1) The Harmont Visit Zone: A Spatial Weird

A man waits nervously behind a tombstone, attempting to evade the gaze of a military police patrol. His companion groans with pain: an otherworldly phenomenon has liquified the bones in his lower half. Their satchels are full of bizarre artefacts thought impossible by science: self-replicating batteries, rings that exhibit perpetual motion, containers of solid empty space. They are stalkers, scavengers who infiltrate an area called the Zone, the boundary of which is strictly policed by the UN and military forces. The novel is set in the decades following an event called the Visit, when six of these Zones suddenly materialised, all falling on a straight line across the Earth’s surface. The central metaphor of the book, from which the title comes, is that these Zones are the result of an alien visitor that was indifferent to Earth’s inhabitants, the Zones and relics within merely the detritus from the cosmic equivalent of a Roadside Picnic (1972; 2012).

This first chapter provides a foundational explanation of what the Weird involves as a geographical concept. The first subsection synthesises various understandings of the Weird, while the second proposes the analytical object of the Zone, intended to spatialise the Weird.

1.1) What is the Weird?

Roger Luckhurst (2017) defines the Weird as a concept of transgression that “twists or veers away from familiar frames and binary distributions”. This is the key idea of the Weird: the entrance of ‘a Real’ that cannot be digested and incorporated into previous systems of understanding. The Lacanian register of the Real is that which is “foreign to Imaginary-Symbolic reality”: unimaginable to the individual and indigestible by the structural realm (of ideology and discourse). Mark Fisher (2009: 22-23) describes the Real as what any imposed reality must avoid confronting, as it exposes the “fractures and inconsistencies in (our)...apparent reality”. In classic Old Weird narratives these incursions often takes the form of revelations which straddle the scientific and unearthly, such as China Miéville’s figure of the ‘arche-fossil-as-predator’: the uncovery of intelligences and agencies that precede humanity. Roadside Picnic notes almost immediately that the most important fact of the Visit was not any scientific subsequent discovery but the occurrence of the Visit itself, for forcing the conclusion that reality is stranger than previously imagined (2016: 83). This is why Miéville classifies the Weird as ‘abcanny’ rather than ‘uncanny’, to imply the intrusion of something totally foreign into the known, rather than an emergence from within of something long repressed but familiar.

Continuing on, the definitions posed by Mark Fisher stress the centrality of agency to the Weird. Fisher (2016: 61-62) uses the twin motifs of presence and absence: the Weird is marked by the presence of “that which does not belong”, this presence potentially borne as a ‘present’ absence. Using the dictionary example of a bird’s ‘eerie cry’, he suggests that an occurrence becomes unsettling when there “is a feeling that there is something more in (or behind) the cry…a form of intent that we do not normally associate with a bird”. Similarly, a landscape emptied of life is eerie when the reason for this absence is not understood, and becomes actively Weird upon the consideration that a new, unknown agency has supplanted those formerly present. In marking the importance of strange and unseen agencies, it can be seen more clearly how the Weird becomes “about the forces that govern our lives and the world” (Fisher, 64) The Anthropocene (and its constituent parts: capitalism, colonialism, climate change) becomes Weird through its status as a higher-dimensional hyperobject, affecting virtually everything while remaining not ”fully available to our sensory apprehension” (64).

A third aspect of the Weird is an ecological tendency to collapse scales. Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology and Luckhurst (2017) each lead us to a particular etymological flair by drawing both the Old Norse ‘urth’ - “twisted, in a loop” - and the ‘wyrd’ of Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’- denoting destiny or fate - into the Weird (Morton, 2016: 6). Morton suggests that “ecological awareness is weird” because of its “twisted, looping form”: not only are all ecological systems uncalculatably complex loops of matter, energy and causation, but also involve situations where distant scales “flip into one another” (6-7). The Anthropocene clearly highlights these loops: the mechanisms of the positive feedback loop between permafrost melting in the Arctic and global temperature rises, for example, causes a “crashing together of disparate spatialities and temporalities”, bringing together the spatial (organism to ecosystem to global) and the temporal (seasonal to decadal to geological) into a dense “ecological milieu” (Turnbull, 2021). As Luckhurst suggests, it is “no wonder that there are lots of weird fictions that focus on malignant stirrings of ancient things long buried in the earth, of nature that refuses the role of passive object, but bites back”, for this is perhaps the central narrative of an Anthropocene where the ‘negative externalities’ of carbon emissions and environmental damage reveal themselves to be far from inert and ignorable.

