Well, hello everyone, and I'm Doug Davis, and I'm here to talk about a kind of fiction,
science fiction maybe, that may or may not exist, and it's called slipstream fiction.
I know that your professor also called it crossover fiction, which might be another
name for slipstream fiction.
It's a new kind of speculative fiction that really might just simply be another name for
postmodernism, if you ask me.
No one calls themselves a slipstream writer.
People grow up saying, I want to be a science fiction writer, but no one grows up saying,
I'm going to be a slipstream writer.
It just doesn't happen.
Maybe that's wrong.
Maybe one of you is sitting there in the audience, and you do dream of being a slipstream writer,
and I'm very sorry, you can be a slipstream writer, pardon me, but this form of writing,
it's maybe a genre, maybe it's a subgenre, maybe it's a style, maybe it's not so much
a style of writing as it's a new way of reading fiction that's already been written.
We just have a new sensibility of it.
Now there is, there is a science fiction film out there, a real science fiction film
made in the year 1989, and that's an important year for slipstream, but not because of this
movie.
For the life of me, I don't know why your professor asked me here to talk about this
stinker of a movie for 45 minutes, but none of you should ever see this film.
However, it is science fiction.
How do we know that?
Well, look at the poster.
It is set in the future.
It looks all cool and futuristic, complete with otherworldly aircraft.
It is full of actors who appear regularly in science fiction movies.
Look closely and you'll see Luke Skywalker.
He's the grizzled guy who looks a little like your professor.
It is also literal, this film, with its science and technology.
The definition of a slipstream is a turbulent flow of air driven backwards by a propeller,
and propellers are on planes, and look, there are planes on this poster, and this is indeed
a movie about guys who fly planes in a post-apocalyptic future in which the earth is torn by fierce
winds.
It's kind of like an action adventure version of J.G.
Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere.
So this movie is about science and technology, and it's set in the future.
It's science fiction, and now we all know what science fiction is.
Slipstream the movie is not slipstream fiction, and we shall never speak of slipstream the
movie again.
Let's talk about slipstream fiction.
So in the same year, 1989, the same year that movie of which We Shall Not Speak was released,
cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling wrote an essay in which he postulated the existence of a
new literary genre that was beating the pants off of science fiction.
He called this genre slipstream and provided his readers with a reading list that was a
who's who of famous postmodernist novelists such as Pynchon and Don DeLillo and Kathy Acker
and Kurt Vonnegut, and he gave this definition to slipstream fiction.
Here it is.
This is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange.
The way that living in the late 20th century makes you feel if you are a person of a certain
sensibility.
We could call this kind of fiction novels of postmodern sensibility, but that looks
pretty bad on a category rack and requires an acronym beside.
So for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books slipstream.
Now, of course, he said a lot more.
It's a long essay.
Do read it.
It's online.
He says that slipstream was not science fiction because it's doesn't it's not about the sense
of wonder.
It defied a lot of generic expectations.
It's textually playful.
It seemed to be a literature that was taking a lot of science fiction's best tricks and
doing them better, a little differently, but better.
Now given that slipstream is a kind of multi-meaning thing, sort of vague, maybe it's postmodernism,
I think we could postulate that slipstream, frankly, it's just postmodernist SF.
The new wave back in the 1960s, as I'm sure you've learned, brought modernism into science
fiction, and that's when authors privileged character and theme and style along with
science and technology and futurity.
And now we have postmodernism coming into science fiction, all of the tricks and styles
of that genre.
And we'll talk about those in a little bit.
So we could also say those slipstream is what happens when different genres are mashed up
with science fiction, that it's a mashup, a crossover.
It's science fiction, but just infused with other genres.
Or we could say it's a self-consciously literary way of reading and writing science fiction
that emphasizes character and theme and style over science and technology and futurity.
And that would be, in Darko Suven's formalist terms, it would be a literature of science
fictional estrangement, but without the cognition, without that scientific rationality that links
it back to the real world.
It's astranging, and it looks and smells like science fiction, but it doesn't have those
scientific and technical hooks that you expect in science fiction.
