WFRs 101 Weird Writers - William Gibson and John Shirley - The Belonging Kind

Highlights

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My original intention, when I first started writing, was to interpret the world the way the Surrealists did: to get into those places where the conscious world – the physical world – and the unconscious world come together. To make people see the fantastic in the mundane.[3] 🔗

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It was a feeling of alienation, of numbness, of the fragmentation of society and the accompanying estrangement of modern life. It was about the sensation of being forever alone, even when you were in a room full of people: a bar, for instance. It was the rebellion of a young generation who grew up and found themselves in exile. And maybe the nascent beginnings of that cyberpunk sprawl are present in the city through which Coretti searches for his strange woman: the city with a “dim neon aura.” Meanwhile, the strange woman is aloof yet comfortable with the world around her, inhabiting her environment with both a hard edge and an easy grace; 🔗

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Shirley’s youthful involvement with drugs and punk rock gave him experience with being alienated from society, at the far, far fringe of the mainstream. His reaction was to violently rebel, shoving the collective face of society in its own hypocrisy, cruelty and inhumanity. His fiction explores the darkest aspects of human nature with a jaded weariness that makes it feel mundane. It was a dynamic rebellion, framed as a demand: Wake up. Wake up to the blatant nightmare you call the real world. 🔗

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Meanwhile, this fictional Coretti is almost like an alter-ego. An exile, but a numb and sleeping one, who follows the path of least resistance, who finds his tribe without even trying. When he flees, they call him back.
And that is, at its core, the horror of this story. Psychoanalysts say that fear of heights is really the fear that we’ll jump; “The Belonging Kind” walks a similar edge. As terrifying as the loss of selfhood might be, it holds a certain appeal, especially for someone who’s known what it is to be on the edge of things. It would be nice to fit in. It would be nice to never have to worry about the right thing to say. It would be nice to have a tribe who knows you’re one of them, without even knowing your name. But would it be worth the price of identity? Would it be worth the cost of never being yourself, or really anyone at all, ever again?
Maybe. 🔗