Chrononautic Log: infernokrusher

October 12, 2005

So: Trying to put together a guerilla Twenty Epics reading for World Fantasy. Problem: Venue. Ideas, so far:

• Michelangelo’s coffee shop: Advantages: No friction with hotel or with concom. Disadvantages: No alcohol. Might need permission.
• Hotel room: Advantages: Easy to do. Disadvantages: Crowded, less convenient for audience, could generate noise complaints.
• Second-floor conference room hijacking: Advantages: Convenient for audience. Disadvantages: Could collide with official programming.
• Party coup d’etat: Advantages: Cheeky, beer-friendly. Disadvantages: Staging an event in the middle of someone else’s event always confusing. Don’t know if there are any good target parties.
• Hotel lobby invasion: Advantages: Cheeky, public. Disadvantages: Hotel might get irritated if we start handing out free beer.

Other thoughts?

Comments (12)

August 11, 2005

Things I learned on the way to Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• Changing clothes in an airplane toilet takes longer than you think. But it sure beats the alternative.
• St. Pancras Station is always under construction.
• Shane Warne is one hell of a bowler. (His new hair plugs look pretty good, too.)
• On the train, when you close your eyes for a short nap, and wake up in love with the girl pushing the coffee trolley, it’s ’cause you’re jet-lagged.

Things I learned in Scotland:

• It’s not just London that at 5:30 in the morning looks like the set of 28 Days Later. (I blame the tower blocks.)
• Best UK con custom e-var: Free drinks for every panelist in the Green Room before each panel. We need to import this one, guys.
• Irn-Bru tastes better than you’d think.
• Scotch doesn’t kill germs. Tequila kills germs. (Thanks, Gwenda!)
• You can get away with bringing overheads to a panel, if they’re good overheads.
• It’s still possible to have a good panel about slipstream, even if infernokrusher only comes up once or twice. (Thanks, Hal!)
• I should have listened to everybody who told me to read Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania.
• Ben and I, in combination, are too loud. (Yeah, I know I should have known this one already.)
• Christopher Rowe really is a genius.

Things I learned on the way back from Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• However, it has the nicest immigration officers.
• And the beer’s not bad, either.

But:

• WisCon is still the Best Con.

Comments (14)

June 16, 2005

And further convince me that we’ve tapped into something that’s not only seriously funny but hilariously serious:

It seems almost banal for me to say — as if it’s news to anyone — that there’s something of a tendency for put-upon geeks to revel in revenge fantasies of intricate detail, imagining sublime immolations and sledgehammers upon skulls . . .

But that’s not infernokrusher, to my mind; infernokrusher doesn’t give a shit about such petty rationales as revenge. Infernokrusher takes that little posturing puerile ego in its black trenchcoat out behind the bike sheds, gives him a cigarette and says, settle down, pumpkin. It’s no fun blowing stuff up if you do it out of anger.

No. Infernokrusher finds that sorta psychological self-abusing and self-excusing wish-fulfillment wank just . . . well, dull.

— Hal Duncan, “Why Do I Infernokrush?”

(H)al, I think you’ve just posted either the introduction to, or the lead-off essay for, the first issue of Burn Ward: Dispatches from the Infernokrusher Frontier.

Comments (1)

June 5, 2005

Comments (8)

June 4, 2005

Due to a packing error, it looks as though I’ll be carrying my laptop back to Seattle in its natural state; so it occurs to me that I ought to get this into the Google caches and the Wayback Machine before I go, for posterity.

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Update: Added slogan, courtesy of Mike Ford.

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Notes toward an Infernokrusher manifesto

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).

— Meghan McCarron

Literary excellence through superior horsepower.

— John M. Ford

Catch phrases

• Explosion is the new transgression. Demolition is the new deconstruction. — Benjamin Rosenbaum
• How far is the distance between infernos and krushing? — an Infernokrusher koan by Dora Goss
• 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?” — Meghan McCarron
• More than the death of the Reader, Infernokrusher prizes the sudden, violent dismemberment of the Reader
• Monster truck fiction — ‘soft infernokrusher’ — rolls across genre boundaries . . . and krushes them
• Infernokrusher fiction explodes stagnant genre conventions, e.g., that it’s not okay to have all your characters run over by a monster truck in what would seem to be the middle of the story
• Infernokrusher is a violently anti-materialist movement, regardless of the materials involved
• While other attitudes to art yearn to communicate truths, to move people, to challenge, or to entertain, infernokrusher art wants to blow stuff up
• It is important to note that an infernokrusher sensibility does not require literal infernos or crushing
• Core Infernokrusher fiction would never forget to fill up the tank. — Karen Meisner

Redefinitions, subgenres, philosophemes

• slipstream -> proto-infernokrusher fiction
• slipstream : infernokrusher :: uniformitarianism : catastrophism
• Elemental truth in infernokrusher fiction: Nature crushes stuff too
• Religious truth in infernokrusher fiction: God likes to blow stuff up
• Innocence in infernokrusher fiction: e.g., eight year olds natural krushers
• The ultimate ambition of infernokrusher art is to blow up the world
• Heretical spinoff: slow infernokrusher fiction
• Important subgenre or trope in feminist infernokrusher fiction: blowing up Barbie
• Infernokrusher critiquing involves burning manuscripts and melting them to slag (the more positive reviews are more explosive)
• Resolved: Hot pink — color of infernokrushing

