If the weird, as #MarkFisher suggests, is an intrusion on the established world from something truly outside of it, then where exactly is the outside? Take H. P. #Lovecraft, for example. To him, ‘outside’ was outer space, and the deep sea – depths that, in his time, had scarcely been plumbed. Of course, storytellers across the globe have imagined creatures and societies living on the Moon and under the sea, well before Lovecraft, but in a way that brings these locations ‘inside.’ One of my students told me about Lucian of Samosata, the 2nd-century Roman author of A True Story (sometimes translated as True History). It is the earliest text, some scholars have argued, that could be categorised as sci-fi/fantasy (if we pretend to ignore the anachronism of genre*):
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1348255?origin=crossref
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239038
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story#Science_fiction
It is a satire of Homer, among other writers, and to greater outlandish heights does Lucian go – to the Moon, and to Venus, where first contact is made with alien races. All befitting of science fiction (and perhaps fantasy, if you substitute ‘alien’ for ‘human-adjacent’). It is bizarre, but Fisher’s weird it is not. Peopling the cosmos with humanoids and architecture familiarises the strange. Our modern understanding of the weird celebrates the strangeness as it is, and intentionally maintains a divide between the human and non-human.
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