Odd, here I thought slipstream meant 'making a change in the software release after the first printing of CDs but before the distribution, with the result that not all of the CDs distributed are identical'

Eh. I've seen the latter done well, and yet the concept also seems to be responsible for 80-90% of my really bad slush.

Good one, Dave. I was talking to somebody about this yesterday afternoon and we agreed that "rigorous" doesn't necessarily only mean what some folks think it means, either. I'd say more, but you've said it so well, above.

I don't know, man. Telling me that a piece should make you "feel strange, like living the late twentieth century," doesn't do a lot for me, mainly because the 20th century didn't make me feel strange. Heck, neither does the 21st. It's like saying "feel strange, like breathing oxygen." Er. Ok. Clearly I don't have the certain sensibility Sterling's referring to. And if slipstream has shifted to Horton's definition, then that suggests a whole bunch of other writers felt the same way. Of course, when dealing with vague categories, I can also why something prescriptive would be more popular than descriptive. Easier to get a handle on. This isn't better, of course, but still.

Having said that, if you're truly unhappy, then you should start calling Horton's classification "New Slipstream" and make a case for an immediate return to "Classic Slipstream."

What's not good about the shift is that it took a very broad category and narrowed it down to perhaps one kind of story that fit that category and left out of the definition any of the other sorts. It's an attempt, I think, to control and define something that was harder to get a grip on maybe. I can remember a lot of debates about this about seven or eight years ago now. People really didn't know what slipstream meant. They still don't. But what most people have decided is that it means magical realism. And the sad thing is, they think it means a very banal sort of magical realism.

I actually just finished doing a sort of interview with Yoshio Kobayashi and K. Lincoln Bird, who moderated, about the state of American spec fic, and talked some about this. Hopefully it'll appear somewhere easily accessible, like SH, in the future. We'll see.

I'm not--entirely certain that I see a clear difference between the two pull quotes. At least, they read to me a bit like a Venn diagram. (This may be because I'm with Jon in that living in the late 20th century doesn't [in of itself] feel strange. Guess I'm not a person of Sterling's sensibility?)

My guess would be that people felt they needed a word for that vaguely-magical-realism-written-by-non-South-American writers, and there was this one for kinda sorta the same thing? But that would be only a guess. I confess that I use it in something very much like the second sense. Do I get brownie points for a constant-if-useless awareness of the physics-y sense of the word?

I think it gets to what Barzak’s saying, that Anglo magical realism was only one (small) part of what Sterling was trying to define when he coined the word slipstream. And that what most SFnal folks seem to mean when use it, is, in fact, not just magical realism but a very banal sort of magical realism. (Thus the Nebula panel you reported on.)

And it’s okay if living in the 20th century didn’t make you feel strange; there’s nothing wrong with not being a person of a certain sensibility. But there should still be fiction that makes you feel strange. And I don’t know about you, but even a lot of really excellent contemporary magical realism (say, Kelly Link’s “The Girl Detective” or Pat Murphy’s The City, Not Long After) doesn’t do that for me, whatever else it might do.

Also see comment on previous posting, in re “short 20th century”: the world of 1917-1991 is not the one we’re living in now; it’s the world that produced Naked Lunch and Galapagos. (Not to mention — to stay out of the slipstream — Sterling’s “The Unthinkable” and Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War.”)

P.S. You get brownie points for the physics. I lose points for that Bill Paxton / Mark Hamill movie.

The difference (IMHO) is that the second definition defines it in relation to (or opposition to) traditional SF or fantasy. It's the GVG definition. It causes problems because it doesn't take the work for what it is, but instead wants to say, "This could be SF if the science was better" or "This could be fantasy except it's not clear whether there's really magic happening or not." It has trouble getting past those considerations and taking the work on its own merits (or lack thereof).

I have to confess to a certain amount of bewilderment over the need for definitions and labels. These sorts of discussions come up at every convention or workshop I go to. From a marketing/publishing standpoint it has validity, but should we as writers be worrying about what to call our writing? Shouldn't the work be able to speak for itself?

Hmm. The last piece of fiction that made me feel strange was Gavin Grant's "Heads Down, Thumbs Up," over at SciFiction, and it did that mostly by confusing the hell out of me. Hmm. I shall have to investigate further.

I started responding to this thread. I'm up to 1159 words so far. Probably best if I post it on my blog and link from here, when I'm done?

But I will say this -- Dave S., I think you're pretty much right about what's wrong with the definition of "slipstream" GVG and the rest of that panel seem to have been using. It's a little like old-skool lit folks talking about SF -- "well, but The Specialist's Hat and One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts can't be slipstream -- they're good!"

But I think you're wrong about the usefulness of having a critical vocabulary of distinctions -- as long as categorizing isn't the *end* of the discussion ("what pigeonhole can I put this in?") but the beginning ("wow, that is messed up. I think I might like it, but I can't begin to understand it. Where can I go to get a better clue? What can I read that will take me closer to the heart of what this is trying to do?")

I started responding to this thread. I'm up to 1159 words so far. Probably best if I post it on my blog and link from here, when I'm done?

Works for me. :) (Flash on Chris Rowe mime...)

Why, oh why, did no one catch that mime on cameraphone? Where was Cory when we needed him?

Ben, I'll grant that there is a use for critical language, certainly. I was speaking from my knee-jerk writer's perspective: "Whyd'ya gotta label everything?" I doubt if any of us start writing by deciding on the genre first, but perhaps I'm wrong. I rarely worry about such things until I'm deciding where to submit something.

But on the critical side, I question whether slipstream, under either definition, is a useful term. I just boned up on the original Sterling essay, and while he makes some interesting points (including questioning the inadequacy of the term itself), the shorthand for what he's saying is essentially what Horton is saying above. Despite its attractiveness, it’s a vague and unsatisfying expression of a genre. Try telling someone that you write fiction that makes people feel strange, and when they ask for clarification, see if you can do so without referencing the genres in some way. The layperson's definitions of fantasy and SF (something like "stories with magic, and/or dragons" and "stories about the future, with spaceships and lasers") are reductive and incomplete, but they do have something at the heart of them; fantasy is about the impossible (as we in the Western world define it), while SF is (largely) about possibilities. Maybe the layperson’s definitions shouldn’t matter, but they do, because once a term takes on a meaning for someone, it’s pretty tough to get them to accept a redefinition. And definitions will always get reduced, because that’s how the human mind works.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the problem with Sterling’s essay, and the term slipstream, is that it doesn’t reduce well. Horton's distillation of "slipstream" is reductive and incomplete, but in some ways it gets at the heart of Sterling's essay, which is something like "There is some interesting writing going on that doesn't fit easily into either the literary or SF/fantasy genres, and here are some examples." That’s not much to go on, because it mostly consists of defining that writing by what it isn’t. If there’s really a need to distinguish what many of us do at least part of the time from what the rest of the field does most of the time, we need better terminology for it.