So here we are.
It's a multi-meaning thing.
Let me talk about a couple slipstream novels and stories that come out of the mainstream
community that we could call slipstream.
And these are not, I know that your professor had you read the Neil Gaiman story and I had
you read the Ted Chiang story, both great stories.
But I want to talk about two other stories.
I found a little short story that I really want to talk about with you.
I may even read it to you.
Here's a novel.
I'm not going to read you this novel.
This is a fine slipstream novelist by an author named Michael Cunningham.
Michael Cunningham is a pretty famous mainstream American author that got famous for a book
that he wrote called The Hours.
That was made into a movie with the most expensive Hollywood A-list actresses of the day.
You can see them there in that picture.
The Hours is a straight-up postmodernist revisiting of the modernist author Virginia Woolf.
The book concerns three generations of women.
This is, again, not a slipstream novel.
Three generations of women who are affected by Virginia Woolf.
The first is Woolf herself, and it's in 1923, and she's writing Mrs. Dalloway and struggling
with her own mental illness.
The second section or thread of the book is Mrs. Brown, and she's the wife of a World
War II veteran, and she's reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1949 as she plans her husband's birthday
party.
Then the third is Clarissa Vaughan, who plans a party in the year 2001 to celebrate a major
literary award received by her good friend and her former lover who's dying of AIDS.
Pretty complicated plot.
The situations of all three characters mirror situations experienced by Woolf's solicitor
Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway.
You have the same characters with the same names.
There's a Clarissa Dalloway, and then there's a Clarissa Vaughan.
It's a very literal modern-day version of Woolf's character.
That was a very popular novel, a very postmodernist translation of a modernist novel, but then
Cunningham did something that I think is really awesome, but it confounded many of his admirers.
He wrote a book, and it published it in 2005, and then he didn't publish another book until
2010, maybe because of this book.
He rewrote The Hours.
He basically took the same novel, the structure of The Hours, a three-part historical novel
with the same characters reoccurring at three different historical moments, and he wrote
a novel called Specimen Days, and he replaced the spirit of Virginia Woolf with the spirit
of the American romantic poet and New Yorker Walt Whitman.
Instead of sticking with the modernist stream of consciousness style that he used in The
Hours, The Hours is written kind of like Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham wrote the three
sections of Specimen Days in popular generic modes.
He used the first section as a ghost story, the second section is the detective story,
and then the third section is a science fiction story.
So it goes from industrial 19th century New York to contemporary New York to New York
150 years in the future, a post-apocalyptic New York.
Now, as Cunningham notes in his author's note, he played fast and loose with history,
and this is one of the aspects that Bruce Sterling identifies as slipstream, that slipstream
authors are interested in history, but they like to play with the characters.
They take historical personages, but they're not writing historical novels, so it's a historical
novel about New York, but a lot of that history, as Cunningham observes, is made up, and Cunningham
seems to gesture, who cares?
It's a story.
I'm taking liberties with history.
So the first story in Specimen Days is called In the Machine, and it's a ghost story.
And it takes place in New York City during the Industrial Revolution as human beings
confront the alienating realities of a new machine age.
And the principal characters are a boy named Lucas, who's autistic, and he autistically
recites Walt Whitman's poetry.
And here, the poetry kind of comes out of him without meaning, so it's just a bunch
of signs.
And then there's a woman named Catherine, who was to marry Lucas's elder brother, and
then there's a man named Simon, who was recently crushed by a machine, and Lucas has gone in
to take his place in this horrible factory.
And the story is that Lucas is worried that the ghost of Simon is haunting all over the
machines that he's working at, and they're trying to kill him and Catherine.
And the second short story, so you have three short stories, the second short story is called
The Children's Crusade, and it's a kind of crime thriller.
And it's set in early 21st century New York around 2005, and it plays with the conventions
of the thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band, and this terrorist band
recites Walt Whitman's poetry as a kind of terrorist mantra.
And they're going around detonating bombs at random around the city.
And the characters are Kat, who's an African-American woman working in the police department, then
there's Simon, who's Kat's boyfriend, and then there's a little boy named Luke, who's
a child terrorist.
