The image that conjures the weird for me, above and beyond all others, is the rift in reality. The tear in the space time continuum that swallows the Starship Enterprise. The wardrobe that opens to the land of Narnia. The dimensional experiment that gushes alien monsters out in to the Black Mesa research facility. The tear in the fabric of the real, in whatever guise it represents itself, is the true essence of the weird.

Attendees at the recent Weird Council conference at Birkbeck University might disagree. As an event examining the work of novelist China Miéville, they might have felt compelled to argue for that emblematic image of the New Weird, the tentacle: the monstrous appendage that emerges from the rift to disturb the mundane order of things.

Weird Council was remarkable for many reasons. First as an academic conference dedicated to the work of a writer who has been publishing for only a little over a decade, and one who belongs, as Miéville does, solidly in a tradition of genre writing that is rarely recognised in academia. Second, it brought together a remarkable diversity of specialists with a shared interest in Miéville's work; academics, political activists and of course the fandom that have played such a major part in evangelising him to the wider world.

But it was as in its recognition of the weird itself that Weird Council seemed most significant. It comes less than a year after the publication of The Weird by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, a landmark anthology that helped to define the weird as a significant literary tradition with well over a century of history. Emerging from the works of Alfred Kubin and Algernon Blackwood among many others, progressing through HP Lovecraft, Franz Kafka and Shirley Jackson, and embracing figures such as Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and Miéville, the weird represents a powerful literary tradition.

The picture that emerged at Weird Council was of the weird as a counterpart to many of the intellectual and cultural movements of the 20th century. More than once the comparison was made between the weird, with its refusal to depict reality as contiguous and rational, and the shift in the visual arts from representation to abstraction. The weird's obsession with what might be called the "fourth dimension" through metaphors of hyperspace, multi-dimensionality and time-travel mirrors the emergence of scientific concepts such as relativity and quantum theory. In an overarching sense, the weird shares the subjectivity and uncertainty prioritised by postmodern philosophy. The reality the weird describes is as immutable and unknowable as the reality of the postmodern world.

The weird is characterised by a willingness to play fast and loose with reality. And its emergence in the early 1900s coincides with a radical shift in our perceptions of what reality is. Science at the time was busy revealing not just that our universe was much, much bigger than we had guessed, but also far less certain, with the principles of quantum mechanics suggesting that God did indeed "play dice with the universe". We were also becoming aware that many things we accepted as real – ideas of nationality, race, gender, sexuality and many more – were in fact socially constructed. The conservative social order in which people knew their place was about to be replaced with a far more complex and less certain liberal worldview.

The weird became both a part of these radical changes, and a reaction against them. JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is a paean for the return of a king and a social order that was undergoing radical and irrevocable change. As becomes apparent in his racist poetry, HP Lovecraft's stories articulated a very deep anxiety and fear of social change. The commercial genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror that commoditise the weird are often reactionary in nature. Faced with a rift in reality, they encourage the reader to dive for cover.

The significance of Miéville's writing has been to reawaken many people to the radical purpose of the weird. Novels such as Perdido Street Station, The Scar and The City & The City remind us that much of what we call reality is constructed, uncertain or unknowable. Faced with a rift in reality – and our world of high speed technological change confronts us with such things daily – we don't have to respond with fear and seek escape. Instead we can choose to dive headfirst in to whatever dimension lies beyond.

Because of its importance as a radical literature, and also its vast influence as a reactionary one, it seems well beyond time that the weird received far more serious attention as a major literary movement. Weird Council was an excellent start. Long may it continue.