from this class. So I thought maybe if you wanted to talk about Area X a bit and Annihilation and sort of how you see the sort of ethical and relationship to nature, because one thing that struck me was in the third book in the notes, you mentioned Rachel Carson in the same breath as you mentioned Baudrillard. And so I kind of wondered what that meant for ethics and for nature. Well, it's kind of a tough question because I wanted the books to kind of be a discussion

of this to some degree that might embody some of it but especially like in Authority there are certain characters who are kind of like testing out different ways of looking at the world and then in Acceptance there are characters who are kind of living out different ways of viewing the world I think I don't really come at things from a as much of a kind of philosophical standpoint as I do a kind of instinctual one when I'm writing. I don't want the books to be didactic, so anything that's philosophy has to be kind of like cooked and kind of disguised, even though there are some lines right out of some of those semiotext books in acceptance because they kind of fit the

ghost bird's point of view almost exactly. I think we're rapidly coming to a point where, I've said this and it's a very blunt kind of not particularly subtle way of saying it, but we have this view of the environment as being first of all separate from us, removed from us, and then secondly that it's something that we either control or we act as stewards of. And I think both of these are flawed ways of looking at our environment and so much else of how we see the world comes out of this that the very foundation of how we deal with the world is fundamentally flawed across a lot of different things societally

culturally it's cetera because of that so really the books are about characters who either face up to this or they don't to some degree. And the ones who have the imagination to face up to it or are transformed in some way, some of them survive, and the ones who don't, like control, they're too encoded or corrupted with the way we see the world now to ever really get beyond that. I don't know if that answers your question, because again, I'm not deeply into philosophy or anything. I'm very much a writer who's instinctual. But if you have another follow-up

question to pull something else out of me, feel free. Well, does anyone else have a follow-up question? I think I... Eleanor, maybe? I can ask more. But other people talking... Sorry, I started talking, but I didn't realize my microphone was on. I mean, over in the... In terms of... We were talking earlier in terms of whether or not speculative fiction has or should have a political consciousness.

consciousness or the subset of that being progressive or has a responsibility to do that. And I don't know. I mean, part of me thinks if you're writing about the future, you should be writing about a possible future or writing about a change that could happen. Well, I don't think, I don't really believe in so-called moral fiction. If that makes any sense, especially as John Gardner defines it, if that's what you're going after. I think you have to commit to whatever it is you're doing, and if what you're doing

is something that is exploring something that doesn't fit our modern view of what ethics or morality should be, then you just have to follow it. But these books, it was very important to me not to pull back, but it was important to me that the third volume not disappear into some alien place with no sense of humanity to it. And so I continued to explore in the third book the dysfunction, but also the kind of pushback or struggle that people make against a consensus reality that doesn't serve us well. And so I feel like the ending is fairly hopeful considering the possibilities. In fact, the ending acceptance is actually fairly upbeat

considering where we actually are in the next hundred years on this planet. But to get to your question about speculative fiction, what I find really quite fascinating is There are several authors now who are not writing speculative fiction, who I feel are dealing better with the science fictional future than a lot of science fiction writers. I don't know exactly why that is. There might be something about self-defining as a science fiction writer that precludes you being able to see beyond a certain range of options. Submergence by Ledgeguard from Coffeehouse Press is an amazing book that to me has more kind of avant-garde science fictional weird ideas in it than any science fiction book

I've read recently. You could say the same of Richard Powers at times. I also just read a book called The Absolution of Roberto Lang, I'm going to say, by Nicholas Rombes from Two Dollar Radio that's also not really science fiction. It's kind of weird fiction. But the things that he gets across about our current condition are really not conveyed in a science fictional way, and yet they seem to me speculative and in a sense that does begin to kind of reach beyond the normal kind of paradigms we see in a lot of science fiction. This might just be because a lot of science fiction has become commodified, it's become product, and it's incredibly difficult to move beyond that, to kind of get beyond the

the kind of pop-culturization of things to get to some other kind of point of view on it. And I'll stop there so I don't just start to babble. Okay. Eleanor, do you have a follow-up? Because I don't want to just be rude and jump in. No. Okay. I think you're saying no, but you're muted. Sorry, no, I don't have a follow-up. So, I guess, for me, what we're sort of, we keep getting around, we're engaging with, is you're saying that you don't subscribe to sort of a moralistic or a moralistic fiction, correct?

I totally agree with you here. I'm trying to formulate and reach it back to this idea of inhuman ethics or what for you is important. Obviously, Area X is... Sorry, Ted. Well... The importance of Area X or the landscape of the... Sorry. Sorry, I don't know that AreaX itself engages in any kind of, like, ethics, per se. If you have something that's kind of omnipresent in everything, kind of interconnected in everything,

there's no them, there's no us, so to speak. I'm not sure that there's any real way of defining that. Again, though, I'm not heavily into theory, so it's not something I've really thought about, except for I have a whole backstory of what I know Area X is, how it actually operates. There's an actual rigid logic to doppelgangers versus being turned into animals. there's a kind of a backstory to it where where it's not even really it's not even really the the genuine article it's kind of the it's kind of something that's been deployed out of context

and so sometimes what happens when you have something that's deployed context is you get something that appears to be harmful If you were to use this human example, I don't know what the example would be, but there's many contexts in human history where something is deployed in the wrong way through some kind of cultural misunderstanding, and it's actually harmful even if it's not meant to be. So I don't know... Do you have a more specific question? No, no, I think a lot of the questions we've been asking are trying to speculate about sort of like what an ethics would be once you've exhausted the human domain of ethics, what

the non-entropocentric ethics would be, which we... Well, I don't know what that's... ...scienting. Go ahead. That's like trying to imagine a sense that human beings don't have. You can kind of artificially replicate it, I guess, through other, you know. It's something I've actually struggled with myself. I mean, even in the prior books, the Ambergris books, even again, just on the tactile level of trying to imagine a non-human existence and trying to describe on the page what a different set of, like, responses or perspectives on the world would be, it's incredibly difficult to find the words that will convey that. Sorry, do you have a question?