I don’t think the definitions are really commensurable. Rich Horton’s defining it in terms of content (which is how the SF world tends to draw the SF/non-SF boundary), whereas Sterling’s defining it in terms of effect, or even process.

I think that's kind of Dave means. Back in the Golden Age, the writers talked a lot about science fiction as something that "inspires a sense of wonder," or so they say. Don't hear that any more, or at least I don't. It became reduced to its content.

I certainly don't start with picking a genre or subgenre. But a critical understanding of genres and their history is a tool in the toolbox -- usually framed in a master/apprentice mode. Just like a jazz trumpeter can decide, in the moment, if he wants to play this measure the way Stachmo would, or Miles, or Coleman, it's useful to be able to say, now should I do the PKD thing here, or the Gibson thing, or the Italo Calvino thing, or the Dickens thing? And to know what kind of constraints, reader expectations, costs, and advantages go with it. Like learning chess openings and endgames.

Thinking too hard about it can also get in the way; that's a risk that comes with the territory. YMMV about what you want to consider consciously. But it's useful to be able to say, "hey, I'm looking at the kind of thing you're going after, and listen, have you read Kobo Abe? You ought to steep yourself in his techniques."

SFnal/fantastical intrusions into mundane contexts do not necessarily make me feel strange at all. Did the movie "Ghost" make you feel strange in an eerie, postmodernist way? Did it challenge your ideas about who you are, make you feel like the edges of your reality might unravel at any moment?
How about "Independence Day" with Will Smith? "Love at First Bite"? The last six love stories you read where the lover of the protagonist turns out to be a mermaid, selkie, vampire, robot, or elf? Feeling any eerie postmodernist unease yet?

If you want to see the difference between "literature that makes you feel very strange" (postmodernist, irrealist literature) and "sfnal/fantastical intrusions into familiar contexts" (contemporary fantasy), try these, from Sterling's list:

BANKS, IAIN - The Wasp Factory
FRISCH, MAX - Homo Faber
PYNCHON, THOMAS - The Crying of Lot 49

and he should have included, e.g.
ABE, KOBO - The Box Man
KUNDERA, MILAN - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
BORGES, JORGE LUIS - Borges and I
etc

Genre intrustions? Not a one. But after reading "The Crying of Lot 49", I spent a haunted train ride staring out a dark window into the night, wondering if I was real...

I'm familiar with those works (aside from the Abe and the Frisch), and to me they just underline the original point from Carter Scholz that Sterling was reacting to, that mainstream fiction had co-opted the tropes of genre in order to create some really challenging fiction. I happen to agree with Scholz; I find that feeling of strangeness much more often in mainstream or translated works than in genre fiction, at least at the novel-length.

I understand the distinction Ben and David are trying to make. But the more closely I look at the definitions, the less pronounced the distinction appears. Granted that Horton is talking about trappings to some extent, and Sterling is not. But consider this, from the Sterling: "[I]t is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so." And Horton again: "Slipstream tries to make the familiar strange–-by taking a familiar context and disturbing it with SFnal/ fantastical intrusions." The difference there is pretty subtle; I wonder if that's what Hannah meant when she said she wasn't sure she saw the difference.

Where, in any of those examples I gave, do you see any co-opting of genre tropes?

I'm perfectly willing to admit that some works are both -- that genre tropes are perfectly at home in postmodernist/irreal fiction. But they aren't necessary. And most genre fiction is not distruptive of consensus reality at all -- quite the contrary, by playing its "What if" game it solidifies consensus reality. It says "We all know there are no ghosts; now here's a ghost story". Most genre fiction is deeply epistemologically conservative. *Especially* most "urban fantasy" of the "here's a NYC love story -- with a mermaid!" school -- which seems to be *most* of urban fantasy -- and which, if you read the Horton quote, sounds like it could be *exactly* what he's talking about -- and which seems to be the *opposite* of what Sterling is talking about.

But perhaps that isn't what Horton means by "making the familiar strange". In that case, perhaps he's talking about a subset of irrealist/strange fiction that happens to use genre tropes. But even then, it seems ass-backwards to me to say that that makes this postmodern-alienation fiction a kind of SF. By that logic, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" proves that absurdism is a subset of the Western.

Does anyone know the publication date of Sterling's catscan 5 essay?

It appeared in SF Eye sometime in the 1989 to 1991 range.

Ah, specifically 1989. So, about seventeen years ago.

[Insert train ride home.]

Where, in any of those examples I gave, do you see any co-opting of genre tropes?

None--at least, not exactly. Sorry, there's a lazy guy between my brain and the keyboard. My trouble is I still think of that sort of "What the f&%*?" disconnect as being characteristically SFnal--the false/real police precinct in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, for instance, or multiple examples from Dick. I was trying to say, mainstream produces that strange feeling better than genre used to/should.

Mainly my point in all this (if I still have one) is that I don't think the Sterling definition is much more useful than the Horton interpretation. One is genre-centered and the other is not, but neither is perfect and both are somewhat nebulous.

Just popping in here, first, to be counted as a person of a certain sensibility, because unlike Hannah and Jon, living in any century has always made me feel very strange. Second, I here add two more quotes which may or may not be applicable but which certainly made me smile when I read them tonight in Perry Miller's THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS: A READER.

George Ripley speaking for it:

"...They're writings, accordingly, whenever they appear, will be alive. They will probably offend or grieve many, who make the state of their own minds the criterion of truth; but, at the same time, they will be welcomed by others, who find in them the word which they were waiting to hear spoken."