And then we go to the third story, so we go from ghost story to crime story to science
fiction story.
The third story is called Like Beauty, and it's a post-apocalyptic science fiction.
It's set in New York 150 years in the future after a catastrophic nuclear meltdown.
And in the story, New York City is overwhelmed with refugees from the first inhabited planet
to be contacted by the people of Earth.
So we have the principal characters are, again, they're Simon, and he's this time an
android.
And he has a poetry chip in him, and the poetry chip constantly recites Walt Whitman.
Then you have Katerine, who's a female alien lizard.
And then you have Luke, who is a homeless boy.
And they're all fleeing New York to Denver, following the path of Walt Whitman, ironically,
when androids are kind of outlawed and persecuted in New York City.
Now I highly recommend this book.
I think it's kind of a really surprising and mind-blowing book.
And a lot of people liked it, but you can always count on The New York Times to say
something lousy about science fiction, to not get it.
And I want to show you what The New York Times says about Michael Cunningham's book, because
it's really illustrative of how Slipstream crosses different audiences.
So pardon, it's a huge quote.
Sorry for giving you this, but let's look at this review of Specimen Days.
I'll read through it.
So Specimen Days is both a very bad book and a very brave one.
In the flickering light of this ambitious new novel, the silky tour de force of the
hours now looks as if, for all its surface complexity, it might actually have been too
easy for Cunningham.
Wolf's airy sensibility matches up nicely with his own.
In that book, he wove together three separate stories set in three different periods, with
little to connect them but a thin, delicate thread of style and a fragile sort of hopefulness
in the face of mortality.
All three stories are about the temptation of suicide.
Of course, Virginia Woolf killed herself.
And everything works.
The novel floats around serenely, like a boat on a gentle English stream.
In contrast, the three stories, again set in three distinct times that make up Specimen
Days, are arranged in a homelier, plainer fashion, one novellicized chunk of narrative
after another.
To add insult to self-injury, Cunningham also chose to cast each of these stories in the
form, more or less, of a popular genre.
The first in The Machine is a kind of ghost story.
The second, The Children's Crusade, is a police procedural.
The last, like Beauty, is science fiction.
The idea, I think, is that the use of such dubiously respectable forms, such a wonderful
New York Times phrase, is somehow democratic and therefore, again, a possible means of
getting in touch with Cunningham's inner Walt Whitman, who saw himself as a poet of the
people.
The wilfulness of these gestures is all too apparent.
Although Cunningham gamely tries his hand at lowly genres, he can't hide his fundamental
lack of sympathy or familiarity with them.
Even in the strongest of the stories in The Machine, he still seems a little embarrassed
at having to conjure up an actual ghost.
So there you go.
There's the kind of mainstream reception of this book, which is a slipstream book.
So here's slipstream.
Mainstream authors suddenly write books.
This is one side of slipstream.
They suddenly write books that look and smell like something other than fine literature.
Something a little stinky, those dubiously respectable forms, one of which is science
fiction.
Now, on the other hand, I've yet to meet a science fiction fan who doesn't think this
is quite a good book, and the science fiction, to me, does not read at all like the work
of someone who doesn't have sympathy for androids and aliens that he conjures, and I've read
interviews with Cunningham where he talks quite fondly of science fiction.
The New York Times can't even get it through their heads that a literary author, someone
famous author of the hours, might even have respect for science fiction.
But for Cunningham, it's just a natural move into the genre.
Now, the final book, Like Beauty, the science fiction novella, it's beautiful.
It's touching.
It's a deeply melancholic story about kinship.
And in my opinion, it's the strongest of the three pieces, not the weakest.
So my own take on this novel is pretty much the exact opposite of The Times' reviewers,
but I'm coming at it from science fiction.
So that's one side of slipstream, is that mainstream authors, all of a sudden, they're
writing science fiction, but they're not marketing it as science fiction, and it's not all science
fiction, and they're still concerned with character and theme and the theme of melancholy
and loss and kinship.