To summarise, the Weird should be understood conceptually as an affect or inflection that seeks to expose a newfound complexity. It draws attention to the intrusion of the ontologically-disruptive, traces of interloping but elusive agencies, and interrelations between vastly different scales. In the Anthropocene context, the Weird leads us to “the agency of the immaterial and the inanimate” and our ensnaring in the “rhythms, pulsions and patternings” of occluded forces - social, geological and biological (Fisher, 2016: 11).

1.2) What is the Zone?

Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet (2011) is an attempt to comprehend politically the world as human and non-human - as Weird. The Anthropocene challenges the “modern existential framework”: to “recuperate” the non-human world into the “dominant, human-centric worldview” - which Thacker calls ‘the world-for-us’. This effort is necessarily limited: natural disasters and environmental ruin is often ambivalent towards humanity, but must be slotted into the “solipsistic” frame of the “human subject” - “after all, being human, how else would we make sense of the world?” Thacker describes this initially inaccessible world, that “resists or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us”, as the ‘world-in-itself’. The Weirdness of this world lasts only as long as it remains unmetabolised. For example, the ecological modernisation agenda, including activities such as emissions trading and eco-compensation, can be seen as an attempt - albeit an incomplete attempt - to render understandable the ramifications of the Anthropocene to the current socioeconomic order.

Thacker goes on to introduce a spatial motif into this framework. The ‘magic circle’ deliberately draws on an occult imaginary - of summoning forces through an inscribed and bounded threshold. The “textual convention” of the threshold, James Kneale argues, may be largely uninspiring and “generic”, but it “simultaneously implies openness, change and lively movement” (Kneale, 2006). The magic circle refers to situations where the Weirdness - the ‘hidden’ strangeness and complexity - of the world-in-itself is revealed “at the same time that it recedes into darkness and obscurity”, remaining ultimately unknown (Thacker, 2011). However, the magic circle implies an intentional human inquiry into the Weird, through science or philosophy, which is what gives many narratives featuring it a “tragic tone”. What is crucial though is the moments when the world-in-itself manifests unprompted, “without any magic circle to serve as boundary”. Actively disrupting “active human governance of the boundary between the apparent world” and the unknown, this ‘magic site’ signals an unwarranted incursion of the new and Weird.

Roadside Picnic and its Zone is “perhaps the biggest influence on writers of the New Weird” (Luckhurst, 2017). The Zone is certainly a magic site, a Weird space where preconceived notions are broken and unknown agencies supplant the human. The Zone featured in the novel partially overlaps with the town of Harmont and has emptied the space within its borders, supplanting humanity and enforcing an impenetrable sovereignty: a world-in-itself. The eerie landscape that remains is marked by an absence: humans were once present, but are now not. In entailing both Weird presences and eerie absences, the Zone as a spatial form of alterity is distinct from other concepts, such as the frontier and the heterotopia:

- While the Zone may be the target of attempts to understand and annex, it differs in that the Zone is not a fresh ‘terra nullius’, as the frontier is envisaged. The Zone is not only haunted by the eerie traces - the ‘present absence’ of the vanished human population no longer present - but is also in no way inert land to be conquered, for it has already been invaded and claimed by an ethereal and unconfrontable agency. In other words, unlike the stadial expansion envisaged by the frontier, the Zone presents an area that was once understood and possessed but has escaped - or been taken - back into a Weird unknown.