Nathaniel L. Frothingham speaking again it (kinda):

"It loves to bring together the low and the lofty, the learned and the vulgar, the strange and familiar, the tragic and comic, into rather violent contrasts. We cannot say that it is always clear and sprightly. The words are often unusual, the digressions bewildering, the objects in view not very manifest. But it will seldom fail to repay careful attention."

And to rip off Paula Guran's closing construction, I remain;

Clear and sprightly,

Christopher

Hi, also just popping in. I have no quotes to offer, but I do have a thought or two. I think there's so much ambivalence around the category of "slipstream" because "strange," or genre-stradling is an inadequate description of what's going on. Namely, what often gets called "slipstream" in the genre (and, I think, much of the "trope-borrowing" work outside the genre) seems to me to be work that is not just situated in, or stradling genre. It's work that's also about the genre in a certain way. I hate talk of post-modern "self-awareness" because I'm a post modern baby, and I think the term implies a callousness that is rarely present, but I think there is an astounding amount of play with conventions going on, especially in the work of younger writers. In a quest to make something new, something distinctive, people are writing things that on one level or another want you to notice the ideas they're shuffling together, the conventions and traditions that are colliding -- the selkie in brooklyn, to a T. Or, the baroquely written, chronologically complex story about Amazons on Mars (why does that story not exist?)

When it's only that shuffling, it tends towards the merely "strange" or even boring, because the only pleasure is intellectual, to see the pieces moving. And in general, because it's a technique about play, and about the joy of playing, it often rings false when it takes itself too seriously. But when the juxtapositions become emotional, when the joy and the trickiness come through, it rocks my socks.

--Meghan

This conversation is making me feel very strange. Is it slipstream?

I think I've heard/read that Sterling was less than entirely serious in that essay. Yes? No? I'm not sure it matters, but wondering.

Can we talk about Christopher's 'rigorous?' Please?

I've begun a couple of times now to comment on the definitions and their compatibility or lack thereof. Each time I end up just restating what I think you folks are saying. Quite useful to me, but probably less so to the group. Dave does indeed point to where I see the definitions overlapping--that both are on about weirding up and destabilizing the familiar.

Content versus effect. Okay. Do I misunderstand in guessing that ifff we're working from effect, something's being slipstream is wildly subjective?

I've run myself into a corner now, and am dearly wishing to collect you folks into a room with a chalkboard and plenty of snacks. Also wondering where Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World might fall in this wrangle, if anywhere at all. And very much enjoying this conversation, though I may have to beg off participating on account of brain overload.

I think from the very start, the pun underlying the term collapsed the meaning of "slipstream" into something defined not so much by content, process or effect but by a spatial metaphor of location -- as a sort of stream of fiction that sheers off at the margins of the mainstream and picks up and drags along whatever genre material is in its path. Arguably, you can invert the imagery and see slipstream as the stream of fiction that sheers off at the margins of the *genre* and picks up and drags along whatever *mainstream* material is in its path -- but either way the idea of a turbulent area between mainstream and genre is at the heart of the term as an image. It's just a more dynamic version of the same spatial metaphor that underlies "interstitial", to my mind. And in terms of overlap and perturbation, Horton's idea of "taking a familiar context and disturbing it with SFnal / fantastical intrusions" makes perfect sense to me.

The problem for me is that even considering Sterling's focus on the estrangement effects of the 20th Century, it seems that slipstream, like interstitial, has pretty much always really been defined in relation to mainstream and genre rather than in its own right. The content-based, process-based and effect-based definitions thrown at it have always felt nebulous, descriptive of features rather than definitive of a form. To me a meaningful definition of a literary form has an "if-and-only-if" quality I don't see in either Sterling's or Horton's rules-of-thumb. Darkly absurdist satires such as Catch-22 make me feel strange -- in fact, the estrangement of Yossarian and other characters in relation to the 20th Century in general and WWII in particular is, I think, a key feature of the book, with the fantastic/absurd conceits, the implausible events, intrinsic parts of Heller's attempt to communicate that dissociation to the reader -- but I don't think of Catch-22 as slipstream.

I've grown uncomfortable with the term 'slipstream' over the years because I think such definitions-by-location, while they fairly accurately place this form of fabulation in a metaphoric interzone where mainstream and genre tropes and techniques (contents, processes *and* techniques) commingle, tend to do so from the genre ghetto perspective. Sterling recognises this limitation when he says "nobody calls mainstream 'mainstream' except for us skiffy trolls". I suspect the end result is actually to focus slipstream simply on a subset of SF/F writers and readers who frequent that interzone and know it like the back of their hands; they understand what the term is labelling even if they don't agree on the fuzzy boundaries. The subset of *non-SF/F* writers and readers who might also belong in that metaphoric zone, meanwhile, don't think in terms of mainstream, so this definition-by-location is sort of like giving them meaningless directions - pointing them towards an area between somewhere they're wary of and somewhere they've never heard of. The theoretical interzone thus ends up, practically speaking, as just another wee corner of the ghetto, a cafe where the cool kids hang out and play their music, which those who live uptown know next to nothing of.

I actually wonder if that's part of the reason behind Sterling's obvious reticence with regards to the term.

Wow. Seventeen years of arguing about what slipstream is? How the time flies...!

From my POV, Horton's definition of slipstream (genre intrusion on normal events) is a clear example of the genre attempting to digest slipstream into itself, which, by definition, it simply has to do.

Because sf/f/h defines itself by the presence of magical elements or fantastic occurences, genre readers/critics discovering these traits in other literatures by definition have to view these literatures as extensions or examples of genre fiction. Magic *can't* occur in writing outside the genre without it also being considered *of* the genre. That, or the genre must contemplate the irrelevence of itself - and that's too damn scary. Consequently, 17 years after Sterling defined slipstream as being beyond genre, you get "definition creep," where a magical lit like slipstream is now defined in genre terms.

Can magic intrude on a realist story without it being a genre story? Personally, I think so, and Sterling, even if he was being ironic, seems to suggest at least that much in his definition of slipstream.

"Can magic intrude on a realist story without it being a genre story?"

Absolutely. In fact, I'd argue that it cuts both ways. If you take a story which fits into a particular *realist* genre -- say Kitchen-Sink -- and have magic intrude into it, then couldn't you argue that the story is no longer "genre" *because* of the magic?

