When Weird Becomes Normal with Kate Marshall

So Kate, you and I have spent a lot of time thinking about weirdness, which is either a professional qualification or a warning sign.

Maybe a

little bit of both.

So to start us off though, would you explain like what drew you to the weird as something worth taking seriously?

That's a great question and I love the way that you immediately start with those two terms of weird and serious put together.

I think, you know, I came to this as a literary critic and really as a reader of novels and as a person who really spends a lot of time just thinking about contemporary culture and media.

And I think that I started working on it partly because I had noticed a real flourishing of what was being called in many different ways, weird fiction, and specifically thinking about it as new weird fiction.

And I thought, okay, that's a really interesting question.

I've always loved genre.

I think things like speculative fiction and science fiction are so great for telling us what we're worried about right now, what we're thinking about.

They give us a chance to understand the future.

They give us a way to understand our present by imagining otherwise.

And so this isn't science fiction in particular.

It's not necessarily speculative fiction, but it's a little bit close.

And weird fiction is something that's unsettling.

It's something that is...

I think a really important genre for thinking about the proximity of what's strange to our everyday lives.

And so I thought that's very interesting and very important for understanding the present, but also it's interesting because it's something that has a history.

And so I think it can be really valuable when you're trying to ask hard questions about the present to have something that you can think about that can take you to previous moments in history to see how that played out.

And so I was really interested in the new weird, partly because it had an old, and that you could go back and think about when were the other moments in which the weird was really important.

That's so interesting.

I just, in my own reading, I encountered, I read recently, oh, just totally like Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.

I don't know if you've ever read it or had a chance to read it recently, but he wrote it in 1968.

And it's amazing how prescient it seems for today, even.

But you're seeing that kind of thing within novels, within fiction, that's increasingly... something that has that's mediated by by this approach yeah