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John MacNeill Miller @snarlsdickens.bsky.social · 22h

There are a few Zachary Gillan essays about weird fiction vibes, it’s true

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My little contribution to ongoing debates over weird fiction is now up at @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social! In it I try to explain why we fight about what counts as weird fiction, giving some deeper historical context for disputes over the term and a sense of what the stakes of those debates might be.

pghrev.com

The Dilemma of Defining Weird Fiction - Pittsburgh Review of Books

“Weird” was only intended as a placeholder. When Weird Tales magazine debuted in 1923, the adjective in the title meant the same thing it means in

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Zachary Gillan @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 21h

Yeah - I thought it was the heart/point of the show, even, but it seems to be more like set dressing for the actual story they want to tell. C’est la vie

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Zachary Gillan @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 21h

I crashed out of watching Lost pretty early in the final season and still haven’t finished it; enjoying this thread is probably the closest I’ll ever get. I remember like 30% of these characters

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In retrospect I think you’re right, and it was my misunderstanding of what the writers were trying to do that really primed me for disappointment

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Thanks for checking! We are, for reasons of thematic unity, just doing visual for this call

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Anyway, that was today's dispatch from the paranoid site of productive ambiguity.

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What she specifically said in my presence was that something "smells of the translator" and the usage of an olfactory metaphor is quite a choice—it's usually a tool of class paranoia. It's par for the course she'd consider genre to be something "lowly" to transcend. People really think like this!

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Damion Searls somewhere is rolling his eyes at me and going, "LET IT GO, ANTON" but I have a point to make! Genre and translation are both deserving of derision to people like Lydia Millet (which was where I took this discourse), which is an interesting touchpoint between these two literatures.

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This Lydia Millet blurb is sending me: “a clear triumph for VanderMeer, who after numerous works of genre fiction has suddenly transcended genre with a compelling, elegant and existential story of far broader appeal.” She doesn't think much of translated literature either!

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There are a few Zachary Gillan essays about weird fiction vibes, it’s true

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Mike Fox @polyscribe70.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Well-deserved, Seán, chin up!

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Fantastic collection!

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it's been great in recent years to see new venues like Ancillary Review of Books, Typebar &c. appearing to uphold this whole sphere of discourse (there have been periods where at least to me it felt like it was Strange Horizons carrying the torch on their own)

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I mean, I've personally been lucky on this front (a lot of very thoughtful critical attention!) but that was a roll of the dice that mostly doesn't work out for new writers

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that kind of discovery requires a different world of in-depth reviews and critical essays in a sphere of independent magazines and bloggers &c. in the absence of a robust bookish internet of this kind, what you get is books that vanish into the dark and can at best hope to be "rediscovered" some day

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