David S.:
I still think of that sort of "What the f&%*?" disconnect as being characteristically SFnal...mainstream produces that strange feeling better than genre used to/should.

This is confusing. It sounds sort of like what Sterling was saying in '89; "we're supposed to make people feel strange, but there are people in lit who are now better at it." Is this what you're saying?

---------

Chris: Woot! Go 19th century slipstream! What were they referring to, exactly, in the original context? I'm finding it hard to match what they're saying with "Walden Pond"...

--------

Meghan (hi there, great story on SH, by the way):
Thank you for pulling away from the "between/among genres" business and pointing toward the "playing with tropes such that the reader's awareness that you are playing, but playing seriously, is part of the story's joy." Yes. And, of course, as well as being a fun thing we like to do hereabouts, that is a very old thing. John Gardner, I believe in On Becoming A Novelist, calls it "deconstructionist" fiction and gives the example of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was all about the deconstruction -- a ghost/revenge tragedy with an indecisive hero? A sonnet making fun of sonnets ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun")? etc. The earliest one I can think of is the Book of Jonah, a comic send-up of the prophetic tradition. That's the same spirit you find in Alan Moore's Watchmen, say, or Lethem's Super Goat Man riffing on both Giles Goat Boy and the superhero comics. And you point, rightly, to the sweet spot, where this isn't mere satire, but where it can actually heighten rather than deflate the emotional effect. That interesting boundary between the distanced/ironic/cool/mocking and the emotionally engaged, and how a story that slips from one to the other can sometimes catch you unawares and move you more deeply than one that is frankly sentimental.

--------

Hannah:

I don't know what Sterling meant by the essay, but I read it as a provocative wake-up-call to SF. I reckon he did think there was something going on in the works he cited. I surely don't think he meant to start a new genre, and he must be appalled that the stupid name 'slipstream' has stuck.

Rigorous? Yeah. Not all rigor is the rigor of propositional logic and what my zeppelin-riding alter ego calls "linear causality" (whatever that is). Derrida is as rigorous in his own way as Euclid. But not the same way. What do you want to talk about, about rigorous?

It does seem like if more genre people had a better hold on what "rigorous" meant in the irreal/postmodern literary traditions and were thinking more rigorously about how to combine that with our branch of the literature of the fantastic, that JeremyT and the Nebula panelists would be complaining a *little* less loudly about the "slipstream" slush. Rigor is what's needed, and it's a different rigor. If all this talk of slipstream and interstitial leads to wild experimentation, that's a good thing. But every line of a good story still has a reason for being there, such that if you removed it, there would be a gaping hole. Slipstream is not a license for random spewing. (For an example of what I now think is a lamentable lack of rigor in a surrealist story, I'll (with chagrin) offer my own story "Fig" from LCRW #13; and I'll contrast it with my story "Red Leather Tassels" from F&SF. Both are weird as hell and make no sense from a conventional genre-fantasy point of view, and if you don't like weird as hell you won't like 'em; but I feel like "Fig" is sloppy in a way that RLT is not. Looking back, I mean every line of RLT, where as some of Fig is just me wanking about).

Subjective: yes.

Harukami: yes.

--------

Hal: You pinpoint precisely what's wrong with the term "slipstream", why Sterling must rue the day he jokingly introduced it, and why we'd really be best off abandoning it. Probably it has too much momentum, alas. But I'd much rather regard someone saying the word "slipstream" as a jumping-off point for a discussion. I'd like to steer them away from the skiffy-troll conversation about "the mainstream mixing with genre" (which wasn't even Sterling's point, it was "mainstream works that make you feel weird the way some genre works used to") and towards the idea of the irrealist literary traditions and their intrusions into the popular literatures of the fantastic.

"Darkly absurdist satires" are precisely a part of this tradition. Catch-22 is very much a part of the tradition that is now influencing speculative fiction.

No genres really have if-and-only-if borders, other than very contrived ones. More useful than looking at recipes (rocketship? check. hero and heroine marry at end? check.) is looking at sources of reader pleasure, and the constructions and moves that mediate and produce it. And looking at traditions, which are not if-and-only-if boxes, but things that are handed down, changed by each pair of hands.

Don't believe me? Try to come up with an if-and-if border for Southern Gothic fiction.

---

Barth: Amen.

---

Hal: What is Kitchen-Sink?

There's no a priori reason why SFnal elements can't intrude on a realist story without incorporating it into Our Beloved Genre. It's the way genre aficionados construct their identity that forces the incorporation.

But that same process also makes it a no-win situation: on the one hand Dave Langford castigates Margaret Atwood for claiming that Oryx and Crake isn't SF, and on the other hand he castigates Paul Theroux for daring to write O-Zone.

"couldn't you argue that the story is no longer "genre" *because* of the magic?"

I guess my question is, is the whole point of blending two genres, or even just smushing them together, an attempt to get out of genre all together? Is slipstream ultimately about being Margaret Atwood?

And if that arguement is true, then slipstream is not just diluting the genre -- it's trying desperately to escape it.

I'm highly dubious that that is the case. If slipstream writers wanted out of SF, they wouldn't be publishing (or trying to publish) in the places they do. And moreoever, for someone who wants to push the bounds of science fiction and the fantastic, identifying with a genre offers them the huge benefits of a history to push against and a tradition of that same kind of pushing.

Indeed, when I compare the work of genre-stradlers who publish in SF, and those who don't, often the spec types come out on top, because they seem to have a better grasp of what they're working with. I'm thinking of Matthew Derby's collection "Super Flat Times," which has a couple standout stories, most notably "The Sound Gun," but the speculative elements often feel stale or under-realized, I suspect because he's coming out of Brown's MFA program, in a literary, experimental tradition, not a spec one. At the same point, I think the spec slipstreamers tend towards complacency, thinking this experimentation, and this pushing, within the context of a genre that has often been considered conservative, is the goal of the work, not its beginning. It's an easy trap to fall into (trust me, I know), and I think it's also the trap that sometimes turns people off to "slipstream."