I think Adia wanted to... Yeah, no, I was just going to... because it was me that was kind of raising the question of what a non-human ethics would be, if it was even possible. And I guess in the reading that I've been doing around the seminar, I think I've just actually hit on the answer in what you've just said there, because just in terms of like the two genres, there's a fraction between the genre of horror and the genre of weird, or the new weird, which happens between 2006 and 2011, as far as I can see, and what fractures them is that horror is always linked to this notion of legend, which is sort of what ethics

is about if you think about it. Ethics is linked back to this notion of legend, this idea of morality, which is essentially a legend, and what distinguishes the new weird from horror is that precisely it's groundlessness. It doesn't have that anchorage in any sort of legend. I expect Ben to jump in here because this is really his forte, but I'm right in saying that, I'm sorry, you know, that if there's a link to ethics in horror, it's because horror is linked to this legend of morality, whereas the new weird isn't, like it's just groundless. So maybe if there's a non-human ethics in the new weird, Jeff, it's because a non-human ethics, because it's groundless, because you can't, like you said, you're searching

for this, and you can't find it anywhere, it's, there's just these creatures and these things under there but there's no there's no ground for them, you know what I mean? I don't know. Yeah, no, I think that's a really insightful comment and what I would add to that is I think there's two things going on there. The one thing that you mentioned and also just as an aside Laura, thank you for that comment you said your microphone was broken. The thing you mentioned, then also the thing that New Weird is a lot more influenced by mainstream realism and therefore traditions of stories where you don't go back to the status quo but also stories that don't have to complete their story arcs if that makes any sense and part of completing a story arc is often the thing that's in the tail of it in the end of it is is where you get kind

of the not necessarily the summing up but you get more of that sense of some kind of ethical resolution I guess you could say the other thing I would say is that I don't know that that's across the board for new, weird, or for horror, and these are also terms that are very fluid. It's always really difficult to kind of get a sense for where one stops and where the other begins. I mean, I know where it is for me. I don't know if it's the same for everyone else, but I don't think it's just an issue of simple escapism versus non-escapism. This is another issue that I really think about a lot in terms of dystopias and even the southern reach because, again, to me the southern reach is a best-case scenario.

The best-case scenario is that an area X comes along and purifies everything and some of us are left because if you look at the actual scientific data, there's not a lot of data indicating we're going to be around in 100 years. So in that case, it's like the definition, the frontier of what's escapism and what's not escapism kind of changes quite a bit. The other thing is this search for something you can't actually convey. Landscape and Memory by Shema or something like that talks about photographers trying to get beyond the human gaze, trying to find a way not to frame things with their perspective and how the ones who try that, even though they fail, they get

closer to something. And they may not even understand what it is they're getting closer to because they're in the middle of it. But that's the attempt, the truly, in a way, science fictional attempt to see something different, if that makes any sense. And I wish I had that book in front of me because it's really quite fascinating to think of it in the visual space instead of the space of having to use words, if that makes any sense. Words. But I've had this discussion, too, about landscape and wilderness on panels, because it comes up again and again, even just cliches in science fiction about what a wilderness space is as opposed to a rural space, as opposed to, and then, like you said, the myth, bringing

in all these things from like Grimm's fairy tales and everything else that are very much in an embedded human gaze having a particular perspective that often had to do with warnings and survival and everything else, but then get so embedded in the literature that it's hard to get it out if you want to get it out. And so I've had these fascinating discussions where I'll talk about the potency of getting lost in the wilderness and not knowing where you are and not having a GPS and how rare that is and what that means in the modern kind of condition. And then immediately the conversation goes back to like wolves and Red Riding Hood and

things like that, which can be potently subverted but still exist within this certain kind of limited sphere. So it becomes very frustrating. when I was pitching articles to various places, because I've had an opportunity to do that because of this series, nobody wanted anything that had anything to do with this subject. They wanted stuff about lighthouse keepers, they wanted stuff about the environment that was familiar, but there was something about the other topics that maybe I presented them wrong, but it just seemed like an area that they didn't want to discuss or they didn't want to explore. Amazing response. I guess. I feel like I'm babbling. No, no. It was making me really good.

Yes, it was very good. There's the obvious ghostly problem with everybody when people are meeting the mics. Thank you for that. I think we have a few people without microphones, So posting questions on the right here. Yeah, I am seeing the pop-up. So if anyone has a pop-up question, I'm happy to answer that too. JOHN MUELLER Do you have a mic on? I don't know if that's an accent.

Yeah, well, if no one else... I mean, one thing that... One thing I'm wondering about is how you sort of conceive of nature in a general sense. I mean, partly because, like, a lot of the work I do is on the history of the concept of nature. And I've had similar... What sounds like similar frustrations when I've been at conferences and I've presented something, and I talk about nature, and people say, oh, well, nature is just something that, you know, painters invented in the 18th century. You know, they'll say something like this, where it's like they completely collapse a very particular aesthetic and the actual idea that nature is a series of physical, you know, interconnected systems that we depend upon and whatnot. So, I mean, I'm just curious, you know, what,

how would you sort of see either in the books or in general because you kind of say, you mentioned the best case scenario, it seems like this sort of it's almost like Gaia with a vengeance or something in a way the idea that the best case scenario would be if the earth could actually reclaim itself and some people survived and I just wonder why you pick that model of nature even though if it is not the case and we're actually maybe in a much worse condition. Why that? Yeah, why that version? Again, a lot of I that's a good question.

I was actually kind of horrified because I was on a panel and someone said, oh, so you're talking about Rousseau and I was like, no, we're not talking about Rousseau. I'm not subscribing to that either. But I think that the thing that this exists in is in the specificity of detail about the systems, because the systems are all so interrelated. And we have this tendency towards classification that even extends towards genres in a much less subtle context that precludes us from seeing the whole thing. And so even today, I was reading this article on plant communication and the plant communication through various forms of fruiting bodies and fungi and how trees, you know, many miles

away communicate. and that by itself is... We only probably get a sense, even through science, of about 10%, 15%, maybe 20% of those systems and how they actually interact. Now, it's telling me I have network connection problems. Are you still hearing me? Yep. Are you hearing me? Yes. All right. so I don't know again, you're probably more of an expert on this than I am I'm feeling my way through it instinctually for what works for a fiction writer and what seems to me to make sense

and has to do with my direct experience in the wilderness and my direct experience and sensory experience of that in addition to reading people like Rachel Carson and reading the semiotext books and all of that and kind of putting it all together. So I don't know if I really answered your question there, but I mean, I even have right here a bootleg copy of a whole freaking journal that's all about nature, the yearbook of comparative literature. And the first piece here, Aristotle and the Masculinization of Phusis, just made me feel like people still don't

fucking get it. And then going on, it's like Darwin, Freud, and the whale. Sorry, but this strikes me as like trying to deal with something with information that's 30 years, 40 years out of date. And so, you know, one thing I would actually like from you after this is an idea of where people are actually doing the interesting stuff. I don't actually think that nature has a higher function like that, but I do think that parts of it have a higher function than real lies. There's a lot of things about animal intelligence we don't know. There's a lot of absurdities about science and animals that just would crack me up if they weren't so serious. I mean, even the fact that white mice, it turns out, are much more fearful of male sweat than female sweat,

which may have influenced a lot of studies because the scientists were primarily male. You know, there's all these different aspects of it that lead me to believe that we just don't know enough to put together a unified theory about our own environment yet. But I also have to say that that is definitely also a fictional construct and that it's an interesting point of view to explore in fiction whether it's true or not. I have a quick question. I haven't read much of your work, I must admit, but I read recently, I can't remember where,

a critique of sci-fi, of a trend where post-apocalyptic narratives aren't present enough, so to speak, you know, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Ian Keown's whatever. I was wondering, I feel like there needs to be a trans-apocalyptic sentiment. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the idea of the post-apocalyptic thing? I think there's actually way too much of it right now, and it's all pretty terrible escapist crap. Even Station Eleven, the idea in the 30 years we're going to be staging Shakespeare productions across a vast wasteland of 2% of the population,

it may be a very poignant novel in other ways, but it doesn't really seem to hold up. we have a lot of people who quite frankly are coming from a middle class or upper middle class background who are conveying a real ignorance about the underlying underpinnings of the world and I'm not saying I get them correct, I'm just saying that I at least acknowledge that I have certain blind spots and I try to explore those blind spots and kind of shore them up but what I see is a lot of what I would say are, and I don't know how else to say it, it's just writers basically reducing the world down to 2% of the population so they don't have to actually deal with the implications of a wider landscape.

