It’s a term that isn’t always easy to define which is one reason I like it. Fantasy, horror and science fiction evolved quite naturally as descriptive terms then ended up being co-opted by the imperatives of marketing. If you drew a Venn diagram you’d find the Weird intersecting with familiar genres, and with the wider literary world, but never quite matching any particular area. Weird Tales magazine used to publish anything that suited its title: this might be horror, sf, heroic fantasy (both CL Moore and Robert E Howard could dip into the weird stuff), and even detective fiction in the case of all those “psychic detectives”. Weird for me defines a quotient of the uncanny or the fantastical that lies beyond the usual stereotypes of the genres. It’s often present in places where there’s no overt generic reference at all: David Lynch’s Eraserhead is a good example.

Important here would be the strength of the form from which the book had been freed ? The input offered by the form would persist like the remains of a vanished civilisation, suddenly offering structure & then denying it, as you moved across the book’s landscape ?

The novel called Pearlant, which was to be published by Gollancz in April 2012, is now entitled Empty Space & will be published by Gollancz in May/June 2012.

Pearlant was the working title. By the time I’d finished, I didn’t like it. No one else liked it either. I thought I’d call it Black Heart. Characters of mine have been drinking Black Heart Rum since “The Gift” in 1987, although they only got going in earnest in 2001. But Gollancz turned out to be publishing another novel called Black Heart in the same month. So I reverted to the working title for Light, which I always liked because space isn’t empty at all.

Empty Space is the third & final book in the Light setting. It suggests that I always had a plan, albeit of the usual mad, half-hidden kind. If you didn’t like Light because of the sex, don’t get Empty Space. If you didn’t like Light because of a perceived “coldness” don’t get Empty Space. If you can’t navigate yourself morally, politically & emotionally without three sentences of direction for every sentence that furthers the action, don’t get Empty Space.

Oh, & we have an outstandingly raw-looking cover design.

& in other news, Empty Space is now subtitled “A Haunting” & scheduled for June.

not so much a part of it as a colonial dependency inhabited by an inferior people. The England of the books, the real England, began somewhere in London and stretched out westward from the city into a rich, dappled landscape of green hills, brambly footpaths, oak trees, and half timbered Tudor villages… (p127, my ellipsis)

The geographical and cultural interpenetrations of that kind of fiction–its landscapes & the “worlds” they encoded–were always more complex than Raban makes them seem. This is because it was a fantasy not just for its consumers but for many of the authors who wrote it; and in the end even for the very children who lived something like it, out in the brambly Shires. Having said that, Raban comes as close as anyone has come to describing my own relationship with the England of those kinds of children’s books. They informed the world of a quiet, alienated boy (whose family, entry-level middle class, went in awe of fake Tudor, let alone the real thing, & knew they could never aspire to it), not destined for grammar school or university but already trapped by the primacy of the written word & the culture of fantasy, or fantasy of culture. By the end of the 1950s I had already bought into writing as an escape from the housing estate, rather than an honest admission of what I saw & experienced. This gave rise to a set of internal contradictions & literary/political paradoxes which took two decades to resolve.