I think it's interesting to note that Kelly Link and Gavin Grant seem to be not thinking so strictly about genre boundaries when including works in "the year's best." Who knows, maybe a kitchen sink story with magic could find its way in there (and if it were, my vote would be for "sea oak" by george saunders, american gritty working class absurdism with zombies.)

Yup. People with content-based definitions of genres are going to find themselves increasingly bewildered. It's all about traditions and communities. Everyone is by now undoubtedly weary of my favorite example (and the principals probably get tired of being compared, but they are both so gracious and cool that they never let on); so I'll just cite it: Kelly Link and Aimee Bender. There. I'm done. :-)

And, who the hell would want to get out of the SF/F genre? The SF/F genre rocks. We have the best parties. And we send each other fan mail. And we write reviews. We zine. And so on. Academia and Manhattan have nothing to compete with our verve, community, energy, and passion.

For me, if I have any selfish, ulterior motive behind my arguments for how "slipstream" gets constructed and construed, it's that I want to be able to write literary-influenced experimentalist fiction and talk about it at cons.

And ditto Meghan that people coming from lit are often hindered by a shallower connection with the tradition's deep thinking behind fantastic and speculative tropes, and skiffy people are often hindered by a superficial grasp of the history of experiments in voice and narrative.

They keep reinventing time travel paradoxes and the retelling of fairy tales; we keep reinventing stream-of-consciousness and unreliable narrators.

But there are an increasing number of people who come out of both traditions; I grew up with an equal passion for Heinlein and Kafka, Bester and Barthelme, Le Guin and Borges, Dark Knight and Maus, Blade Runner and Repo Man....

I think there's so much ambivalence around the category of "slipstream" because "strange," or genre-stradling is an inadequate description of what's going on. Namely, what often gets called "slipstream" in the genre (and, I think, much of the "trope-borrowing" work outside the genre) seems to me to be work that is not just situated in, or stradling genre. It's work that's also about the genre in a certain way.

What Meghan said.

Also, everything Hal said.

And Ben:

It sounds sort of like what Sterling was saying in '89; "we're supposed to make people feel strange, but there are people in lit who are now better at it." Is this what you're saying?

Yup. I've been saying this (or trying to) this entire time.

Hal: You pinpoint precisely what's wrong with the term "slipstream", why Sterling must rue the day he jokingly introduced it, and why we'd really be best off abandoning it.

You weren't talking to me here, but Yup. I think we agree on this, we just got tangled up in minutiae.

This has been the post where I agreed with everyone.

Chiming in with agreement on one minor point from Ben's post: SF conventions have WAY better parties than academic conferences. World Fantasy is usually back-to-back with the History of Science Society annual meeting, and the juxtaposition makes me want to cry.

Maybe we should crash the HSS meeting and get a party suite.

["we're supposed to make people feel strange, but there are people in lit who are now better at it." Is this what you're saying?] Yup.

Ah. Well, I think that was more true in 1989 than it is now. "The Specialist's Hat" and "Identity Is A Construct" made me feel very strange. So, in a different but related way, do some ostensibly core-genre works that trigger the same sensibility, like "The Voluntary State". It's interesting to look at what's going on in the latter case: it's like the intrusion of irrealist fictions into the popular literature of the fantastic (which, with gritted teeth, I'm willing to call "slipstream") has expanded our tolerance for a blissful, immersive jouissance of not-knowing-what's-going on, allowing a work like VS, which actually has naturalistic/speculative/logical underpinnings, to delay the moment of figuring-it-all-out long enough that from the point of view of reader pleasure, it's almost a surrealist story.

(Although, of course, this move has a long tradition in SF too, going back at least to Bester and popular, I guess, in the New Wave -- but VS feels somehow different?)

I agree that all those stories have that effect, and everyone here could, I'm sure, name many more. I think it's an exciting time to be working in and around the genre. But one thing that's interesting is that those works and probably most of the works we would come up with would be short fiction. The--sigh--"slipstream" novel still seems to be far more common outside the genre than in. Why is that?

Because publishing a novel is a lot riskier (financially) than publishing a short story? Because readers tend to find novels by the marketing category they’re shelved in, whereas we tend to find short stories by the brand identity of the venue that publishes them?

Because publishing a novel is a lot riskier (financially) than publishing a short story?

Sure, but are those pressures working against genre writers more than against literary/mainstream/your-arbitrary-and-meaningless-label-here writers?

Because readers tend to find novels by the marketing category they’re shelved in, whereas we tend to find short stories by the brand identity of the venue that publishes them?

By "readers" do you mean readers outside the genre, or people who don't read much short fiction, or both, or neither?

I think I mean both. Or both plus everybody else, too.

I think the pressures do work more against genre writers, because the one thing you can say about the “Fiction & Literature” section of the bookstore is that the books in it don’t have to be about anything in particular — fundamentally, it’s not defined by content but by marketing approach. So even a blatant Heinlein homage like The Sparrow (okay, I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean) can live there if it’s got a matte-surface cover and Ballantine doesn’t give it the Del Rey imprint.

Whoa there, bucko. Can you explain to me how _The Sparrow_ is a Heinlein homage?

Ah. I thought you were making a "readers"/"we" distinction, but I think I misunderstood.

And you make a good point about about-ness. The Porcelain Dove is another example of a book that likely did much better outside the genre than it would have in, because it didn't have to live up to the expectations of the fantasy readership.

Maybe part of the impulse in genre to define slipstream as them-doing-what-we-do is driven by frustration and envy, not just because it gets more attention outside the genre but because it's harder to do similar things within the genre and make money i.e. sell novels?

I think you're on to something with the frustration and envy. There's also something about the fact that a lot of SF concepts are implemented badly by mainstream writers, who sometimes use them as metaphorical devices in such a way that they don't make sense when taken on their own terms. But there's also a lot of resistance from genre readers when non-genre writers do things that are actually fine when taken on their own terms but problematic when put against the backdrop of decades of SF writing...

I'm starting to use terms that may only make sense to me. Backtrack. When I say "on their own terms", I just mean, does this concept make sense within the world of the story? Because SF readers (rightfully) expect that the concept will make sense within the world of the story. SF readers often, though, expect the concept to also make sense in the context of the entire history of SFnal treatment of the concept. (Because I have _The Sparrow_ on the brain now, I'm reminded of hearing a lot of SF readers complain that the book sucked because the protagonists clearly had never heard of the Prime Directive. And no, I'm not making that up.)