And so you follow small shrewd people across very unrealistic, almost stupid art installation type barricades and crap, and you have communities called communities and you have all kinds of things that are ridiculous. Like there's one novel called California where a woman actually runs screaming from a porcupine and hides behind a shed. And the writers actually said that this is a sympathetic character who is very much a reflection of herself. And these things are pouring in. I've got seven galleys right now for books next year that 2% of the population survive. And I can tell you from reading them right now that the other thing that's quite disturbing is these read like environmental disaster cozies, more or less.

And part of the most disturbing part of them is in almost every single one, there's like one non-white person. That's the other thing that drives me nuts. It's like a way of trying to somehow hold on to some kind of perverse status quo that doesn't even really exist, that's total bullshit. it. And so I'm very, very suspicious of a lot of this. It feels, again, like a commodification, because one thing that this society we live in does is it commodifies everything immediately. And one reason I like the weird is that it's still not something you can find in the bookstore as a separate category or anything like that. It resists commodification to some degree by

being slightly amorphous, and yet it still has some definitional qualities you can point to. So I hate to be a downer on that, but everything I see coming in is like all but 2% of the population has been killed by a virus or something else or environmental catastrophe, and that's it. It's just BS. At least the road, because it was dealing with a father-son relationship, it succeeds on a certain level regardless of the veracity of what's going on in terms of the apocalypse. But it's funny to me how many of these apocalyptic scenarios don't really involve the environment. They involve some virus or something, which I guess you could say comes out of the environment, but they don't actually deal with the idea of environmental devastation. So again, it's kind of a cop-out. It's kind of like, well,

everything's still around and it's 40 years from now, but you know. Anyway, I'll stop my rant there because it's something I'll write about eventually, but it's kind of dangerous thing to write about. It's difficult. Yeah. Thank you. It brings up a... Well, at one point you made, it actually brings up something on the sidebar here. I don't know if you saw it when it popped up. Laura asked a question that she was interested to hear more about. I saw it earlier and I didn't see it long enough to see what the question was. Basically, to see... She was interested in hearing why you... why none of your protagonists, why you chose them to be non-straight white males. And so this is a purposeful thing. She wants to know, like, why?

There are things that you do that are purposeful, and there are things that just come out. When it turned out that the expedition wasn't named in the first book, and for the first few pages of the rough draft, I didn't know who they were, I asked myself, who are they? And I can't tell you whether it was a conscious or unconscious decision, because it kind of occurred so simultaneously that there was some subconscious element, and then some element where, you know, I saw that I thought they were all women. I thought it was interesting not to provide physical descriptions for a number of reasons. One is that the landscape encroaches in on them more. There's, like, literally more description of the landscape than of the people, and that actually creates a kind of sense of unease, I think.

but I also like the idea of consciously like the idea of being all women when you see so many of these types of stories where it's all men or all men and one woman and then also the idea that there's so much baggage that occurs when you use physical descriptions with regard to characters who are women because a certain percentage of your readership is going to assign certain values based on looks and so what I wanted to do is take that away and then in book two restore some of it and create a dysfunction between your view of who you thought the characters were and maybe think about why you defaulted to certain things when you get to book two. So once that was set in place, partially consciously, partially not, you know, kind of from the

subconscious, then I started thinking about the other things and I used a lot of my own workplace experience. So a lot of the characters are based on people that I knew. Now, they're not those same people, but that kind of predicated the diversity because that's what I experienced in the workplaces that I worked in when I had a day job. And then I just consciously also wanted to play against certain things that I find really stupid and wrong and also boring. I mean, there is that cliche in Hollywood movies of it's the black guy who always dies fourth or fifth or third from the last, you know? And so I wanted to push back against that, like in acceptance, you know. I always thought Grace was the most well-adjusted of all the characters,

and I thought it was very important that her story arc of it was natural, that she would be one of the people who walked out at the end. And it was quite fascinating, the reader reaction to that, because most readers were fine with everything in the books, but I got quite a bit of pushback, still a minority of readers, but almost all, in fact it was all men, basically saying for book three, why couldn't Grace be out of the picture somehow so that Control and Ghost Bird could have a romantic relationship, which I found kind of revolting because another thing, exactly, it's ridiculous. And it's ridiculous in part because there's a certain percentage of guys who also thought at the end of Authority that this was going to be a love story between Control and Ghost Bird in Book 3.

And it's quite clear to me in Authority that Ghost Bird has no romantic interest in Control, and Control may have an obsession and some kind of a crush, but so what? and then the power dynamic shifts in book three as well and the power dynamics are very important as to how these relationships play out I mean control is literally in control and authority and then he's totally at sea and ghost birds that are in her element in book three so that whole relationship changes as a result so you know this was fascinating to do and I recognize that it's partially just representational, right? It's representative because I don't deal with, I don't like in the first book have to deal with issues in society

that women face because they're on a sexpedition all by themselves. In book two, I touch a little bit on control, having experienced certain forms of mild racism, but I don't really go into that. There wasn't enough space in these particular novels to explore all of that. so to some degree it's just representative it's not dealing deeply with any of the core issues that any of that brings up but it was important to me that it be that way and it was also important to me in terms of like body type like I wanted the psychologist to not be a normal not a normal but not a the normal kind of Hollywood kind of you know I don't know what you would call it but I'm so scared about the casting in the movies like what they're going to do that it's going to wind up being like, you know,

all these kind of... Anyway, so that's kind of where all that came into view. Part of it was subconscious, and then part of it was pulling out and consciously doing things to push against stereotypes. Does that make any sense? I don't know if that answers the question or not, but... Yes, she says yes. We have another question from Craig up here. where he's talking about he's wondering how much the transitional environments or what perhaps the weird is I'm sorry? like how much is these how much of how much is the focus of the environments

he calls it the transitional environments make up what the weird is or make up what the yeah what we can say about the weird. You're saying there's a direct correlation between the actual environments in the books and some kind of parallel to weird fiction? I don't know if that really... Go ahead. Sorry. I don't know if that really corresponds. I do feel like the weird exists in this transitional space. it's also no it's not surprising to me that I exist in that transitional

space too for the most part which is to say up until these books I've basically had to try to be both a mimic and camouflage myself to appear to be one thing to a mainstream literary audience and appear to be another to a genre audience because I've always had work that's too weird for core genre and work that's too weird for core mainstream, but if I don't get some portion of those readers, then I don't do well in terms of reaching an audience, and that's a marketing question and probably beyond what you want to talk about here, but it also becomes a question of how you tell your story, if that makes any sense. so it's almost about

the transition in terms of how you try to tell the story that's between the pages so the reason why I think this question is maybe a little bit important is because when Ben did when we had our first session and Ben can probably join in after I kind of contextualize but he was talking about the new weird in the sense of one of the major defining qualities is that it produces this, you know, Eleanor quoted Mayfield today talking about this sort of uncanny affect, but also Ben specifically framed it inside of climates and atmospheres.

