Simulation is a tough conceptual nut to crack. Read in light of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard, the term triggers associations with imitation and postmodern aesthetics.1 However, the concept of simulation can also be employed in a more neutral way, to refer to a model of either another person’s mind (mental simulation) or of a real-world system. The latter type of simulation is increasingly central to individual and societal responses to the climate crisis: because of the fundamental uncertainties introduced by climate change, we are forced to come up with imaginative scenarios—simulations—of what the world would look like at a certain degree of warming. This focus on possible scenarios is an opportunity for the fictional imagination: fiction (in literature, film, and many other media) has long been engaged in the simulation of what could happen under circumstances that may, in some instances, depart significantly from the real world.
A particular kind of imaginative simulation of the future aims to disrupt our everyday understanding of urban space. This disruption is rooted in the tradition of weird fiction, which goes back to H. P. Lovecraft’s early twentieth-century works and has influenced a wide range of media. The weird is famously difficult to define: it brings together fantasy, horror, and science fiction elements without falling neatly into any of these established genres.2 Lovecraft’s fiction often revolves around the cosmic horror evoked by the realization that human history is secretly steered by extraterrestrial forces. It cultivates a sense of atmospheric dread designed to elicit discomfort, largely through the ambiguities it generates and the things it leaves unsaid.3 Thus, according to Mark Fisher, atmospheric “wrongness” is one of the genre’s hallmarks: an object or situation feels odd and out of place, typically in a way that jeopardizes the protagonist’s (or narrator’s) sanity.4 Recent fiction under the heading of the “New Weird” has shifted the focus from cosmic interference to ecological destabilization that may be anthropogenic in nature—a theme pursued with particular clarity by Jeff VanderMeer’s works.5
New Weird fiction and its offshoots in film and video games rarely reference climate change directly, but their uneasy imagination of human-nonhuman relations resonates powerfully—perhaps more powerfully because of its indirectness—with the environmental crisis being experienced today. The climate itself is “weirding,” in Thomas Friedman’s terminology: supposedly once-in-a-lifetime disasters are now common occurrences, the seasonal cycle is frequently thrown out of kilter, and so on.6 Weird media capture this sense of creeping and deadly destabilization more accurately than Hollywood’s sensationalist disaster movies.7
Urban space is often the subject of the popular imagination of disaster: collapsed infrastructure and deserted or overgrown streets are the bread and butter of postapocalyptic fiction. Without completely rejecting the postapocalyptic imaginary, both Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne (2017) and the video game Alan Wake II (2023) present a weirded simulation of nonhuman space, transforming and rewriting urban landscapes in ways that challenge dominant cultural narratives about environmental issues and the city.8 These are certainly not the only weird fictions that negotiate the instability of human-nonhuman relations in times of climate crisis, but they do so in particularly effective ways, and tap into the affordances of their respective media. Borne and Alan Wake II frame instability as a source of possibility and creativity rather than a purely destructive force of the kind that takes center stage in more conventional postapocalyptic fiction. Simulating physical space and the experience of the characters inhabiting it affords audiences the opportunity to immerse themselves in this weirdness and grasp its transformative potential.