Whoa there, bucko. Can you explain to me how The Sparrow is a Heinlein homage?

I knew someone would call me on that. :) Okay, homage probably isn’t the right word (and it’s really only the second quarter or middle third or so of the book that strikes me that way) but the “small closely-knit band of people who already happen to be our protagonists constitute entire starship crew” motif struck me as very Heinleinesque. And more importantly, much more solidly in-genre than something like Gun, With Occasional Music.

Ah. I thought you were making a "readers"/"we" distinction, but I think I misunderstood.

Yeah, sorry, I meant “we readers... but we....” (I started out referring to readers as “they,” which would’ve been clearer, but not very nice.)

An in-genre slipstream novel is likely to be published with the same marketing strategy as, say, American Gods: not published by a genre label (AG was under William Morrow), not labelled on the spine as Fantasy, but aggressively marketed in Locus, reviewed and awarded by the genre press, etc. So was it published in-genre or not? Blurry border, meaningless question; it's a spectrum, not a sharp demarcation.

Anyone read Cloud Atlas? Isn't that a case in point?

(And I'm curious about the Heinlein thing too. It does seem like an homage to Golden Age SF, though, in many ways. Blish is usually the antecedent cited, though I believe MDR that she hadn't read A Case For Conscience. GVG says that in his memory, The Sparrow only started to take off, sales-wise after it won the Tiptree and started to get in-genre recognition...)

But there's also a lot of resistance from genre readers when non-genre writers do things that are actually fine when taken on their own terms but problematic when put against the backdrop of decades of SF writing...

And when they do things that might not measure up to the best that SF writers can do, but that would nonetheless slide completely under the radar if they were done by somebody with solid O.B.G. credentials.

Oh, and the Prime Directive people need to go back and read H. Beam Piper.

Couldn't one extrapolate these two different quotes--approaches to fabulism (though certainly not the only ones)--in terms of nineteenth century literature, as different strands that have always coexisted as different approaches? (E.g., Poe and H. James, respectively, in terms of the different definitions. I tried to shoehorn Hawthorne into this, but don't know if I can). And perhaps the advent of early 20th century genre-fying--the graft into the conventions of adventure fiction--muddled the picture, which people are only beginning to untangle now.

This is a very rough flow, which I urge people to tear to pieces:

(Borges uses Poe as an ur-text) --> using Borges as ur-text --> grafting different strand of Poe's legacy (genre-fied) onto Borges

(Carver uses Jamesean(?)/O'Connor texts as ur-texts, shearing out the fabulist elements) ---> Using Carver as ur-text --> grafting fabulism onto Carver

I think you're on to something.

There's also something about the fact that a lot of SF concepts are implemented badly by mainstream writers, who sometimes use them as metaphorical devices in such a way that they don't make sense when taken on their own terms.

But this is another complaint that was truer in 1989. Mainstream writers our age grew up immersed in a cultural bath of science fiction, are often either genre fans or know genre fans, and regard the previous generation's sneering at popular forms as obnoxious and boring posturing. So when they use genre tropes, they tend to do it right; when they use them metaphorically and eschew logic, they signal that that's what their doing in a way that works -- at least for me.

I'm thinking of Lethem, Chabon, Einstein's Dreams, Time's Arrow, The Time Traveler's Wife, Aimee Bender e.g. "The Healer"... I could go on and on.

I'm reminded of hearing a lot of SF readers complain that the book sucked because the protagonists clearly had never heard of the Prime Directive.

Not that anyone on Star Trek has... :-)

(I feel like you're being pretty generous in calling these individuals "SF readers", but they're your friends, so....)

"small closely-knit band of people who already happen to be our protagonists constitute entire starship crew"

(Ah, okay, with that explanation I get the Heinlein thing -- you're not thinking of classic adult Heinlein, but of the juveniles, The Number of the Beast, etc.)

Alan, that's very much what I was going to say in the mammoth essay I announced above and haven't posted yet, but you've said it better and more succintly... :-)

Is it really fair to class Lethem as someone in the mainstream who's being embraced by SF readers? Because my impression of him has always been that he's a big ol' convention-going SF writer-geek who slid over to the mainstream lit-fic crowd only fairly recently.

Don't forget, the important distinctions are all social. It's not what's on your bookjacket that matters, it's who you hang out with. :)

Damn, you people are prolific.

I'm gonna jump way back to David's original posting and respond belatedly to it even though the conversation has long since moved on:

I would argue that "slipstream" has been an ill-defined hodgepodge of several overlapping concepts ever since Sterling's essay; if you look at his booklist, it includes plenty of stuff that has nothing to do with that 20th-century-weirdness definition, and in fact I would argue that the essay itself provides multiple definitions. In my 2001 editorial "Where Does Genre Come From?", I noted that I thought "fiction with fantastical elements that's published in a marketing category other than speculative fiction" was fairly close to one of Sterling's definitions. I added: "Sterling says that on being given a vague definition of the term, any SF reader can immediately add books to the slipstream reading list, but I think that's partly because there are several overlapping definitions, some of which are very vague."

...Re the Prime Directive and The Sparrow: I may actually have been one of the people who said that to Susan (or at least something vaguely like it). If so, I didn't mean it in the sense of "They're part of the Star Trek universe so they have to obey its rules"; I meant "Surely a group of smart people who are going to travel through space to contact an alien civilization (a) should realize that there's a large body of fiction and theory about alien contact; (b) should know that there's a large body of historical fact about contact with foreign cultures; and (c) even if they're unfamiliar with all of that work, should be able to figure out for themselves that different cultures are different." That was, for me, the main flaw in an otherwise very enjoyable book. (I know others had other problems with it; I seem to recall that Ted hated the physics, for example.)

Sure, sure, on Lethem. I think his first published story was in Aboriginal SF.

As for this:

...it's like the intrusion of irrealist fictions into the popular literature of the fantastic (which, with gritted teeth, I'm willing to call "slipstream") has expanded our tolerance for a blissful, immersive jouissance of not-knowing-what's-going on, allowing a work like VS, which actually has naturalistic/speculative/logical underpinnings, to delay the moment of figuring-it-all-out long enough that from the point of view of reader pleasure, it's almost a surrealist story...