I mean, these are the big themes of Cunningham.
So on the other hand, slipstream also happens when science fiction writers write something
that's not set in our real world, but that doesn't quite fit the conventions of science
fiction or fantasy.
So science fiction authors like Ted Chiang, who I asked you to read, and Neil Gaiman,
suddenly write some kind of speculative sort of science fiction that isn't really scientific
or focused on technology or science.
The Chang story I asked you to read seems like religious fiction.
It's a good story, but it's religious fiction.
And the Gaiman story is a Sherlock Holmes story mashed up with H. P. Lovecraft.
Also a really good read, but what is it?
We'll return to that question in a moment.
The larger point I want to make is that this kind of fiction, we call it slipstream, has
been written for a long time, at least since the 1960s.
And back then, we called it postmodernism.
When you read Sterling's 1980 in Manifesto, again, you'll find a long list of so-called
slipstream authors, most of whom are postmodernists who started writing this kind of feeling,
very strange fiction in the 1960s, around the same time as science fiction's New Wave.
So in the New Wave, you had science fiction authors discovering modernism, and then postmodernism
is just brewing and bubbling up at the edges of avant-garde literary and artistic culture.
So again, on Sterling's list are several big name postmodern authors, Pynchon, Vonnegut,
The Willow, Kathy Acker, and then there's this fellow, Donald Bartlemay.
And I should have given you this story in advance, but it's very short.
And this fellow, Donald Bartlemay, might have pioneered the genre.
So if you will allow me to take about eight minutes, I would like to read you a story.
I think it's story time.
I want to read you a story from 1968, and it's called The Balloon.
Let me read you the story.
This story, by the way, is now presently in the Norton Anthology of American Literature,
which is basically the most canonical thing that you can do to a story, because this is
the anthology that every American professor uses to teach American literature.
So here's The Balloon.
And I want to talk to you, and let's think as we're reading it, what's science fiction
about it, and what isn't science fiction about it?
I mean, Donald Bartlemay is not a science fiction writer, but look what he's doing.
It's called The Balloon.
The Balloon, beginning at a point on 14th Street, and there's a map I gave it.
You can see 14th Street down there, lower Manhattan, and then the balloon goes all the
way up to Central Park, that green thing on the map.
The Balloon, beginning at a point on 14th Street, the exact location of which I cannot
reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping until it reached
the park.
There, I stopped it.
At dawn, the northernmost edges lay over the plaza.
The free-hanging motion was frivolous and gentle, but experiencing a faint irritation
at stopping, even to protect the trees, and seeing no reason the balloon should not be
allowed to expand upward over the parts of the city it was already covering into the
airspace to be found there, I asked the engineers to see to it.
The expansion took place throughout the morning, soft imperceptible sign of gas through the
valves.
The balloon then covered 45 blocks north-south and in a regular area east-west, as many as
six crosstown blocks on either side of the avenue in some places.
That was the situation then.
But it is wrong to speak of situations, implying a set of circumstances leading to some resolution,
some escape of tension.
There were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there, muted heavy grays and browns
for the most part, contrasting with walnut and soft yellows.
A deliberate lack of finish, enhanced by skillful installation, gave the surface a
rough, forgotten quality.
Sliding weights on the inside, carefully adjusted, anchored the great, vary-shaped
mass at a number of points.
Now we have had a flood of original ideas in all media, works of singular beauty as
well as singular milestones in the history of inflation.
But at that moment, there was only this balloon, concrete, particular, hanging there.
So far, this is a story about building a big, dumb artifact in New York City, a balloon.
And we're talking about engineering.
I continue.
There were reactions.
Some people found the balloon interesting.
As a response, this seemed inadequate to the immensity of the balloon, the suddenness of
its appearance over the city.
On the other hand, in the absence of hysteria or other societally induced anxiety, it must
be judged a calm, mature one.
There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the meaning of the balloon.
This subsided because we have learned not to insist on meanings.
And they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomenon.
