SubscribeThere are two great countries of literature; the fantastic and the naturalistic. The border where these two countries meet however is decidedly hazy. This no-man’s-land contains slipstream, books that are neither fish nor fowl. It’s a tricky thing to pin down but like a certain other genre we could mention it is easy enough to point to. These are the books that contain fantastic elements but are not fantasies, that are naturalistic but not rigorously so. The popular literary term ‘magical realism’ is simply a subset of these.
Bruce Sterling coined the term with Richard Dorsett and popularised it in his 1989 essay of the same name. That essay was decidedly ambivalent in tone and John Clute, who prefers the more scholarly sounding term fabulation, noted that ‘slipstream’ had inappropriately derogatory connotations. Even Sterling said he doubted the term would stick, parody of ‘mainstream’ that it was. However the term has survived, shorn of its negativity, and whilst not yet a marketing category is still a useful label.
Sneakily Sterling, taking his cue from Carter Scholz, tries to slide all SF written by ‘mainstream’ authors under his umbrella which seems a mistake. There is nothing slipstream about The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, a science fiction novel in the long line of literary dystopias. In short we should not consider the writer but the work. Slipstream fiction is as likely to be written by those nominally placed on one side as those on the other; writers traditionally considered genre such as M John Harrison and Lucius Shepard feel the pull as strongly as Peter Ackroyd and Rupert Thomson. Equally writers such as Jonathan Lethem and Iain Banks can work on both sides of the great divide whilst only occasionally dipping their toes into slipstream.
Of course it isn’t necessarily a case of slipstream being the best of both worlds. For example, Lethem’s lone slipstream novel As She Climbed Across The Table is the least impressive of his body of work. Slipstream is as variable in quality as everything else. It can however produce uniquely interesting books.
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James Patrick Kelly, one of the editors of Feeling Very Strange, has a good but out of date post on slipstream here. Author Jeffery Ford discusses it here and here.
Critic John Clute prefers the term "fabulism" whilst others like "interstitial".
Oh yeah, and its nothing to do with this.
posted by ninebelow at 12:57 AM on September 6, 2006