So I like this, I like the idea that maybe the environment, like the focus on the environment, the crypto, like cyber kind of characters, the archetypal characters in that sense, and you sort of blur the boundaries. and so the environment has very... I see it as a huge importance in the way they've been, I guess, framed in the weird, or a way that the new weird functions, not what the new weird is. Right. I'm not really sure how to answer that. I can just answer it from a fiction writer's point of view, which is that I always wanted the environment, the supposed backdrop, to be doing something.

just like you would have supporting actors in the background of a scene who are not really the focus of the scene, they're still acting, if that makes any sense. And so I didn't want there to be any descriptions, really, that were just backdrop. There's always something going on. The world is continuing on behind the characters. I'm a big believer in two things. One, that character is setting. So, for example, in Authority, the environment's described much differently because Control wouldn't know a sandpiper from a kingfisher if it bit him on the ass. But also this idea that the objects in your environment are actually alive, that they have some sort of meaning to the characters, to different characters.

And so I actually have a whole lecture about this, a PowerPoint with notes that I can actually go ahead and email if you want, based on the Ambergris books. But this idea that objects, background of scenes are alive, and that one way that the uncanny works is how you describe these kinds, the stuff that's in the backdrop. that there's actually a lot of work being done in what would be considered not really part of the focus of the scene. I mentioned this briefly in an interview I did with Peter Mendelson on Boing Boing, so I hope I'm not repeating too much, but there's also a certain amount of, and again, this is veering from your question, but it's the only way I have to answer it.

there's a certain amount of stillness and repetition that you need in the background in order for uncanny effects to work. Like, for example, the most simple version of it would be that in authority, the hand on the wall doesn't work if you haven't gone through that door uncannily twice before. And if you haven't gone through that door uncannily twice before, in a way where the door was paid attention to, It had some significance, but also just simply a stillness, which is to say the wrong kinds of description. One thing I see in a lot of, especially beginning writers who write weird fiction is they fill their scenes too much with the flailings of their characters.

And so they have a lot of unnatural or unnecessary mannerisms, all kinds of things that in effect are dead weight and work against the uncanny effect. Now that's just stage business, but there's a lot of things in the craft that imbue the work with the sense of the numinous. And it's hard to describe exactly how that works, but as somebody who believes in charged images, one reason I can't get into Lovecraft is his images to me are dead. They have nothing beyond the surface. And so they don't, to me, project any light, if that makes any sense. They don't have any additional subtext.

They just are whatever they are. They're inert. And to me, the uncanny and the weird is through that sense of a charged image, an image that has some kind of additional dimensionality to it. And that's why also I find the weird in a lot of fiction that is notionally not weird fiction. I just read a book called The Kills by Richard House, and not a single supernatural thing occurs in it. but to me, it is most definitely weird fiction. The Corpse Exhibit by Hassan Blasim. Now, some things occur in some of the stories that are weird or uncanny, but there's a lot of stories where they don't, but they still feel like weird fiction to me. So I think sometimes it may just be because we're moving closer and closer

to kind of an absurdist, weird science fictional future where realistic fiction has the same kind of uncanny effects in it, but they're just not classified as like supernatural. I mean, I think that was you saying you were kind of going away from my question, but that was a great response to my question. Okay. Thank you. Sure. We have two now that just came up. One's a comment by Tripp. Okay. I saw the gaming one come up briefly. Gaming. Video game? Yeah. That's at the bottom? Yeah, it was something about using video games to create these kinds of effects, I guess.

I can't see it now. I haven't really thought about that. Go ahead. Is there a question now? I was going to say, if you want to, do you see the, if you look to, if you grab the chat box on the left, there's an icon, you can pull up all the chats that are coming up. It won't just be like a boat. Okay. See, to me, it was just a bunch of ghosts. No, it's okay. Right on the screen, transitionally. Yeah. We take screenshots really quickly. Here we go. Okay, so, yeah, keen on the domain of contemporary video games. I don't know enough about video games

I used to play video games and then when I began writing quite a bit I had to give them up because I was so obsessional about them I would say that I did play the game Myst and I thought there was quite a bit of potential for doing really neat and weird effects there's actually an annotation going up tomorrow on Genius.com of an acceptance chapter where we're doing something a little bit perhaps what you're what you're talking about those more hypertext thing there's actually be a shadow page by Tom Tom Abba it's the same the same page acceptance text but if you click on one link this is an annotation in my annotations it leads you to his page which looks exactly the same but all the annotations are different

the annotations for his page are all messages from people trapped in the southern reach after the end of Authority, as opposed to mine, which are all kind of found objects and weird repurposing. Like, I decided that Mike Chaney from the science director from Authority had been working on kind of a fan fiction about control, trying to understand control by writing a short story about him, and so there are bits of that in there. But I do think video games have a lot of potential. I think that to fully realize that potential, you probably have to take out the functionality, which is to say you'd have to be wanting to create the thing just to make it into a kind of an artifact and not something where you're trying to play a game, if that makes any sense,

or playing a game is just a ruse that winds up not leading anywhere. I think that The Kills by Richard House is another good example of that. It's got the mimicry of being an espionage novel, but it's doing something else entirely. It's kind of a cuckoo's egg. And I think that across video games or novels or anything else, the things that are really interesting to me are the ones that infiltrate pop culture by seeming to be one thing, but then turning out to be something else. And that'll frustrate some readers, but it'll also lead to repurposing and renovations that I think are quite interesting, and sometimes more interesting than full-out formal experimentation, just because the audience for formal experimentation can be quite small.

I guess his follow-up question was, would you enjoy the notion of Southern Reach trilogy being adapted as a video game? Right. The problem with that is that Paramount owns the rights, and I probably wouldn't have anything to do with it, so I have no idea what they would do with it. My sense in general is that they're going to strip out some of the maybe Cronenberg-esque dream logic of these books to begin with, so I don't know what that would look like. So I'd probably have to do it with the properties personally that I control, which would be the Ambergris stuff. In fact, there's some stuff there in terms of video games and graphic novels that I'll probably be exploring in the next couple of years. So with the Southern Reach, with Paramount, how much sort of relation will you have with the nation?