Pathways of the Urban Imaginary
Considering both fictional and factual narratives, Ursula K. Heise identifies three common “templates” for contemporary culture’s imagination of environmental issues within the space of the city.9 The first involves decay or toxicity as a source of risk for city dwellers. Heise links this template to a long history of imagining cities as “sites of corruption, contamination, and waste,” often in opposition to the idealized purity of the natural world.10 Disaster movies clearly build on this scenario. A second template foregrounds the unevenness of different social groups’ exposure to environmental risks: these “climate justice” narratives (in Heise’s terminology) expose the overlap of environmental degradation in the city and social inequalities. Finally, Heise discusses narratives of multispecies coexistence, an idea influenced by Jennifer Wolch’s concept of “zoopolis,” which envisions the integration of animals (companion animals as well as wildlife) in the space of the city.11 This coexistence is at the heart of rewilding narratives: urban space is reclaimed by animals or plants after a catastrophic event. In other instances, multispecies narratives don’t require a dramatic rupture from the everyday but rather an intensification of awareness: the human characters realize that “cities are not just habitats by and for humans...but also for a multitude of other species.”12
While Heise’s survey is not meant to be exhaustive, it helps situate Borne and Alan Wake II, which resonate with ideas of contamination, social marginalization, and multispecies coexistence, but don’t fit neatly into any of these templates. Weird fiction destabilizes our imagination of space by refusing alignment with existing cultural narratives about urban environments. The destabilization is simultaneously perceptual and affective. It is perceptual because weird fictions disorient the audience by disrupting their experience of narrative space and of the characters occupying it. China Miéville’s New Weird novel The City & the City (2009) serves as an influential model for this type of perceptual challenge.13 It imagines two different cities (with completely separate political systems and cultures) sharing the same physical space. Movement between the two cities is tightly controlled, and the inhabitants of each city are trained to ignore (“unsee,” in the novel’s language) the existence of the other.14
Alan Wake II reinterprets this movement in metareferential terms: the player-character is a writer who reshapes physical space by manipulating “scenes” and “plot elements” so as to solve spatial puzzles and advance the game’s narrative. In VanderMeer’s Borne, it is primarily the protagonist and titular character who embodies perceptual destabilization, but the space that surrounds him is also impacted. Moreover, weird fiction creates affective uncertainties that signal a larger disruption or rupture in human-nonhuman relations, hinting at the breakdown of anthropocentric ideas of mastery. While this affective resonance departs from the bleakness of much disaster fiction, Borne and Alan Wake II complement negative feelings with humor and playfulness, which turn the weirded city into a space of creative experimentation and possibility.15 That combination of contrasting feelings is also part of weird fiction’s reimagination of urban narratives.
Lieven Ameel has already started to unpack the way in which representations of the city in contemporary literature can destabilize anthropocentric assumptions, with examples from fiction by Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Jonathan Lethem. In these novels, “the ontological stability of the narrated storyworld is threatened by continuous references to menacing weather conditions and by a sense of unsettling nonhuman presence.”16 While in Ameel’s examples (three realist novels) the source of the nonhuman threat is mostly psychological, the weird mode turns this psychological destabilization into a material reality. In Borne and Alan Wake II, ontological instability is the result of urban space becoming radically nonlinear in both spatial and temporal terms, diegetically and not merely in characters’ perception of a climate changed world.17
Tender Monstrosity
The setting of VanderMeer’s Borne is fairly standard postapocalyptic fare: an anonymous city devastated by an unspecified disaster, possibly caused by an evil biotech corporation (known simply as “the Company”) that continues to oppress the city’s inhabitants. Rachel, the character narrator, toys with the idea that all this, including her life as a “scavenger,” might just be a “bad dream,” and the generic quality of the setting does feel dream-like.18 Consider, for instance, this descriptive passage:
We [Rachel and her partner, Wick] were bound by our mutual safe place: the Balcony Cliffs, which existed on the northeast fringe of the city, overlooking the poisoned river. To the west as the city sloped toward sea level lay the territory of the Magician. To the south, across desolation and oases both, the remnants of the Company, protected by Mord. Much of all of this sprawled across a vast dry seabed that extended into the semiarid plain beyond the city.19
Occurring early on in the novel, this description is one of the few explicit accounts of the city’s appearance. After that, no detailed description of this toxic wasteland is needed because the reader can quite simply fill in the gaps by drawing on an extensive repertoire of urban representations in fiction, such as by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, and many others.20 The sparseness and predictability of the setting help highlight, by way of contrast, the novelty of VanderMeer’s titular character, Borne.