- Similarly, while some equate the Zones of the Weird to heterotopias, they bear a key difference in their formation (Luckhurst, 2017; Montin, 2013; Weinstock, 2016). Foucault describes the heterotopia as a “place… formed in the very founding of society”, a “counter-site” of “crisis” or “deviation” to which unsavoury elements are banished, thereby serving a “function in relation to all the space that remains”: brothels, asylums, prisons, colonies are used as examples (1984). The heterotopia therefore is defined from the outside, with an understood but undesired Other forced into the confines of this space. Conversely, the Zone, as a magic site, is where the occupying Weird stakes its own claim, a space that is defined from within and expands outwards from a point of origin.

In summary, the Zone can be understood as a spatial form of alterity attuned to spaces where the human is supplanted by the Weird. The Zone entails a movement between states - known/unknown, inside/outside, old/new - where assumed ontologies are disturbed and interlopers are acted upon by immaterial and irrupting forces. Landscapes devastated by the ‘world-in-itself’, such as natural disasters or environmental deterioration, are one genre of the Zone, as are those where the ethereal and eerie agencies of the Anthropocene - capitalism and imperialism - make themselves known. This chapter now concludes with a demonstrative application of the Zone to both a human and a non-human context.

Inside Roadside Picnic’s Zone, intruding stalkers must wend an intricate path through a minefield of deadly forces that manifest as insubstantial shadows, mists, and oozes. These forces lie beyond reproach and distort the landscape itself, forcing humans to traverse and experience space much like those excluded from the constructed ‘world-for-us’. While this may invoke images of wildlife crossings and roads blocked by natural disasters, James Kneale (2019) discusses this in relation to black experiences during travel of an ‘atmospheric racism’ that can “deform space and time”. Kneale suggests that “places can be eerily racist despite the absence of a specific agentive source for that racism”: the constant threat of “murderous racist violence”, as well as an environment of “hostile policing and residential discrimination”, forms an oppressive yet ethemeral agency in those areas deemed ‘white’ (Kneale, 2019: 104). The unstable unit of a ‘Jim Crow Mile’, which accounts for “both physical distance and random helpings of fear, paranoid, frustration, and outrage” (taken from The Safe Negro Travel Guide, 1954), calls to mind the ways in which landscapes can be Weird for some but not others (Kneale, 2019: 102). In this flipped frame, the ‘white world’ becomes the Zone, as an atmospheric racism takes a “a toll on black minds and bodies”, unmooring and disorienting those subject from euclidean space and time. Stephen Shapiro (2020: 56) therefore understands some recent “Black-oriented narratives”, such as Lovecraft Country (2016), as a ‘Woke Weird’ which deploys the aesthetic and motif of the Weird to engage the audience’s “political sensorium” to the “entanglement” of minorities in the cruel and ethereal agency of racial capitalism.

The absolute foremost example of the Zone is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine: Jonathon Turnbull describes the Weird lifeforms and habitats that have flourished in the wake of the nuclear incident as “challenging assumptions of where life belongs”, exposing “our concepts, methods, and ontologies and inadequate” in the face of “ecology’s inherent weirdness” (2021: 277). However, the Fukushima Exclusion Zone perhaps poses a more relevant Zone for the Anthropocene. The Zone, declared in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster, encompasses much of the town of Ōkuma. The waterborne contaminants that leaked from the swamped Fukushima Daiichi plant are reminiscent not only of the “mists and oozes” that “populate many of our speculative fantasies about the end of the world” but also symbolise the ‘seepages’ of the Anthropocene (Thacker, 2011; Cons, 2020). Jason Cons terms ‘seepages’ to refer to flows - not just of materials and pollutants, but of people - that operate “at radically heterogenous times, scales, and viscosities”, usurping those projects of the ‘world-for-us’ that attempt to “produce space and territory as solid containers” (2020). Bringing us in a (Weird) loop, however, are the stone tablets that dot the shores of Fukushima Prefecture, placed “in the Middle Ages to serve as tsunami warnings” (Ghosh, 2016: 55). What better representation of an Weird object in the Anthropocene than an ancient monolith that prophesied a future disaster but now stands alone in an eerie landscape, usurped by a formless radioactive agency and emptied of the human?