You don't have any control? I don't have any control. The director, Alex Garland, and I've only had a couple conversations with him, and I can't really talk about it that much. It's been quite fascinating because I think he's got a much more rationalist view of the universe than I do. And I think that'll definitely play a role in the movies, being somewhat different. That's pretty much all I can say. That would be a different interpretation of your work, so it's interesting to see how... Well, I'm sorry because I think it might actually take out the underlying philosophy of it.

that. Okay. Although they've been doing some, they've been, I mean, it seems like the storyline and the framing and some of those have been brought up. I agree with you that I think most of contemporary culture and dealing with these sort of environmental issues have been dealing with exit strategies, like just exiting, and we're just going to these sorts of things. So I'm interested in how they will take your work. Does anybody else have any questions to post on the chats?

We're almost at an hour, so I don't want to keep you for too long, Joe. I don't want to take up too much of your time either. If anyone has a last question, I'm happy to take it. Nope. Okay. Two people. Oh, okay. No, you go first. While reading Annihilation, I detected some kind of connections to psychedelic experience. I was wondering, is that wholly imagined on my part? When I was doing the Ambergris novels, I was asked by a Swedish artist who'd been in and out of mental institutions,

what mental institutions I'd been in. And I told him none, and he was quite pissed off. And the same thing goes for the mushrooms. I get asked all the time if I've done psychedelic drugs or had drugs at all. And I do a lot of study of very kind of out there biology and then use that in the books. And I can't actually write on any kind of anything. Sometimes I can write on alcohol if I really need to, but anything that I would take. And I'm actually kind of scared of taking psychedelics just because I just don't want anything rewired. and I might be naive about what they do to you, but I just don't want anything in my brain rewired.

So I've had these weird experiences where I've used mushrooms as packing material for my books and had people freak out thinking that I was sending them psychedelics because I didn't know actually what psychedelics were like. In fact, Linda Moorcock, the wife of Michael Moorcock, called me up to say, have you sent me psychedelics or are these cooking mushrooms? Because I really need cooking mushrooms for dinner. But I don't want to fry them up if they're psychedelics. And so, yeah, so I get that question a lot, but I haven't actually... I mean, I think I've tried marijuana twice in my life, and that's about it. I need clarity to write for the most part. Interesting question, though.

And there was a second question? Yeah, I'm going to follow it up with something similar, but in a more kind of maybe epistemic sense. So obviously you are kind of leaning towards, even with the notion of weird fiction, towards an unknowing. So it always rests on this, as opposed to horror, having this sort of legend rooting it or whatever, this notion of the unknowing. and at the risk of being a caricature of myself, I'm going to take it back to negative theology. Are you aware of negative theology at all? Because, I mean, so I'm going to quote, like, your interview that was one of the readings, The Uncanny Power of Weird Fiction, from October 2014.

So towards the end of it, you say, we like to think that we understand our universe came away from these readings with a sense of fiction in which to find the distance and the universality to grapple with the negation of that idea so that's essentially negative theology or apophatic mysticism the idea that we know nothing about our world and then you go on to say at the end of that interview the impulse is tempered by the recognition that we can never know all of it or even most of it, i.e. nothing, and that this seeming lacking is not a failing but a strength. But no, I think that's really interesting, that this seeming lacking is not a failing but a strength,

because, I mean, with, say, you know, sort of leading negative theological figures or even like those who are crossing kind of conversations with scientists or even if you want to go very strictly epistemically on it with evolutionary bio-semi-auticians, that this is it, that without unknowing, reality itself would shut down, or that the cosmos has no foundation save that of ignorance, and this is the first elementary lesson of the void. Does that make sense to you? I'm just wondering. It does. It does make sense to me. It actually, that and a few other things that have been said that made me quite interested to follow up in a more formal way

on things that I think I've kind of probably touched on informally and come to instinctually without any kind of like, I don't know what you would call formal training, because I certainly read a lot, but not the kind of formal training that you clearly have in terms of having studied this kind of thing. It does. I don't even mean, I certainly don't mean reveling in ignorance either. I just, there's a confluence of two things. One, you know, I had a lot of workplace experience before this where it became clear if you kind of like withdrew yourself a little bit from what you were looking at, that the world seemed to operate on inefficiency and not knowing and a seeming to know that was a false kind of knowledge or knowing.

And so that in confluence with being very much rejecting kind of formal religion but still kind of seeking out a kind of spirituality, which I find very much in hiking. And I mean, like when the biologist has that moment of kind of ecstasy when she's walking towards the lighthouse. That's very much how I feel when I've been hiking for a certain amount of time and I'm out in the middle of nowhere, and you still have this sense of there being something beyond you, even though you don't want to categorize it in any way. And it may be a false sense there too, but there is a comfort in an enormity that you can't grasp all of.

I don't know how to describe it exactly, but I don't find it to be defeating or anything like that. I find it actually very, very hopeful. The idea of eventually being to know everything is kind of horrifying to me. I don't know. Maybe because as a writer or a fiction writer, that's kind of horrifying anyway because that's not really how good fiction works. But I don't know. I think you have a better handle on that than I do. No, no, I actually come from a similar background. It kind of worked a lot. But the fascinating thing about negative theology or apophatic mysticism is that it is about this not knowing,

and you sort of find your way, or even an instinctual. So it's a very black metal thing as well, which an awful lot of things that you've said tonight, I've just been, do you listen to black metal? You look like you do. No, I don't listen to it. I mean, I don't mind that. I don't mind that. But yeah, it's that instinctual instinctiation, you know, where it sort of comes and you're like, where did that come from? I don't know. But yeah, it's good. But formally, it's a good, I find it's a good sort of construct formally, you know, myself personally, to sort of follow these questions, you know, up with or structure, you know, these thoughts. No, it came out of pushing away of something else, because when I was growing up in the

Fiji Islands, there were always stories about British missionaries and everything, and so I grew up with a very negative view of Christianity, which is kind of what pushed me towards not kind of being invested in any particular organized religion, which then pushed me towards thinking about these things from outside of that perspective. So for what that's worth. But I also, I think one of the things I would just say in closing is that in this series, it was very important to me that my personal biases not always be there in the text in the way that you would expect. If my personal bias was in there, then Saul as a religious man would have been portrayed

in a more cynical way. but it's very important that the characters have a life beyond your own sometimes narrow views of things. And so sometimes it's the people you least expect, people who are not actually even nice people who say the things that I might actually believe in, just because I think there's a kind of irrationality in human beings and an inconsistency that plays out that way a lot of the time, that the people that actually know things are sometimes not the people we'd want to hang out with either. And now I'm definitely babbling. Is that it? Have I babbled enough? I think we have one more question

where two people are talking, are both asking for you to say a little bit more. They're very excited about this, what you talked about hypertext, this hypertext that you're doing, and they want to know more. Yeah, it's at Genius.com. It's going to debut tomorrow. And like I said, Tom Abba, who is another guy, his last name is ABBA. He lives in the UK, and he does a lot of really fascinating intertextual things, or intra-textual, I guess you would say, where he combines online things with physical books with actual street performances and crowd actions to create the entirety of the narrative. And he's the one who's done the shadow text for this annotation,

which is taking the beginning of acceptance and annotating it, the whole reworking of the scene where the director is dying beneath the lighthouse. And so he has those shadow annotations, and then I've taken bits of Whitby's personal diary, which is, you know, it's very easy to come up with bits of Whitby's personal diary when you don't have to put it into a novel and actually contextualize it. You can just do it as a bit of found text, a pop-up annotation in this context. And then I actually got quite a bit of charge out of imagining Mike Chaney down in the science department of the Southern Reach creating this kind of fan fiction about control as a way of trying to understand his own situation.