I have it on the best authority that "VS" is really just a story about a malevolent super computer bent on taking over the world at the head of an army of giant robots.

And on all the rest of this, it's fun to watch and read these discussions when they don't get acrimonious. So long as all y'all are still spending time writing fiction for later generations to argue about (in addition to writing MolesPosts, I mean).

Susan, ok on Lethem, but that too is a continuum. Chabon grew up reading SF and comics, and did his Locus interview. Aimee Bender grew up on MZB and her fiancee made her read Man in the High Castle. Martin Amis's dad was a science fiction fan. My point is that a lot of the people publishing in lit -- not sneaking in, either, but at the heart of contemporary lit fiction, identifying there, and deservedly so -- are genre fans. I don't know how many of them go to cons, but then, I never went to cons before I started publishing SF either.

Oh, here's another name for you, a hot new literary writer who has never published any SF, but who I hear has an interest in the genre -- Mary Anne Mohanraj. :-)

Actually, Jed, that was one of my favorite things about the Sparrow. It offered a model of alien contact which has a long history in the real world, but is rarely seen in SF, and justified it very soundly. The model is the Vatican's model at its best -- as seen in, say, the movie The Mission and in Fathers And Crows. It's the "dive in, be guided by faith, offer everything you have, engage completely, trust in divine wisdom" model. The whole point is that the Sparrow's crew got there first because they *didn't* deliberate and consider, they didn't try to maintain critical distance, they didn't try and figure out what would be prudent. They beat the anthropologists, militarists, politicos, and xenocultural conservationalists precisely because their model -- the Vatican's tried and true model -- is immediate, total, unhesitating engagement. What happens to the protagonist is not a regrettable result of bad planning -- it's an intended, inevitable consequence of this kind of exploration. Whether he knows it or not, he's sent as a sacrifice, a martyr.

It's actually quite an effective strategy of colonization. While the nation-states were using good judgement and force to create colonies, the Church was using martyrs and teaching -- as well as the point of a sword and massacres and turning a blind eye to slavery, to be sure -- but when the colonial empires got thrown out on their asses, the people left behind were no longer Spanish, French, or Portugese, but they were largely Catholic. It's not as dumb as it seems. MDR really got it, and I thought that was the one original thing she added to the history of first-contact literature.

Yes to "slipstream" as a mess of incompatible definitions, from the moment Sterling spawned it.

I think his first published story was in Aboriginal SF.

Which reminds me of another lit writer, Tod Goldberg, who I found through an Aboriginal SF story. The border guards have all gone home, folks.

I have it on the best authority that "VS" is really just a story about a malevolent super computer bent on taking over the world at the head of an army of giant robots.

Yeah, yeah, get in line behind the rest of the critics. :->

Show of hands: about when in that story did y'all figure out that that's what VS was about?

(It's never acrimonious chez Moles... as for spending time writing fiction... *ahem* *ahem*... gee, nice weather we're having, huh?)

Well, I haven't read The Sparrow (shit) but I have been eyeing it on the library shelves for awhile. I think its cross-genre appeal to this little reader would have a lot to do with 1. pretty cover and 2. a story that is clearly about christianity and its colonial pretentions in a way that SF isn't often literally about -- many many many alegories, but few actual jesuits no? -- whereas there is LOADS of "mainstream" stuff wading in those waters.

But back to the question of the "slipstream" novel -- I think one problem might be that much of what gets called "slipstream" IN SF involves mucho mucho language play, play that works well in short stories, where a good amount of the pleasure is learning these new verbal rules, but not so well in a novel, where either the rules get learned a third of the way through, and then there's two thirds of a book left to be held together by plot and talking weird. Or else, the work features the kind of genre play that lends itself to short, minimalist narratives, but not to the longer bits of novels.

I think also there's a possibility that, since this "slipstream" phenom is more common amongst younger genre writers, the novels just haven't happened yet. They're happening in the mainstream, because slipstreamy mainstream is about using genre in literary style writing, thereby pushing the bounds of what the writing can do. "Slipstream" in genre is much more often about pushing the stories and tropes themselves, which is a harder trick when you're writing long. There are undoubtedly people toiling away right now, trying to make these concepts work in the long form.

Chabon and Lethem are slipstreamy as all get-out. They'd never want to be called that. But goddamn, who would? Slipstream, ultimately, is just a wussy term. We should be drawing names less from wishy-washy words (slip, stream) and more from monster trucks (krusher, inferno).

Also, I like parties. Especially parties in hotel suites with bathtubs full of beer. That's the only reason I'm here.

I'm gonna write a paper about the use of color in O Brother Where Art Thou now. If you think everyone's freaking out about slipstream, you should see the tizzy over Digital Intermediates in the film industry. Every color can be changed? Every lighting choice tweaked? Our art form is losing all its integrity! It's being diluted! It makes us feel, well... strange!!!

Okay, so Ben just said what I had to say about the Sparrow, but I believe we were posting mostly simultaneously. So. What that guy said.

I hereby rebaptize "slipstream" fiction "infernocrusher" fiction, per Ms. McCarron.

I hereby rebaptize "slipstream" fiction "infernocrusher" fiction, per Ms. McCarron.

Hear, hear!

There's a market I'd like to see: The Magazine of Infernocrusher Fiction. Probably have one interesting slush pile.

I think it's "infernokrusher" fiction, actually. And I like it. Lots.

I started trying to come up with variations on “Truckasaurus” and, you know, it’s amazing how wimpy and public-library-kids’s-section they all start to sound as soon as you replace “truck” with something literary.

There's a market I'd like to see: The Magazine of Infernocrusher Fiction. Probably have one interesting slush pile.

Well, Jon, every movement needs a journal to spearhead it. And if you're interested in reading slush . . .

And Alan's right; it looks better with the k. Infernokrushers unite!

My cover letters will all have flames.

my favorite thing about this "infernokrusher" concept is now there are all sorts of new debates to be had. Instead of "Well, where are we slipping? Are we beaver-like dam builders, or just clumsy waders?" we can now ask "Are we glad things are on fire? Do we like to Krush?"