Pieces, presses, publications, organizations

• Ignitrix: (1) a goth, feminist Infernokrusher ’zine (2) sobriquet applied to Meghan McCarron as coiner of the term “infernokrusher”
• Thrown Down A Well Still Burning: a moody, “soft infernokrusher’ poetry ’zine
• Burning Hammer Review: Academic “soft infernokrusher” journal, probably from the University of Pittsburgh
• Burn Ward: Dispatches From The Infernokrusher Frontier: an anthology of Infernokrusher criticism
• Monster Truck Press
• Twelve Ton Press
• Megaton Press
• Swan Inferno!!!!!: the canonical Infernokrusher Ballet
• Blowtorch!: the canonical Infernokrusher Broadway musical
• Hammer and Napalm: Infernokrusher eating club at Princeton
• McSweeney’s #27 — the Infernokrusher Issue: comes soaked in gasoline, with a match

Deviations and faux-infernokrusher tropes:

• infernoes/krushing only as metaphor
• infernoes/krushing as resolution rather than violent irruption — trappings, but lacks sensibility

The infernokrusher coat of arms

• Monster truck, in flagrante, rampant
• Motto: Da ogne bocca dirompea co’ denti un peccatore

The first Infernokrusher poem

I blew up the plums
that were in the icebox
and which you were probably saving for breakfast
forgive me
I like fire

— Dora Goss

[wiscon]

Comments (67)

June 3, 2005

It was only a matter of time before someone rammed Infernokrusher into the Mundane SF movement, but Hal Duncan has done it with exceptional style and grace:

The Mundanes say:

That interstellar travel remains unlikely. Warp drives, worm holes, and other forms of faster-than-light magic are wish fulfillment fantasies rather than serious speculation about a possible future.

We of the Infernokrusher Movement say:

We laugh maniacally in the face of serious speculation. We will have warp drives . . . on our MONSTER TRUCKS! We will have worm holes . . . and bullet holes, and drill holes, and holes punched through the very fabric of the spacetime continuum by the giant fist of MECHAGODZILLA! These are not wish fulfillment fantasies. These are metaphors for the destruction that is an integral part of every possible future.

And more importantly, they’re fun.

This Is What We’re Saying.™

Because Infernokrusher is all about the fun.

Comments (4)

May 4, 2005

1. Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams (non-fiction)
2. A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren
3. I See By My Outfit, Peter S. Beagle (non-fiction)
4. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
5. Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
6. Looking for History, Anna Guillermoprieto (non-fiction)
7. “The Demons Tormenting Untersturmführer Hans Otto Graebner,” Robert Girardi
8. Dispatches, Michael Herr (non-fiction)
9. The History of Bombing and Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist (non-fiction)
10. The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard
11. “Shore Leave,” Tom Waits
12. Pontius Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, Ann Wroe (non-fiction)

Comments (3)

May 3, 2005

When, exactly, did “slipstream” stop meaning

a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility [Bruce Sterling, Catscan 5]

and start meaning stories that

feel a bit like magical realism . . . [that] make the familiar strange — by taking a familiar context and disturbing it with SFnal / fantastical intrusions [Rich Horton, quoted in Asimov’s]

?

’Cause that seems to be what it means now. And it’s not cutting it for me.

Comments (84)

March 22, 2005

Update: The actual Spinrad article is up on the Asimov’s site. (Thanks to Matt Cheney for the link; see also Matt’s comments there.)

On first skim, I actually think Spinrad’s right about the difference between science fiction and fantasy; I just don’t think it has the kind of world-shattering importance that he ascribes to it.

Oh, and on a side note, I’d love to see the Stable Strategies press kit that he describes, or something like it, if anyone’s got one.

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So, it’s agreed that SF is dead, or anyway on its last legs. But the diagnoses of the cause of death, and the prescriptions for how to revivify the corpse, couldn’t be much farther apart, or even much less related to one another:

Matt Cheney, “The Old Equations,” Strange Horizons:

Instead of encouraging writers who have a sense of the history and substance of genre SF to experiment with form, language, and even the basic meaning of fiction, [today’s SF markets give] the message (most loudly through rejection slips) that to write science fiction means to write as if nothing but the gadgets had changed since John Campbell’s heyday at Astounding in the 1940s. Consequently, the very writers who could revitalize SF and make it a less moribund genre go off and do other things and find audiences that actually appreciate their creativity.

Shorter Norman Spinrad, via Paul Melko:

SF is the visionary literature, the only literature that requires the reader to “create belief.” This is opposed to fantasy where no suspension of disbelief is required; fantasy is clearly not meant to model the real world, so the reader can breeze through places where it doesn’t. . . . SFWA . . . allowing the SF in its name to mean Science Fiction and Fantasy: a portent of doom to the genre!

All about form? Or all about content? Who’s right? I’m inclined to think they’re both wrong, but maybe it’s all three of us. Thoughts?

Comments (81)

November 25, 2003

While we’re talking interstitiality, the Guardian has posted undersung genius Christopher Priest’s top 10 slipstream books list:

1. The Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges
2. Crash, J.G. Ballard
3. The Passion of New Eve, Angela Carter
4. Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
5. The Sea Came in at Midnight, Steve Erickson
6. Light, M. John Harrison
7. Ice, Anna Kavan
8. Being There, Jerzy Kosinski
9. The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Steven Millhauser
10. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz

Interestingly (to me, anyhow), I haven’t read any of these — though I’ll bet I’ve read most of the stories in the Borges collection. I did try to read Light, but gave up a third of the way into it — sorry, Mr. Harrison! Ballard’s short fiction I’ve enjoyed, when it doesn’t too quickly date itself, but I’ve been slow on catching up with the novels. As for Coupland, while I dug Generation X and Microserfs, back in the day, I couldn’t get into Shampoo Planet; and I lost interest in Girlfriend in a Coma once I found out that it was actually about, y’know, the narrator’s girlfriend, like, in a coma.

Most of the rest on Priest’s list I’ve barely heard of, if I’ve heard of them at all. Anyone know more?

(Courtesy of Bruce Sterling.)

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