It was agreed that since the meaning of the balloon could never be known absolutely, extended
discussion was pointless or at least less purposeful than the activities of those who,
for example, hung green and blue paper lanterns from the warm gray underside in certain streets
or seized the occasion to write messages on the surface announcing their availability
for the performance of unnatural acts or the availability of acquaintances.
Now we're talking about language.
We're talking about representation and what the balloon means, sort of straying from the
thematics of science fiction.
Daring children jumped, especially at those points where the balloon hovered close to
a building so that the gap between balloon and building was a matter of a few inches
or points where the balloon actually made contact exerting an ever so slight pressure
against the side of a building so that balloon and building seemed a unity.
The upper surface was so structured that a landscape was presented, small valleys as
well as slight knolls or mounds.
Once atop the balloon, a stroll was possible or even a trip from one place to another.
There was pleasure in being able to run down an incline then up the opposing slope, both
gently graded or in making a leap from one side to the other.
Bouncing was possible because of the pneumaticity of the surface and even falling if that was
your wish that all these varied motions as well as others were within one's possibilities
and experiencing the upside of the balloon was extremely exciting for children accustomed
to the city's flat hard skin.
But the purpose of the balloon was not to amuse children to the number of people, children
and adults who took advantage of the opportunities described was not so large as it might have
been.
A certain timidity, lack of trust in the balloon was seen.
There was furthermore some hostility because we had hidden the pumps which fed helium to
the interior and because the surface was so vast that the authorities could not determine
the point of entry, that is the point at which gas was injected.
A degree of frustration was evidenced by those city officers into whose province such manifestations
normally fell.
The current purposelessness of the balloon was vexing.
As was the fact that it was there at all.
Had we painted in great letters laboratory tests proved or 18% more effective on the
sides of the balloon this difficulty would have been circumvented.
But I could not bear to do so.
On the whole these officers were remarkably tolerant considering the dimensions of the
anomaly.
This tolerance being the result of first secret tests conducted by night that convinced them
that little or nothing could be done in the way of removing or destroying the balloon.
And secondly a public warmth that arose not uncollored by touches of the aforementioned
hostility toward the balloon from ordinary citizens.
As a single balloon must stand for a lifetime of thinking about balloons so each citizen
expressed in the attitude he chose a complex of attitudes.
One man might consider that the balloon had to do with the notion of sullied as in the
sentence the big balloon sullied the otherwise clear and radiant Manhattan sky.
That is the balloon was in this man's view an imposture something inferior to the sky
that had formerly been there something interposed between the people and their sky.
But in fact it was January the sky was dark and ugly.
It was not a sky you could look up into lying on your back in the street with pleasure unless
pleasure for you proceeded from having been threatened from having been misused.
And the underside of the balloon was a pleasure to look into we had seen to that muted grays
and browns for the most part contrasted with walnut and soft forgotten yellows.
And so while this man was thinking sullied still there was an admixture of pleasurable
cognition in his thinking struggling with the original perception.
Another man on the other hand might view the balloon as if it were part of a system of
unanticipated rewards as when one's employer walks in and says here Henry take this package
of money I have wrapped for you because we have been doing so well in the business here
and I admire the way you bruise the tulips without which bruising your department would
not be a success or at least not the success that it is for this man the balloon might
be a brilliantly heroic muscle and pluck exercise even an experience poorly understood.
And now you can see so much of this story is about what the balloon means as a kind
of signifier hanging there.
Another might say without the example of it is doubtful that would exist today in its
present form and find many to agree with him or to argue with him ideas of bloat and
float were introduced as well as concepts of dream and responsibilities.
Other engaged in remarkably detailed fantasies having to do with a wish either to lose themselves
in the balloon or to engorge it.
The private character of these wishes of their origins deeply buried and unknown was such
that they were not spoken of yet there is evidence that they were widespread.
