There’s something about the weird: waarom we monsters, aliens, geesten, zombies en cyborgs nodig hebben om door onze werkelijkheid te navigeren

Abstract

Weird times call for weird narratives. The language of reason and facts or technological fixes do not adequately help people make sense of a disorienting present and unpredictable future, under the looming specter of environmental catastrophe. In the search for alternative responses to this condition, in this article (in Dutch) I turn to the ways in which speculative fiction, and weird fiction particularly, can help us navigate our ‘postnormal’ realities in the 21st century. On the occasion of the publication of Kate Marshall’s study Novels by Aliens (2023), I discuss Marshall’s book and reflect on the ways in which monsters, nonhuman scales and perspectives, and ‘weirded’ variants of realism can play, in Marshall’s words, a key role “in the conceptual work of the present.”