Mark Bould’s chapter on “Speculative Fiction” begins with Jonathan Lethem’s literary critical counterfactual in which the genre border between science fiction and mainstream literature never existed and all novels about science were considered one group. As Bould points out, the very term slipstream itself was coined by Bruce Sterling to refer to the disconcerting works of science fiction that played across the edges of varied genre definitions. Heady mixtures of literary conventions have informed all regions of fiction since then, as speculative fiction draws on and critiques archaic and futurist literary movements representing empire, environmentalism, disability, illness, violence, as well as racial, gendered and sexual alterities.

Despite the centrality of place to H. P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction, weird regionalisms have largely been ignored in literary criticism. This essay not only reads The Southern Reach trilogy through the lens of region, but also reads region through the lens of The Southern Reach trilogy. It contrasts Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” with VanderMeer’s trilogy to highlight how they both develop a weird aesthetics of the Plantationocene. The chapter argues that weird fiction in the U.S. has always been underwritten by racialized and regionalized ideologies that derive from slavery and the plantation. The New England exceptionalism Lovecraft endorses is founded on concepts of personhood, nature, and region that legitimate the dehumanization of African Americans and other people of color. In contrast, VanderMeer presents the indisputably southern terrain of the Gulf Coast in a way that does not rely on “the South” as a significant framework. The Southern Reach portrays a sparsely populated Gulf Coast that is not so much post-southern as it is post-Earth: VanderMeerian Florida camouflages something very different, and much more weird, than region as southern studies scholars often think of it.