It was also argued that what was important was that what you felt when you stood under
the balloon some people claim that they felt sheltered warmed as never before while enemies
of the balloon felt or reported feeling constrained a heavy feeling critical opinion was divided
and here I've put the critical opinion on this slide monstrous pourings harp xxx certain
contrast with darker portions inner joy large square corners conservative eclecticism that
has so far governed modern balloon design abnormal vigor warm soft lazy passages has
unity been sacrificed for a sprawling quality kill castor fear munching people began in
a curious way to locate themselves in relation to aspects of the balloon and here we're nearing
the end of the story I'll be at that place where it dips down into 47th Street almost
to the sidewalk near the Alamo chili house or why don't we go stand on top and take the
air and maybe walk about a bit where it forms a tight curving line with the facade of the
gallery of modern art marginal intersections offered entrances with a given time duration
as well as warm soft lazy passages in which but it is wrong to speak of marginal intersections
each intersection was crucial none could be ignored as if walking there you might not
find someone capable of turning your attention in a flash from old exercises to new exercises
risks and escalations each intersection was crucial meeting of balloon and building meeting
of balloon and man meeting of balloon and balloon it was suggested that what was admired
about the balloon was finally this that it was not limited or defined sometimes a bulge
blister or subsection would carry all the way east to the river on its own initiative
in the manner of an army's movements on a map as seen in a headquarters remote from
the fighting then that part would be as it were thrown back again or would withdraw into
new dispositions the next morning that part would have made another sortie or disappeared
altogether this ability of the balloon to shift its shape to change was very pleasing
especially to people whose lives were rather rather rigidly patterned persons to whom change
although desired was not available the balloon for the 22 days of its existence offered the
possibility in its randomness of mislocation of the self in contra distinction to the grid
of precise rectangular pathways under our feet the amount of specialized training currently
needed and the consequent desirability of long-term commitments has been occasioned
by the steadily growing importance of complex machinery in virtually all kinds of operations
as this tendency increases more and more people will turn in bewildered inadequacy to solutions
for which the balloon may stand as a prototype or rough draft I met you under the balloon I said
it was on the occasion of a return from Norway you asked if it was mine I said it was the balloon
I said is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure having to do with the unease I felt
at your absence and with sexual deprivation but now that your visit to Bergen has been terminated
it is no longer necessary or appropriate removal of the balloon was easy trailer trucks carried
away the depleted fabric which is now stored in West Virginia awaiting some other time of
unhappiness sometime perhaps when we are angry with one another end of story time what are we
going to make of this story if that story were printed today it would be a slipstream story I
mean let's look at it here what is the balloon we can read it as science fiction the balloon is a
nova it's a new technological thing that reconfigures Manhattan Carl Friedman in his excellent book
critical theory and science fiction says that all fiction is different from reality that's why it's
called fiction I mean if it's reality then we call it history or something or reporting but
fiction there's always something new but the thing that makes science fiction different from all
other fiction is that it's the difference that makes the difference and in this story that's
the case that's the balloon is the difference is essential to the story its engineering is
discussed the balloon is a real artifact out there in the city its effects on society are logically
extrapolated so it's extrapolated it's got a novem the story set in a techno-cultural setting it's
about the problems have with living in a media landscape with being bombarded with different
signs and floating things and and you go to New York City and of course it's a vertical city and
you've got advertisements stacked up to the sky so it makes sense to think well this balloon would
be an advertisement but what do you make of a sign hanging there without any signage on it so it
could be a science fiction story but it's not a science fiction story so let's look at the
postmodern aspects of this story first of all a balloon like this is impossible to build I mean
come on this isn't this is not a real technological artifact for all its narrators talk of engineering
it's not a scientific story it's kind of a silly story it's a fun story it's having fun with this
topic the stories presided over by what we would call a postmodernist sense of ontological
uncertainty and constructing postmodernism Brian McHale postulated that the difference between
modernism and postmodernism is a difference between two dominance two dominant concerns
epistemology versus ontology in modernist fiction what you have is a real world out there but
everybody sees it differently and hence the invention of techniques like stream of consciousness
