Slipstream, the Genre That Isn’t.

James Patrick Kelly | John Kessel

Mist and Wishful Thinking
When we were first approached to edit this book, we had to ask ourselves a hard question. Did we actually believe that there was such a thing as slipstream? We knew that for many writers and critics we trusted, the answer was no. Those who would deny slipstream argue that a genre can’t be defined by what it is not. Slipstream can’t just be magic realism sliced away from its South American roots. Slipstream can’t just be a kind of fantasy where nothing is explained, or science fiction where the science doesn’t have to make sense. To assert that it inhabits the spaces between otherwise-accepted genres and realistic fiction is to say it is nowhere.

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Call of the Ghetto
The term slipstream was coined by Bruce Sterling in a column he wrote for a fanzine called SF Eye in 1989. Sterling was attempting to understand a kind of fiction that he saw increasingly in science fiction publications and elsewhere. He quite rightly asserted that it was not true science fiction, and yet bore some relation to science fiction. In a key passage of his essay, Sterling wrote,

This genre is not category SF; it is not even “genre” SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against concensus reality. It is a fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a “sense of wonder” or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction.
Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth centure makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of a Postmodern Sensibility… for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books “slipstream.”

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The problem is that since Sterling coined it, the term has become smeared across several meanings. It is now a would-be literary form, a publishing category, and most recently a fluid but discrete group of writers who recognize in one another a common sensibility.

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The concept of slipstream is a fuzzy set; it is easier to point to examples than to create”if-and-only-if” definitions. So take the following discussion as descriptive rather than definitive.
John Clute, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, in an entry on ”Slipstream SF” took the term literally, imagining slipstream to be mainstream writers following in the wake of SF, being drawn along by the force of its concepts. Clute preferred the term fabulation, popularized by Robert Scholes in the late 1970s to describe the work of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, etc. Elsewhere in the encyclopedia, Clute writes intelligently about fabulation and identifies a thread within it that relates directly to slipstream as we see it: that such fiction abandons the assumption, common to both realism and science fiction, that the world can be “seen whole, and described accurately in words.” Slipstream raises fundamental epistemological and ontological questions about reality that most other kinds of fiction are ill prepared to address.
We chose to call this book Feeling Very Strange for just this reason. While we will argue that slipstream has som identifiable attributes that might well be the beginnings of genre, it is primarily at this point in its evolution a psychological and literary effect that cuts across genre, in the same way that the effect of horror manifests in many different kinds of writing. Where horror is the literature of fear, slipstream is the literature of cognitive dissonance and of strangeness triumphant.
According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, we are often faced with competing and even contradictory cognitions, which can take the form of assumptions, emotions, values, and the like. This creates psychic dissonance, which we naturally seek to reduce. How long can you stand to both love and hate an abusive father? How can you rejoice in the success of a friend when it comes at your expense? If you believed destroying weapons of mass destruction justified the invasion of Iraq, how do you feel about the war now? If God created everything, then who created God? And don’t even try to think about what happened before the Big Bang.

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F. Scott. Fitzgerald once wrote that “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and still function.” However, it is our fate to live in a time when it takes a first-rate mind just to get through the day. We have unprecedented access to information; cognitive dissonance is a banner headline in our morning paper and radiates silently from our computer screen. We contend that slipstream is an expression of the zeitgeist: it embraces cognitive dissonance rather than trying to reduce it.

How to Be Strange
So then, if slipstream is a literary effect rather than a fully developed genre, how is it accomplished?
1. Slipstream violates the tenets of realism.
2. Although slipstream stories pay homage to various popular genres and their conventions, they are not science fiction stories, traditional fantasies, dreams, historical fantasies, or alternate histories.
3. Slipstream is playfully postmodern. The stories often acknowledge their existence as fictions, and play against the genres they evoke. They have a tendency to bend or break narrative rules.
The hardest thing to put a finger on is the strangeness that Sterling identifies as the essence of slipstream, but that all commentators have been at pains to define. It has been called a matter of making the familiar strange or the strange familiar. Carol Emshwiller, a writer we see as central to any understanding of slipstream, says, “estranging the everyday” is the motive for most of her fiction. But there is typically more to it than that.

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But slipstream’s cavalier attitude toward boundaries can lead to a lack of rigor. A failed slipstream story can seem like idle noodling, a grab bag of uncommitted allusions to genres without any investment in characters or the ideas behind them, or acknowledgement that genre tropes are anything more than pawns on a chess board.