It actually gave me a beat on Chaney, who, quite frankly, I found fascinating, but because I couldn't find anything else for him to do, I didn't focus on him as much in these books. And one thing that's kind of disconcerting to me, because I don't believe in sequels or prequels or anything like that, is that ever since I finished these books, these characters have been giving me wormholes into other narratives. The Seance and Science Brigade, for example. I'm working on a novella right now that's set two days before the creation of Area X involving them that I hadn't planned on doing. But, you know, so there may be a few more narrative things. I'm hoping that they'll be expressed mostly through things like this annotated chapter,

because I don't really like the idea of repeating myself, and I begin to feel like even if I explore that stuff, it's going to be some kind of repetition. but one problem when you condense the writing cycle the way I did for these books and then the publication cycle is that you have no real time to put anything in perspective and I think that when that happens sometimes you begin to just create other stories in your head just because you're trying to make sense of everything but anyway, that's the hypertext thing and it'll go live tomorrow is there anything else or is that it? I think that's it. Thank you for spending time with us. And please, we'll check out this Genius.com thing tomorrow.

And if you have any, like, you said you had those slides. I would be interested if you could share those for... Yeah, it's funny because it's something that would work well for this group, but I can't really... It's actually very, very kind of advanced creative writing stuff that I can't usually do for a normal workshop, but it works better on the level of theory, and it's not something I can easily articulate, but I think it does pertain to everything we're talking about here. So it might be a better answer than the ones I actually gave. So I'll make sure that I send that to you in a Dropbox, and then you guys can all take a look at it if you want, just so long as you don't put it up on the Internet or something. So I hope that's okay. No, we can just share it. We have a classroom page. I can share it.

Okay. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity, and thank you for some of the great questions. And also, there's a lot of stuff that I should have been taking notes on because I kind of want to follow up on it from what you guys were saying. Okay, okay. All right, thanks. Thanks a lot. All right. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jeff. all right take care about but all ok okay as very very good very good guest very happy to have them I'll I guess we have

we have like 25 I've its where we can continue to discuss so we can I mean, we had a pretty long discussion with him. I don't know if anybody's going to have anything further to say. But maybe we want to go back into ethics. I don't know. Yeah, did it clear anything up? Opening up, I guess, for suggestions. I'm sorry? I'm just wondering, did it clear anything up for you in terms of ethics, like non-human ethics? Did it clear anything up for anyone? I thought what I I definitely thought what he was saying at the first part about that very much the I'm the the interconnection

and something deployed out of context and non-human ethics requiring a sense that we can't have was very much very much answering the question that I was unable to phrase properly I which was that which was the initial question about the negation of ethics and that, like, at a certain point, and I think also is very much connected to the, to kind of the way that, I guess, I think it's the biologist. I think it might be right after the quote that you posted, what had manifested. it's on page 190 of the book think of it as a thorn perhaps

a long thick thorn so large it is buried deep into the side of the world that kind of like this thing happened and because we can't we can experience its effects but we can't necessarily know why or how it happened ever I thought that that was very much related to that and very interesting so I thought it cleared up some stuff for me but so maybe I can ask better questions now no no but it's not as in like effect has no story I'm just like you're reminding me now Daniel Kulichella Barbara's stunts which is semi-negative theological but it you just said something there that so it's effects so we're sort of suffering the effects but then effect can have no story which brings it right back to the new weird

which is there is no story at the bottom of it. Like, it's this groundlessness, which Ben talked about, obviously. Is that what you're saying, like, you know, so the suffering of the effects has no story, which is kind of what Jeff was saying as well. There's no, you know, like the GPS thing being lost in the park. You remember? Am I right? I know what you're saying. I'm not familiar with the reference, but... To Dan or to Jeff? sit down well okay well just take it as a sort of sentence you know so effect has no story and think about what Jeff just said in terms of you know that the idea of being him like with his friends and going yeah well you get lost in the park

and you don't have GPS but then they sort of resort back to bears and wolves and these sort of mythological stories you know it does always resort to this kind of legend which always brings it back to horror but what is supposed to distinguish the new weird as the genre which brings back to Ben Woodard's concerns at the very beginning is that well what does distinguish it as a genre like why is it not a rehashing of the old well if it's not going to be a rehashing of the old it can't be this you know pedagogical cry or whatever back to these myth this myth or this idea of legend you know that there's something there to rescue at the end of it. I don't know. Or if it's going to go back to the weird, it still has to be this mix of genres where there is no,

it's still groundless or something. I don't know. Somebody else jumped in. But that's kind of what I gather. And I think that's kind of what Jeff was saying in relation to his experience of it when he was talking about being in the park or being lost in the woods or something. He was pissed off at the fact that his friends would keep resorting to, if it wasn't GPS, it would be you know myths or whatever you know that you can't just be lost and lost well and I think that yeah I think that what you're saying that if this if this book had a story in the sense that I think you're using story as as as in terms of in terms of legend and structure right I'm that then the point of this might have been to find out what caused area

X and at the end there would have been a big reveal and we would have all known and gone aha but that's kind of like beside the point it seems and that was kind of what you were taught what maybe what he was talking about in terms of the Red Riding Hood and the frustration of attempting to put of suffering the attempts to put to impose those structures on what he was saying instead maybe yeah absolutely so where does that leave us in terms of the non-human ethics I'm so confused I'm sorry what did you say right at the end that you're so

confused I'm so confused I mean is there such a thing can there be such a thing I mean, so the difference between myself and Elinor is I'm like taking this on a deeply sort of personal, in my living room sort of level, and she's still talking about it in the story, whereas I'm like, how do you, not that, that is not in any way a disrespect to you at all, Elinor. No, I'm absolutely deeply enthralled by your thesis. I'm just like, I noticed the way you kind of brought it back to the characters in the story there, because I was all like, no, but it's like Jeff in the park with his friends. So that's all that I mean by that. So I'm just wondering, say, if we take it out of the story now