narration so you go into the different minds of different characters and you see how they see the
world differently but they all see the same world in James Joyce's Ulysses there's a cloud
floating above Dublin and at various points in the novel different characters all with their own
thoughts and their own views of what's going on see the same cloud you know you're in the same
world this we don't know what world are we in this isn't every day this isn't present day New York
City it's not set in the future what world could this possibly happen in postmodernism ditches that
ontological certainty that modernist literature was so obsessed with and it says basically what
if if no one can really agree on the meaning of the world maybe there is no stable world out there
so we can take liberties with this world like Cunningham does with history and like Bartlemy
does with New York City so thirdly much of the balloon is not about the balloon rather it's about
language it's about how do you describe the balloon what's the nature of meaning it reflects on the
process of writing and making meaning itself it's a story about words about signs and that makes it a
metanarrative and that's one of the signature forms of postmodern literature is their stories
about stories kind of recursive lastly the stories resolution is personal I mean it's
subjective it has no necessary connection to the vast contrivance of the balloon this guy made the
balloon because he missed his girlfriend that that that's hardly the meaning of the story as there's
no interesting so what at the end of the story it was a personal meaning but it means nothing else
to anybody other than himself well slipstream fiction has basically well I knew it made it into
the official canon when I found it in my creative writing class I teach creative writing too when
I'm not doing my other work and in my professional life I'm I teach American literature and I'm the
editor of the science fiction research associations review and we recently published a very good
article by your professor you should all read it and I knew that slipstream had made it into the
official canon of literature when I came across it in a textbook that I use and you you know that
something's been canonized when the creative writers start teaching it so here's my textbook
imaginative writing and I'm now in the third edition and from 2011 and once upon a time the
word genre was a dirty word in a lot of creative writing classes remember when I was in grad school
and I would have students come up to me from their creative writing program and they wanted
to write science fiction they wanted to write fantasy but the term genre was used as an insult
other students in the class would read their stories and the insult would be that's so genre
well I felt sorry for them but they were all training to be little James Joyce's so what can
you do but now many moons later decades later here's a textbook by an author Janet Buraway and she's
about as mainstream a writer as mainstream gets and she makes a really interesting observation
I'll just read it for you the tendency of recent literature is in any case to move further away
from rigid categories doesn't that sound kind of like the balloon toward a loosening or crossing
of genre in the sense of literary form many writers are eager to experiment with pieces that blur the
distinction between two genres or even follow two genre patterns at once and here we mean big
genre story poem play drama those are the big genres all right not the popular genres like
science fiction fantasy horror so many writers are equal to eager to blur those distinctions even to
follow two patterns at once those short short stories may have elements of poetry or essay
the prose poem may be seen as a lyric or a story an essay might be structured with a refrain so
Adam Thorpen's the novel Overton in the form of a film script New York Times columnist Maureen
Dowd writes a political essay in the form of a fantasy play Michael Chabon and others write
detective or science fiction with literary ambition and intent genre fiction pressing at the
bound of the fiction genre with the results that have been called slipstream or interstitial fiction
so you have permission to now write this now what this shows is that slipstream fiction and this
this this mashing up of different genres this author's taking science fiction and bringing it
into the fold of their literature with other genres I mean it's not just something going on
in science fiction this is something going on across literature and indeed across culture so
I think with slipstream fiction we really have to look at it as as Raymond Williams would have us
look at it it's part of what we could call a much larger post-industrial digital media structure of
feeling now this is a great term that Raymond Williams coined in his 1977 book Marxism and
literature and elsewhere he developed it throughout his career and what structure of feeling refers
to is each generation's artistic forms and conventions as developed in a particular world
historical situation so the industrial age has its own structure of feeling and our post-industrial
digital media age has its structure of feeling and slipstream fiction is fiction that that is
deeply embedded in I think our late 20th century 21st century structure of feeling let's go back
to Sterling's definition Sterling says this is the kind of writing which simply makes you feel
very strange the way that living in the late 20th century makes you feel if you are a person of a