The novel opens with Rachel rescuing an entity she names “Borne,” who was carried to near her home by the creature Mord. The defining feature of Borne’s embodiment is its fluid, shapeshifting quality. He is compared to “a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin.”21 Throughout the novel, Borne is described in a number of inventive ways, but mostly metaphorically—with the anemone and the vase being the two most common analogies: his embodiment is radically unstable, capable of expanding or shrinking at will and even of mimicking people’s appearance. This shapelessness is accentuated by the blurry “rippling colors” that the narrator observes and that are associated with Borne throughout the novel. All this makes it remarkably difficult for the reader to visualize what is, effectively, the novel’s protagonist. Paradoxically, then, if the city’s landscape is so easy to fill in based on our familiarity with the type of toxic urban narratives identified by Heise, the titular character (and focal point of the reader’s imagination) remains elusive, an unfillable visual gap in our experience of the novel.
Borne’s weirdness extends to the urban landscape he inhabits, which can be understood as a process of defamiliarization affecting the narrating character’s perception of urban space (and indirectly the reader’s imagination of such space).22 For example, in one passage, Rachel and Borne view the ruined city from the balcony of Rachel’s apartment.23 This is the type of scenery that had seemed generically dystopian earlier in the book, but Borne’s nonhuman perspective influences the narrator’s and transforms her appreciation of the landscape. “It’s beautiful beautiful beautiful,” Borne remarks, and Rachel has to agree: “It was so incredibly beautiful, and I’d never seen that before. In the strange dark sea-blue of late afternoon, the river below splashing in lavender, gold, and orange up against the numerous rock islands and their outcroppings of trees … the river looked amazing.”24 The amazement that Borne brings out is a function of his perceptual destabilization of the postapocalyptic urban space.
However, rather than the nostalgic return of nature that accompanies most rewilding narratives, the re-enchantment of urban space in VanderMeer’s novel goes hand in hand with the weirdness of Borne’s embodiment: the shifting colors of the river resemble the shimmering quality of Borne’s own body. The readers’ imagination is also revitalized as they simulate the protagonist’s perceptual process: the dystopian landscape that almost went without saying suddenly fills with aesthetic potential. Being able to experience awe in the midst of the ruined city complicates the bleakness of most dystopian representations: it yields a sense of “tragic hope,” to use theologian Panu Pihkala’s phrase for an existential form of hope vis-à-vis the climate crisis that does not cancel out our awareness of unfolding catastrophe.25 This complex experience is linked here to a strangely likable, playful monster and the way he refashions the narrating character’s perception and the urban space around her.
Lighting and Writing
Remedy Entertainment’s games have been consistently influenced by the weird tradition: Control (2019), in particular, draws abundant inspiration from VanderMeer’s work.26 In both Alan Wake (2010) and its sequel, Alan Wake II, this engagement with weird fiction takes on intensely metareferential qualities.27 Metareference denotes any form of self-reflexiveness in fiction, including references to the medium, genre, or conventions that underlie a particular fictional artifact.28 Video games can deploy unique metareferential strategies due to their interactive nature. A famous example is how, in Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid (1998), the enemy named Psycho Mantis has access to the player’s PlayStation console and can seemingly take over the controller, and can only be defeated by switching the controller to the second port of the console.29 This metareferential device marks a striking departure from the conventions of gameplay, asking players to attend to the game’s material interface.30
In the Alan Wake series, metareference begins with the games’ foregrounding of the act of writing: the titular protagonist is a writer known for his crime fiction, but players soon realize that horrors and mysteries aren’t confined to the fictional worlds created by Alan. They enter his own reality and give rise to the “darkness” that Alan finds himself confronting in both games. On a ludic level, this self-reflexiveness results in a number of gameplay mechanics that evoke the act of imaginative creation, for instance collecting misplaced manuscript pages (in both games) or reshaping game space by rewriting certain scenes (in Alan Wake II). The latter strategy, in particular, ties in with Fisher’s discussion of the weird as a literary mode foregrounding experiences of wrongness, which Alan Wake II links to the imagination of urban environments.
