Why we need weird stories for a warming world

For centuries, nature has been the backdrop to human drama: a stage humanity dominates, exploits, or saves. But what if the planet isn’t just a setting, but a character in its own right – sometimes collaborator, sometimes adversary, sometimes utterly indifferent?

This is the kind of question explored in New Weird fiction, a genre where ecosystems mutate, landscapes rebel and the line between human and nonhuman dissolves. It’s a form of storytelling that asks us to look again at the world we think we know and to question where we fit within it.

The roots of the “weird” go back to the late 19th and early 20th century, to writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and M. R. James. Their unsettling tales explored incomprehensible forces and cosmic horror. The “Old Weird”, as it’s now known by researchers, borrows from horror, fantasy and science fiction, refusing to stay within the boundaries of any one genre. These writers were fascinated by the limits of human understanding and by realities beyond reason.

The New Weird, which emerged in the 1980s, revived this fascination but with a contemporary twist. Its unruly mix of styles and ideas reflects the complexity – and confusion – of living through today’s ecological crisis.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

In the same way that the weird unsettles genre boundaries, it also unsettles the human perspective. Where classic stories centre on human mastery over nature, New Weird fiction turns that hierarchy inside out. It imagines worlds where the human is no longer in control, where the nonhuman acts with agency and where our categories – living or dead, organic or artificial, natural or unnatural – start to blur.

This sense of disorientation isn’t just a stylistic choice. It mirrors the reality of the climate crisis, which has exposed the limits of our ability to understand or predict the world. When wildfires create their own weather systems, or melting permafrost releases ancient viruses, we are reminded that nonhumans don’t follow the rules we’ve set for them. The New Weird invites readers to experience that loss of control not as failure, but as a way to think differently about coexistence.

The ecology of the unknown

One of the most striking examples of New Weird fiction is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Its first award-winning volume, Annihilation (2014), describes “Area X” – a mysterious wilderness that appears on the US coast. Despite years of investigation by a government agency, the Southern Reach, no one can explain what it is or how it works. The more they study it, the stranger – and more powerful – it becomes.

In Area X, fungi glow, animals behave with eerie intelligence and the landscape seems to rewrite itself. It’s as if the ecosystem has decided to evolve on its own terms. Humans who enter the area are transformed in bizarre and often disturbing ways, blurring the boundary between observer and environment.

For VanderMeer, this isn’t just horror for horror’s sake. The story suggests that nonhuman worlds are full of mysteries that exceed our comprehension. In a time when humans are destabilising the climate, Area X becomes a metaphor for the planet itself – reacting, mutating and asserting its presence. Like the climate system, it doesn’t offer neat explanations or resolutions. Readers, like the novel’s characters, are left searching for meaning in the face of overwhelming strangeness.

These unsettling narratives don’t comfort us with solutions. Instead, they ask us to sit with uncertainty – to feel the planet’s vitality and volatility. The lack of closure in stories like Annihilation keeps us questioning long after we finish reading, mirroring the ongoing and unresolved nature of ecological crisis.

Embracing the monstrous

The New Weird also distances itself from the prejudice of earlier writers, such as Lovecraft’s racism and misogyny. Where Lovecraft imagined difference as monstrous and terrifying, New Weird writers often treat the monstrous as something to be understood or even embraced.

In Acceptance, the final book of the Southern Reach trilogy, the Biologist – one of the main characters – comes to terms with her complex relationship to Area X. What others might see as a nightmare, she begins to understand in a new way. For her, the strange quality of the light and the teeming abundance of life in Area X evoke not fear, but ecstasy.

This vision suggests a different kind of relationship with the world, one that acknowledges the messiness, danger and beauty of ecological entanglement. In this way, the New Weird aligns with contemporary ecological thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and Timothy Morton, who call for embracing uncertainty and complexity rather than seeking to control or purify the natural world.

Their ideas, like VanderMeer’s fiction, reject the fantasy of a harmonious, stable ecosystem existing for human benefit. Instead, they depict an Earth that is active, unpredictable and deeply interconnected, a place where beauty and horror coexist.

As the planet changes, perhaps our storytelling needs to change, too. The New Weird offers no easy answers, but it helps us practise a different kind of attention: one that accepts uncertainty, honours complexity and feels the pulse of a living, unpredictable Earth.

It reminds us that the world is stranger and more alive than we imagine, and that our old stories of control and mastery no longer serve us.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Trang Dang, Nottingham Trent University

Trang Dang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.