by Philip A. Suggars
There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeves’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.
But what if something similar were to happen to you?
Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet as they ever did. The sky is the same old blue.
After a while you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little, and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.
This is the terrain of the weird. Not quite full-blown fantasy, but the quiet unease that things might not be quite right. A sense that the ground beneath your trainers might be a little less solid than you previously thought.Few books map out this territory more ingeniously than The City & the City by China Miéville or The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson. Both of these novels deal in epistemic slippage, the boundaries of what is knowable and what is known, (what Miéville himself has referred to as “sublime backwash”). Each exists at the extreme of the other. Where Miéville presents us with a world where the structure of the real is brutally policed, Hope Hodgson describes a universe where there is absolutely and gloriously no epistemological structure whatso-fucking-ever.
William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (Penguin, 2008)
In Miéville’s murder mystery, Inspector Borlú, a policeman from the city of Besźel investigates a murder that requires him to work with a partner in the twin city of UI Qoma. Nothing too odd there you might think, except for the fact that the two cities share much of the same physical space. In order to maintain the illusion of separateness and sovereignty, citizens of one city must “unsee” anything pertaining to the other, ignoring people, buildings and even events that occur right in front of them. Failure to do so results in an intervention from the shadowy and terrifying force known as Breach.
Treated with a near mythical dread, Breach, makes any violators or evidence of transgression disappear, maintaining the ideal of separateness. They have an almost supernatural ability to detect and punish any infractions and in many ways function much like the Agents in the Matrix. They’re spectral, terrifying antagonists who are rarely seen and cannot be beaten. Only they have access to the duality of the world as it is and as it is perceived.
That said, one of the brilliant things about the novel is that crossing between the cities is a bureaucratic activity. Visitors must queue up to pass through a universal access point, Cupola Hall, filling out forms and editing their perceptions as they go. (Imagine entering Narnia via passport control.)
Now, let’s flip this on its head.
In The House on the Borderlands, if there is an equivalent of Breach they’re all out for coffee and donuts. Within the book’s framing narrative, an old man dwells in a remote house that seems to be perched precariously on the edge of space and time itself. Violent swine-things emerge from the wilderness and attack him. A pit opens into infinity. The house falls into disrepair as does reality itself. Time speeds up and slows down and the old man sees the solar system wither and die, meeting with the spirit form of his lost love in the process. (Clearly, the cosmic horror equivalent of drunk-texting your ex).
The novel, though, is more than just a cavalcade of grotesque set pieces. Hope Hodgson’s book articulates just what happens to the human mind when the epistemological scaffolding holding up consensual reality is removed. Without anything like Breach to police the borders of the real, the old man in The House on the Borderlands is placed in a condition of radical exposure, seeing everything, including those things which exist on a scale too large for the human mind to process, and it destroys him.
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (Penguin Classics, 2005)
It’s illuminating to compare Hodgson’s main character, the old man, to the (similarly nameless) Time Traveller from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. as both experience a similarly nihilistic telescoping of time, but their ultimate fates differ radically.
When Wells’ Time Traveller pushes beyond the limits of human civilisation, (perhaps the first fictional portrayal of a post-human futurity), he arrives on a desolate beach millions of years in the future. A dying red sun hangs in the thinning air. Humanity and all its works are long gone and only monstrous crabs and even stranger lifeforms populate the desolate landscape.
This entire section of the novel is pervaded by a kind of cosmic melancholia that can be viewed as the ultimate end point of Victorian Progressivism. Indeed, Wells’ character seems able to naturalise his experiences because he brings this framework and values along with him. Although he mourns for the end of human history, the Time Traveller’s visit to the abyss is a perverse form of scientific field trip, imbued with the same moral and evolutionary logic exemplified by humanity’s differentiation into Eloi and Morlock.
Hodgson’s old man’s experience, by contrast, is striking in its brutality, a vision of totalising annihilation. The sun burns out, the stars gutter and the entire universe itself reduced to nothing. There is no divine order revealed here, no redemption or a return to a cosy human scale cosmology. The vast scale of the old man’s vision annihilates the possibility of meaning itself.
Similarly, where Miéville’s twin cities are constructed from the rules of seeing and unseeing, The House on the Borderlands gives us the total opposite: a senseless cosmos of no rules, no enforcement nor any pretence of order. The weird here is not a glitch in the system. It is the revelation that there was never a system in the first place.
It’s fair to say that societally we’re somewhere in the middle of these two extremes right now, that the five hundred years or so since the invention of print has been the equivalent of sleeping on Borlú’s sofa: uncomfortable, but still governed by house rules. We got verifiable truth, experts, and certified sources. (A Breach of sorts also, perhaps). But it’s hard not to feel that that period is coming to an end, that while we were sleeping, the internet and digital culture pushed our bed into the old man’s house on the edge of the abyss.
In our own digital present, there’s a powerful temptation to read the chaos of information, conspiracy, and disinformation we are currently experiencing as proof that nothing is real, that nothing matters and that everything is just swine-things in the dark. From here, it can be a short hop to nihilist politics: a worldview where verifiable truth is impossible, authority is always a lie, and the only rational position is cynicism or withdrawal. Hodgson’s doomed recluse seems to embody some of this temptation, overwhelmed into passivity by the scale of the challenge.
But to read The House on the Borderlands as a political allegory is not to collapse into cosmic despair, but to learn from its warning. We are not condemned to inhabit the old man’s house. If we’re next to the abyss, that doesn’t mean we have to tumble in. Noticing that reality is unstable is not the same as surrendering to relativism. We can resist nihilist politics precisely by refusing to slide into the seductive intellectual laziness of “everything is fake” or “all sides are the same.” The weird may teach us to see the cracks, but perhaps it also demands us to keep looking, to keep thinking and to keep questioning not as a retreat from reality, but as a form of care for it.
The answer to epistemic collapse, therefore, isn’t to shrug like Hodgson’s recluse and let the swine-things win. There is a philosophical and moral distinction, I think, between questioning the framework and denying reality itself. While the weird may draw attention to how things fit together (or not) and why, it is not an invitation to retreat from the rational. Rather, it should encourage us to ask how the rules around truth are made, who enforces them, and what happens when they falter.
If Miéville’s novel describes the edges of over-policed perception, Hodgson shows us the dangers of letting the bottom drop out entirely. Both extremes are traps. The political task is to inhabit the weird middle, the unstable, shifting zone between order and chaos, without surrendering to despair.
This insistence on scrutiny is hardly new. It has, in fact, a long democratic pedigree. The socialist firebrand politician, Tony Benn, never one to mistake deference for democracy, distilled it into five plain questions we should ask emissaries from Breach or peddlers of red pill relativism:
- what power have you got?
- where did you get it from?
- in whose interests do you exercise it?
- to whom are you accountable?
- and how can we get rid of you?
So, we carry on watching the sky. And if it seems a bit too purple, maybe we don’t insist it’s blue out of habit or call it green out of spite. We just keep looking, keep asking, and perhaps resist the pressure to unsee.
~
Philip A. Suggars has a single yellow eye in the middle of his forehead and a collection of vintage binoculars.
His work has appeared in a range of publications including Strange Horizons, The Guardian and Interzone as well as being featured on many short-form podcasts. His writing has won the Ilkley short story prize, been long-listed for the BSFA short story award and been included in The Best of British Science Fiction Anthology series.
When not writing words, he records music as one half of the post-punk electronica outfit, we are concrete. Born and raised in South London, he currently lives on the south coast with his family. His debut novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World will be published by Titan Books in 2026.
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