The game has two protagonists: an FBI agent named Saga Anderson and the titular character. Players first play as Saga, who is investigating a series of gruesome murders in a small town in Washington state. Alan has been missing for thirteen years, but suddenly washes up on the shore of a nearby lake. Visibly shaken, he tells Saga that he spent all this time trapped in an alternate dimension known as “the Dark Place.” The player can then switch to Alan’s memories, which transport them to a gritty urban setting strongly reminiscent of New York City. This environment isn’t postapocalyptic in any explicitly environmental sense, but it challenges our imagination of urban space by emptying out what we may expect to be a bustling metropolis and populating it with ghost-like presences and eerie encounters.
Making progress within these memories requires solving spatial puzzles that lend this urban environment a distinctively weird quality. Players solve puzzles through two distinct spatial mechanics. The first involves the use of light sources: by turning on and off certain lights (a streetlamp, a neon sign, a car’s headlights, etc.), players can actively reshape the space. For instance, early on, players need to enter a subway station, but there seems to be no way in. The entrance only appears if players turn on a streetlamp nearby, but doing so requires “collecting” the light somewhere else and storing it in the player-character’s lamp. The unexpected changes to the urban landscape created by these light switches are a first form of weird “wrongness” staged by the game: the player needs urban space to change in order to progress the game. But the changes will also take them by surprise, creating unexpected configurations that drastically reshape their mental model of the game world.
The other way in which players manipulate space is more explicitly metareferential. As a writer, Alan has the power to experiment with what the game calls new “plot elements” within an imaginary location known as the “Writer’s Room” (a physical space representing Alan’s creative processes). By modifying certain “scenes” in the course of our exploration of the city, these plot elements allow Alan to alter space and time simultaneously: players are transported to an earlier timeline, with the surrounding space (the “scene”) looking substantially different and affording access to locations or objects not available in the baseline game world. For example, the rubble blocking a subway tunnel can be removed by acquiring a certain plot element (“Summoning Ritual”) and combining it with a certain scene (“End of the Line”).
Together with the changes produced by switching light sources, these self-reflexive manipulations generate considerable instability in the player’s understanding of urban space. Instead of serving as a reliable backdrop to our interactions with the game, the environment is “weirded” by mechanics that capture, both diegetically and ludically, the presence of a mysterious more-than-human force in the normally anthropocentric space of the city. The material stability of urban space is challenged, along with the player’s ability to cognitively control it by way of a reliable spatial representation (a mental map or model of game space). Instead, players must learn how to navigate its fundamental instability and use it to their advantage as they pursue their (and the player-character’s) objectives. The game’s metareferential weirdness thus speaks to a loss of human control. Through its playful simulation of a constantly shifting city, it explores anxieties linked to irreducibly nonhuman forms of agency within manmade environments.
Reimaging Spatial Instability
In times of climate and environmental crisis, space can no longer be taken for granted. As coastlines recede, desertification spreads, and habitat loss pushes wildlife closer to human communities, the environment becomes unpredictable and thus a source of threat and anxiety. This destabilization is potentially debilitating, but it can also be generative: it represents an opportunity to rethink the binaries of Western modernity, such as those opposing nature to culture or the wilderness to the city. Fictional practices such as literature or video games afford opportunities for simulating this nonhuman threat in a controlled environment. While engaging in these practices, audiences may be more inclined to appreciate the value of destabilization than in real-world interactions.
Any form of fiction is playful in that it allows audiences to experiment with counterfactual or speculative scenarios, but the weird narratives of Borne and Alan Wake II are particularly well positioned to immerse readers in spatial instability. This is due to their foregrounding of atmosphere, and its long history of imagining the breakdown of human control. In both, this breakdown is situated within an urban space, and it is made more forceful by the city’s association with built, human-centric environments. But the breakdown is not only an unsettling experience, as in Lovecraft’s “Old Weird” fiction, which associates wrongness of atmosphere with cosmic horror. Instead, spatial instability opens up spaces for playful—if weird—experimentation with our imagination of urban landscapes. In Borne, the destabilization of urban space is tied to readers’ engagement with the protagonist’s evolving perception of the postapocalyptic city, whereas in Alan Wake II it reflects transformations performed by the player directly while solving spatial puzzles. Despite these differences, both create radical possibilities for reimaging spatial instability as a productive, and even existentially transformative, condition.
Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 27 (1983): 45–56; and Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). For further discussion of the conceptual history of simulation, see David Ciccoricco, Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 21–29.
See Roger Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/Orientation,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017): 1041–61.
Lovecraft himself discussed the importance of atmosphere in the weird genre. See H. P. Lovecraft, “Introduction to Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. David Sandner (Westport: Praeger, 2004).
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016).
See Benjamin J. Robertson, None of This Is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
Thomas L. Friedman, “Global Weirding Is Here,” The New York Times, February 17, 2010, ➝.
On the imagination of disaster in Hollywood movies, see Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017), chap. 5.
See Jeff VanderMeer, Borne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017); and Alan Wake II, Remedy Entertainment, released 2023, Microsoft Windows. Relevant here is Nicole Seymour’s concept of “bad environmentalism,” which also draws attention to the environmental value of transgressive or ironic language (without explicitly discussing weird fiction). See Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
Ursula K. Heise, “Urban Narrative and the Futures of Biodiversity,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment, ed. Sarah Ensor and Susan Scott Parrish (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 152. The term “template” refers to a schematic structure or pattern underlying a broad range of narratives. See Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “A Theory of Narrative in Culture,” Poetics Today 38, no. 4 (2017): 605–34.
Heise, “Urban Narrative,” 152.
Jennifer Wolch, “Zoöpolis,” in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998).
Heise, “Urban Narrative,” 154.
China Miéville, The City & the City (London: Pan Macmillan, 2009).
See also my discussion of Miéville’s novel in Marco Caracciolo, Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 70–73.
I write more at length about the significance of mixed feelings as a response to the climate crisis in Marco Caracciolo, “Mixed Emotions and the Climate Crisis in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction,” in Mixed Feelings: An Interdisciplinary Phenomenology. Ancient Emotions V, ed. Pia Campeggiani and Douglas L. Cairns (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025).
Lieven Ameel, “Nonhuman Presence and Ontological Instability in Twenty-First-Century New York Fiction,” in Narrating Nonhuman Spaces: Form, Story, and Experience Beyond Anthropocentrism, ed. Marco Caracciolo et al. (New York: Routledge, 2022), 71.
I also refer to Jon Hegglund’s discussion of how weird fictions “foreground a blurring between narrative agents and material entities or environments.” Jon Hegglund, “Unnatural Narratology and Weird Realism in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation,” in Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, ed. Erin James and Eric Morel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 34.
VanderMeer, Borne, 51.
VanderMeer, Borne, 53.
See also Marie-Laure Ryan’s discussion of how “the story space {is} completed by the reader’s imagination on the basis of cultural knowledge and real world experience.” Marie-Laure Ryan, “Space,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Hühn Peter (Hamburg University Press, 2014), para. 9, ➝.
VanderMeer, Borne, 6. After this initial description, the novel switches to the masculine pronoun for Borne.
Defamiliarization is a term introduced by Viktor Shklovsky in the 1910s for the way in which literary experience challenges the standard routines of perception. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art, as Device,” trans. Alexandra Berlina, Poetics Today 36, no. 3 (2015): 151–74.
VanderMeer, Borne, 56.
VanderMeer, Borne, 56; ellipsis in the original.
Panu Pihkala, “Eco-Anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope: Psychological and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change,” Zygon 53, no. 2 (2018): 545–69.
Control, Remedy Entertainment, released 2019, Microsoft Windows. See also my discussion of Control’s engagement with materiality, which draws a sustained comparison with VanderMeer’s work. Marco Caracciolo, Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 140–47.
Alan Wake, Remedy Entertainment, released 2010, Microsoft Windows.
See Werner Wolf, “Metareference Across Media: The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions,” in Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, ed. Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).
Metal Gear Solid, Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, released 1998, PlayStation.
See, e.g., the discussion of “ludic metareference” in Theresa Krampe, “Rewriting Rules, Changing Worlds: Diegetic and Ludic Forms of Metareference in The Magic Circle,” Frontiers of Narrative Studies 9, no. 1 (2023): 137–57.
