ABSTRACT
If considered at all, Weird Fiction is usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (“horror” plus “fantasy”) often featuring nontraditional alien monsters (thus plus “science fiction”). Though particularly associated with the pulp magazine Weird Tales, the stop-start existence of which began in 1923, classic Weird Fiction predates it: S.T. Joshi (1990) plausibly treats its high phase as 1880–1940. It has had a colossal impact across work in all media, with under-investigated generically problematizing implications. Indeed, Weird Fiction may serve as the bad conscience of the Gernsback/Campbell sf paradigm, and as rebuke to much theorizing that takes that paradigm’s implicit self-conception as its starting point.