and we talk about is there such a thing as a non-human ethics or a non-anthropocentric ethics, which Elner introduced at the beginning through the blah, bitch. So let's take it back to that. I mean I think also another difference is that oh sorry I can I don't really is that I am I don't I mean maybe this isn't a difference maybe you're really excited about it too but I feel I feel like this is something the the idea of being released from genre constraints either in terms of a pre-existing ethical system,

which we have to then force all of our interactions with the other and behaviors into, but also just genre constraints in terms of story. I find that really... I don't... God, I can't remember the word, but I'm very optimistic about that. not in a way that I think like, oh, we're all going to survive, or oh, maybe we'll save the earth, or whatever. Not in that sense, but in the sense that the idea that the story does not necessarily, is not pointed towards anything specifically, and does not have to be,

and it doesn't even have to be a story is, I don't know, I feel that there's a lot more possibility there than there is in the in a pre-existing system. So I don't, I mean that's like really that's so cliched but I don't know, I'm not really expressing this well I don't think. Well, returning to last week's conversation and Reza's recent work, I'm sure Ben can chime in. These notions of inhuman ethics maybe being, you know, some kind of abduction, some kind

such an epidemic infiltration that all it calls for is like revision, something that's something unwillable, something outside of ourselves, revision, reorientation, and navigation. These aren't even concepts we can rely on, but they're the concepts we need to build or that naturally unfold ideally ethically. And in a sense, I feel like that might be close to an anthropocentric ethics just because it can't be predicted or related. But, you know, it gets complicated

when we start talking about it. Yeah, Augustine's question about time. anything then yeah I don't know I mean generally I avoid the ethical question by just saying you know by taking a you know voluntary human extinction line or something like that that seems the most ethical which I'm less sure about now but I mean it is kind of an interesting question in terms about in terms of infection and being... I mean, it connects to what Jeff was saying about we're already part of nature. We're not easily divided from it.

And that's something that my own work is very much interested in, because even when you read... Even when people make kind of easy, throwaway comments about naturalism, for instance, whether it's in philosophy, whether it's in literature, it's like, oh, well, you know, they kind of say, oh, naturalism sort of means that, you know, we actually can't make ethical questions and everything is determined in this particular way, but generally it's confined to biological, to biology, and it sort of kicks out everything else. And then even, it then assumes that once you get to the, you know, the normative, or when you get to the point in which humans are thinking, that that very process itself is not,

that that process itself is separate from nature. So it's like the space of ideas has to be separate from nature in order to say, you know, we're separate from nature. So it's like the point where the division comes from already assumes a division. So it's kind of a weird... It becomes a really weird problem and hard thing to deal with if you never get out of nature or never out of the story or however you want to put it. everything we think about is even a natural product but it behaves very differently than you know, biology does so what does that mean for these kind of models of infection, these models that you know, nature infected us with brains

and therefore you know we have to deal with the fact that we can destroy certain kinds of nature really easily and reproduce it fictionally at the same time. I think I'm just rambling now. No, it's all good. My girlfriend took me to this Anthropocene talk last night. I find it all kind of funny, but it is interesting, this fact that we are now a geological force as human beings, like ourselves. You know, that the rocks are changing, all the rest. And so it's like hard to talk about anti-anthropocentric ethics when, I don't know, we need them the

most. Yeah, at least we're thinking about it, but it's like, what to do, you know? I mean, I guess that also depends on whether on, I mean, could you say a little bit more about this Anthropocene talk? Because it really, like what you were saying, I think it often depends on how you're seeing the Anthropocene as whether this, like, I don't know, it's been, it's been, it's suffered some critiques as kind of this, you know, we're so powerful, we can affect the Earth itself. sort of theory but then you know a lot of people aren't writing about it like that so if you could say could you say something about this talk yeah sure I

actually thought it was great it was a geologist that that gave it and you know it's a topic a lot of people are talking about that I think is often confused I I was sad to hear Donna Haraway's recent talk staging it. But it was amazing because he's like a hardcore geologist, and he made a science fiction, like literally he invented this like subcommittee related so closely to our course, to give a presentation on one, the first person to coin the term deep time, I think was Scottish, I don't know, here in Edinburgh, so they were all proud of that.

But then he expanded it into a visual presentation. He actually made a cool video about some kind of mechanic assemblage mirroring the human forest becoming a geological one. Like actually we were making an impact on deep time of course, but as we all know the industrialization at large we see is making a bigger one and it was interesting. It was pretty good. But it was cool that he made it like a fiction and people asked questions and he was like I'd have to ask the committee about that. You

You know, it was great. It was really cool. But, I mean, that's all I remember. That crazy smooth ride. All right. Anybody have... We have some last-minute things going on on the sidebar. trying to catch up with these while following the conversation sorry but I believe you are still one just in the same person from modern ethics which

begins by looking for universal standard for persons is separate from teleological and contextual questions I guess and in that and that and what What Tristan is saying here on the chat box at the end in response is... Yeah, I think... I'm trying to think, because in the intro to the new weird that Jeff and Ann do, the only time they really bring up universal conceptualization is when they're talking about that they remain... quoting them is, they remain universal because they entertain while also expressing our own dissatisfaction with and uncertainty about

reality. And in context wherein the monster's estrangeness stands first for itself, has a visceral physicality that convinces us, at least while reading, of the existence of the weird. I believe this is from the intro, maybe it's from a different quote of an interview. you. And we're talking here also about, in the same way that new weird stories are non-stories, the non-anthropocentric ethics is a non-ethics. This is a question, which I think is an interesting analogy and an interesting relation. And we brought up in the first session, Lundell has sort of a prescription of what he calls an anethics

and he does a lot of work in anethics and ambiguity I think also that would be very interesting inside of this debate I should post in the classroom for this question. But maybe this is a good way to pose a historic-centric ethics, just a nonethics or an anethics Again, this is a question we've been bringing up at each session, which I think is good. Could I just direct people to Nicola's unknowing animals and speculations? Can you please put that in the sidebar? I can't. The fan won't give out to me for typing. I need to read more Nicola.

Can you send me links? So if somebody else just types it for me, it's just Nicola Machiandara, Unknowing Animals, and it's in the Speculations Journal. Oh, yeah. Okay. But that is like a, that sort of, it addresses the non-human, non-anthropocentric ethics. Cool. Which kind of, you know, would bring it back to Ligotti or, you know, just a notion of again you know risk in a cliche of myself by saying this but uh yeah we just bring it back to a not knowing and that would be yeah this is a great line I think this is a good point to sort of you made a brilliant trans you know thank you Ben there's the link like

a great point into the next session because we will have him as our guest. So if you wouldn't mind using the classroom to sort of, since you've been quoting him a lot and bringing him up a lot in context of the sessions. Sorry, my weeks have just been so packed. What do I need to do to get into the classroom? I haven't actually accessed it yet. If you use the NewsCenter account, you can do it two ways. You can log into the website, and then there will be a link that says Google Classroom, or you can just log into any Google app with that password, and go to classroom.google.com,

and I'll have to resend you the course code, so you just have to join the class and put in the code, and it'll enter you in. Yeah, I'll bombard everyone with the... I can... I promise. Because, yes, the cards, yes. Just the... I don't know where he went, but yeah, I want to read more Nicola. I've only read, like, three essays, so tell me what's good. What have you read? God. I read one piece in the Black Metal Symposium.