I'm aware that I'm crashing the party, here, but as one of those folks browsing the shelves at the library (that is, without a writer's, editor's, or even a superfan's investment in any aspect of the business), I must say that in all seriousness a blurb saying that so-and-so is one of the best of the slipstream writers will incline me to put the book back (not for any good reason, as I have no idea whatsoever what the term means), whilst a blurb saying that so-and-so is one of the best of the infernokrusher writers would definitely result in the book being carried to circulation (if not eventually read).
I can't really explain why I dislike the term slipstream, as I don't think it tells me anything about the sort of book I'm likely to find. I have finally started reading Kavalier and Clay after however long, and of course it was the sort of book I always would have liked. Not that it was marketed as 'slipstream', but I am just close enough to the edges of fandom to have heard the word associated with the book (possibly in error?). Anyway, I vaguely have a sense books described as slipstream have weak plots; this is (again) not based on any actual works or reviews or essays, but on a kind of cultural osmosis, something like the way that most people get a sense of what 'post-modern' means.
By the way, my library does not separate genres on the shelves, but it does tack a helpful sticker on the spine with a spaceship or a dragon (or a magnifying glass or a rose, etc). I actually do make note of the stickers as I browse, so to that extent the genre markings 'help'. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has no sticker at all, nor (I think) does Oryx and Crake. That said, the stickers are in a general sort of way content-based rather than style-based, or are (I think) meant to be. I find the idea of a style-based (or effect-based) sticker system entertainingly impractical.
Just my thoughts, anyway.
Thanks,
-V.

Jed said, regarding The Sparrow:

(I know others had other problems with it; I seem to recall that Ted hated the physics, for example.)

In case Jed is referring to me, let me just say that while there's no real thought given to the difficulties of interstellar travel in The Sparrow, I don't actually consider that a signficant problem of the book. My primary complaint is that much of the plot -- the characters being trapped on the planet's surface, which leads to most everything else -- is the result of one thing: the shuttle pilot went for a joyride but forgot to fill the tank up with gas. All the characters repeatedly talk about God's plan, but I don't think it's fair to put the blame on God because you ignored your fuel gauge.

Twenty years from now, writers may quibble over whether a story is *really* IK fiction if it takes place in a universe without Hell or the mortal fear of being krushed, because those philosophical ramifcations were clearly implied when the term was coined.

Core Infernokrusher fiction would never forget to fill up the tank. Infernokrusher is always intense.

Dave, I'm not spearheading anything. Not unless I get an office coated in flame retardant.

We must now all swear a solemn vow to say everywhere with a straight face, "Slipstream? Never heard of it. Do you know about infernokrusher fiction, though? Exciting new movement."

We can do this, people.

Leave it to a bunch of SF writers to take a discussion about the problems in attempting to define categories of literature, and discover the exciting solution is to make up more categories.

Krush on!

I'm down. That and the 9/11 (White House saved by gay rugby player) thing.

I can just picture it:

Interviewer: "Tell me about your writing."

Ben: "Well, I never was much of a plot rhino. I'm definitely a style monkey, notorious with a capital 'N'. Most of my writing has been in the traditions of the New Weird, the New Strange, and of course, Amorphous Blob. But now I'm very excited about this new movement, Infernokrusher fiction. It's stunning. Should take us in exciting new directions."

Cool! My book has a burning orange flame-effect (inferno!) cover with a strange cave-painting ghost-hand (open, palm-out, but perhaps... perhaps... just about to clamp shut and *krush*!)... so it will sit perfectly within this new and exciting Infernokrusher movement.

I had been intending to start throwing the term "Indie Fiction" around as my own way of referring to this slipstream / interstitial / cross-genre *stuff* by analogy to music and movies. Indie Fiction is to Genre SF or Fantasy as Indie Music is to Stadium Rock or Heavy Metal. Indie Fiction is to mainstream as Indie cinema is to Art House. And so on. Largely, though, I like the term because it sounds vaguely hip and means very little.

Now, though, "Infernokrusher" is clearly the way to go. Burn, baby, burn! Genre inferno!

Look, young, dewy-eyed, infernokrusher people: if you coin some neologism as a critic, and people still cite that SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, you don't 'rue' the damn 'day!' That means you've BECOME CANONICAL. You're a classic, a definitive figure! You should live so long. Really.

"Infernokrusher" sounds to me like a coinage with 21st-Century legs. It's got that fierce Moslem fundie with a dynamite beltpack thing going on, so it's very of-the-moment. Not that I'd want to confusingly conflate genre tropes with the underlying motifs of global culture -- heaven forbid that I should imply that there's even more going on than you suspect -- but, well, if you want to get cited in 17 years, that's kind of the trick of it, really.

9/11, WTC, Shock and Awe, Infernokrusher: hey, it's your world: run with it.

Hmmm.

So if, in 17 years, CNN is talking about George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden as the twin initiators of the Infernokrusher movement, or era, in modern history, will Alan De Niro rue Thursday, May 5, 2005 -- or at least 1:12 PM of that day? (It's the 21st century, man -- we rue minutes)

Will Meghan McCarron and Dave Schwartz rue their antecedent neologistical comments?

Will Meghan's question "Are we glad things are on fire?" come back to haunt us, as the fundamental question of the era?

Hmmmm.... I think I see what you mean about the rueing, Bruce; it's sort of irrelevant to rue or not rue, if you are just an unwitting pawn of the Zeitgeist anyway...

I do like the idea of being a dewy-eyed infernokrusher person, though. That has a ring to it.

Really, the only thing I can think of to say is: I love the Internet.

I do like the idea of being a dewy-eyed infernokrusher person, though.

'Dewy-eyed' is so slipstream.

I would just like to note that, according to the timestamp, I have transcended time and space.

Go me! Go me! Go me!

By which I mean, I can't tell time.

Go me!

Now that, Hannah, was slipstream.

:-D

Check out the "Karbon Krusher" entry in the Viridian Hot Rod contest. Maybe this is Infernokrusher cover art.

it's sort of irrelevant to rue or not rue, if you are just an unwitting pawn of the Zeitgeist anyway...

Okay, now I'm seeing pulp possibilities here:

---

"They thought the literary movement they had invented was their own...

But they were only...

PAWNS OF THE TIME-GHOST!!!!"