The Weird Turn: Spillovers of Weird Fiction into Ecology and Economy

In this article, we address the widespread sense that the twenty-first century is marked by a growing weirdness, and we argue that the question of the weird warrants sustained enquiry – not only as a diagnostic of our present but also as a resource for imagining liveable, desirable futures. We thus propose that we are witnessing a weird turn across multiple domains, which we approach as a “spillover” of the weird from literature, where it has been associated with a fictional genre, into the arts, the sciences and public culture, as well as into the fields of economy and ecology, which we take as our focus. The weird turn mobilises practices, aesthetics and representational modes from the genre of weird fiction, and speculative fiction more broadly, to address contemporary disorientating experiences of intersecting crises that are often framed as a ‘new normal.’ The weird in this context, we argue, articulates political desires and intervenes into the limitations of realist, rationalist, and positivist attempts to understand the present and to envision desirable futures. Although we highlight the transformative potentiality of the weird turn, we do not treat it as a priori emancipatory: we also scrutinize the weird’s discontents, that is, its ethically controversial dimensions, arising from the concept’s nebulousness, its susceptibility to marketisation, and its openness to appropriation by antagonistic political forces, including authoritarian ideologies and conspiratorial thinking.