I read one piece in the Leper Creativity Symposium. Yeah. I can't remember what else I read. It was a Black Metal Symposium. He seems impassioned. I want to read more. Yeah, no, he is a big time. Cool. Well, you can be in Google Classroom tomorrow. I'll post it there. Cool. I should add also there's the public seminar he did on commentary which is very good and he's talking a lot about Reza's work and that. Have you watched that or listened to it? Okay. Because that's also pretty good. She might be adding it as well. I think she froze. Which one are you talking about, Tony?

The public seminar that... I think you have the a the dark night to the universe the one on commentary because I it's strictly on commentary or on the practice of commentary which I think is well it has had its commentary and per academia and three fiction cool no no no I don't know the one you don't let put I know it I'm sure but you know the name? I'll post it. I have to go back. Yeah, and that, and we'll be discussing True Detective. We can pick any episode. If you guys have a specific scene or episode

that you want to pick, use the classroom to post it so we can all go back and find it. We have a lot of the people in this party right here that contributed to the True Detection series of the collection. So that's the book that we'll mainly be going off of, so you should read those, especially the people that are here in the room, because it's nice to have them, as well as Nicola's submission to that. And if you have the time, you can pick up and read and read Thomas Ligotti's Space Human...

The Human Conspiracy... Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Thank you. Thank you. Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which is his non-fiction work, which has a lot of relevance with the characters in True Detective. And, yeah, I think that's all. If anybody else has anything they want to sort of frame for the next class or close from this class. I'll leave it open for the room. Ben, can I just ask you to do something? Okay. Can you just pull up Nicola's, you know the Glass and Heavy Metal's original song, Reconstruction, 9.2? Let's see if you can get that.

With the Glass and Black Sabbath Black Sabbath. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, just because it's a really good introduction to his thought. That's like, that's him, really, at his, where anyone discovered him or anything. It's him doing his thing and his post-it and sidebar. Right. And that's also, that's one that you brought up the first session, right? Yeah, totally wired. That's the wired text. That's where he, like, yeah. And, you know, we can discuss that maybe then. and I'll have notes ready, but that's where he did it. It was totally weird, as in Wired, as in the uncanny. That's where he just did his thing, and then afterwards he reflected on that paper

and brought it to Salzburg, and then Black Metal Theory happened. But I mean, in essence, everything happened after that paper. But he just did that by himself, kind of like a DJ in his bedroom or whatever. the same black metal hearing on his own in his bedroom before anyone knew it existed because of some maths class he had or whatever It's good and it's a really beautiful naive piece of writing and I was actually thinking about that again brought back to Hildegard of Bingham's book that I was talking about with Amy that day about xenopoieses and glossopoieses

and stuff like that. But in this book she has this notion of greening, which is again kind of what the new weird is related to. In order for things to be uncanny they have to be greened, so you have to make them new in a situation where they're already kind of old, if you know what I mean. So it's like, oh, that happened, but it happened again or it was supposed to happen, but you know what I mean, for something to be uncanny it has to be kind of greened in some way. So it brings it back to this idea of greening of black in black metal that you get in black metal theory, and in Nod Scott and Ben's essays and stuff. But this idea of greening something that's already there, naïving something that's already there,

so therefore making it weird. Anyway, just to think. That makes me want to just ask, I don't know, we did have a post on the classroom where we were talking about the new weird and black metal and the hum and noise and these things. So just wondering if you want to sort of, if there, did anybody have any suggestions for the post that they brought to us?

Or do you want to say anything about your own sort of thinking on this? Yeah, I haven't seen the post because I haven't seen the classroom yet, unfortunately. Oh, yeah, you're sorry. Sorry, I'm just a bit. Okay, well then, have a. Well, yeah, if somebody else wants to say something, and then I can say, I mean, at the moment, what I'm looking at is, you know, I'm writing a book with Nicola, and I've just touched base with this French black metal artist who's very, very elusive, very hard to get in touch with. He's very hardcore, you know, he just doesn't, you know, he's split from the black metal scene when it, immediately when it became, when it came to be seen as something in any way overground. So he split from the black metal scene very, very early on, I think probably in 2000, what are we now, 2014, so 17 years ago.

So the minute it started getting any sort of stench of overground or publicity, he split from it. And he invented his own language called gloat. His name is Vorb, and he is the person who established the Black Legions in France. and he just has this very, very sort of rigid stance on it, you know, and it's very, very, you know, it's very, the French have never been kind of shy about intellectualism in black metal, so it is very upfrontly sort of mystical and, you know, would pertain to kind of Nicola's thought and stuff like that, but it also pertains to New Weird, I mean, I was taking a bunch of notes, everything that I was sort of taking annotations about this week around the readings for the class, I was like, oh my god, this is so black metal.

You know, that idea of making the familiar strange, I mean, that's essentially what he was doing by inventing a language. Michael Bacton talks about this as well. You know, I mean, you're making, but this is a fundamental driving force behind medieval mystical theologies, to make the familiar strange. So, you know, if you just look at that as a sort of you know, a basic thing of weirdness or the new weird to make the familiar strange. You know, you can see the kind of trip that I'm on in relation to kind of black metal, Nicola's talk, that kind of thing. And, you know, people like, who very consciously do it in black metal as well, in a new weird kind of way, you know, like Ford from Les Légions Noirs,

the Black Legions in France, you know, where he invented a language just to de-familiarize the everyday or whatever, you know, so but yeah, I'll post on it during the week because that's what I'm writing about currently I have no problem doing that I can get my way into the classroom so yeah and also, yeah, if you read the classroom there is like a post of Ms. Doyle and Ms. Doyle's work that they're working on together, the collaborative effort where they're talking about noise and the hum and from their perspective I mean so the hum is very I don't remember the actual percentage that you were saying but it's a very low amount of people actually perceive

this phenomenon so it's actually making the strange very familiar and the unobtainable, the thing that we don't many of us basically do not experience. So, am I taking you too far out of context when I'm talking about your story that you put open? No, not at all. I basically lectured them in black metal theory. They're my students, ex-students. So, we're always on a level, I think. Alright, so you guys are, yeah. But I have still, I've sort of surveyed the basics of what they're working on

but yeah we can touch base in the classroom yeah let's do that because I think we're at the two and a half hour limit I think any other conversation that we have let's move it to the classroom if you do not know how to get to the classroom feel free to contact me you know how to get a hold of me all of you personally thank you for being here and we'll talk next week throughout the week in classroom. So thank you. Ben, would you like to say any last words? Or no? No, I don't think so. I think you got it. Okay. Thank you.