certain sensibility so even Sterling's kind of gesturing that this is something that comes out
of the moment out of the out of the material conditions of our existence except I would take
issue with with Bruce Sterling I don't think this fiction feels strange at all I think reading
slipstream fiction feels right I I think that it might feel strange for Sterling because that's
because I mean in his heart of hearts I wonder I I think that Sterling is is a refugee from what
Williams would call a residual form of culture Raymond Williams posits that cultural forms exist
in an emergent dominant and then residual forms so you have new emergent forms representing new
changes in the in the base of society and and commerce and then you have dominant forms and
you have residual forms that are left over from past era so that's not like they go away they're
just they're leftovers and I think Bruce Sterling's a romantic he's a very idealistic person and he's
he's always having fights with with Marxists and and I think he thinks that technology and
capitalism can save the world that's a romantic notion now reading Cunningham or or Gaiman or
Shabon or Chang or even Bartlemay to me feels like the way life is now even if the stories
are all fundamentally speculative but to me that doesn't feel strange they feel contemporary I mean
isn't speculation part of the warp and woof of contemporary culture every gizmo we own is one
year away from being made obsolete by the next generation of gizmo about which there is always
endless rounds of speculation science fiction and capitalism are deeply tied together both are
inherently speculative ventures I mean science fiction arose alongside capitalism and the slip
stream fiction is the kind of fiction that fits our stage of post-industrial digital media
capitalism it's a stage of capitalism that is basically about making money off of multiple
and virtual identities I mean there's not just one you out there there's there's there's you in the
school and then there's Facebook you which hopefully is a smartly censored version of you
and then there's LinkedIn you which is a professional version of you and then there's you as film from
all those security cameras on every corner so you are not an individual identity you are multiple
things depending on your interface with the machines of commerce and surveillance and every
form of culture can be morphed into any form of culture on any device with a microchip we can
watch Netflix anywhere at literature is not an exception to this cultural development this kind
of genre bending is going on all over literature and indeed on I think all over the arts it's a
tendency that was once considered avant-garde and emergent in the 1960s but now it is becoming
increasingly dominant so I mean let's let's look here I mean I think by the 1960s postmodernist
and certain slips in literature it was avant-garde I mean it was an emergent form but by the turn of
the century it had become increasingly prevalent across culture part of the cultural dominant of
post-modernity I mean slipstream is an semi-creative writing textbook it appears in the pages of the
magazine of fantasy and science fiction pretty much any slipstream story could be published in that
magazine and it also these stories appear in the New Yorker which is the fanciest literary magazine
out there and I think it's a part of a larger culture a 21st century postmodernist mash-up
culture mash-up albums and DJ mixing and avatars multitasking cross-posting photoshop retouching
architectural reskinning and repurposing transmedia culture slipstream fictions they're all they're ever
familiar mainstream effects you can read Thomas Pynchon's gravity's rainbow and then you can go
and watch the Simpsons which feels a lot like reading gravity's rainbow with the way it plays
with language and high and low puns and mashes up genres and Thomas Pynchon was even on the
Simpsons so none of these things feel at all strange to a generation doing or making or consuming
them so let's consider an example I think there's really very little difference across media between
what Neil Gaiman has done with Sherlock and what the music producer Danger Mouse did with the Beatles
and Jay-Z in his gray album in the gray album Danger Mouse makes Jay-Z's black album with the
Beatles white album and the results are amazing but what is it is it rap is it progressive rock
it's a mash-up and the result result is a new organic whole and it's a really great album and
it's a completely new music of course it's not slipstream but it comes out of the same structure
of feeling a slipstream fiction that you can take these forms and they're not they don't have an
inherent identity they're they're techniques that can be combined so in effect the gray album is
pretty much the same as Gaiman's story because it's also a mash-up it's a mash-up of Doyle and
Lovecraft I mean what is it a detective story a Cthulhu story and then Gaiman did all kinds of
fun they did all these post-modernist typographical tricks with his story he printed it up like a broad
sheet from the Victorian era he put little wink wink nudge nudge advertisements from Dr. Jekyll in
now slipstream fiction then I guess we can just say it's it's it's not so strange it's it's it's
just contemporary culture it's I think it's I would call it contemporary SF maybe not science
fiction but but we can expand our sense of SF Paulo Freilich who I believe you have met
describes slipstream as two or more literatures occupying the same territory different communities
of readers and writers can approach and claim the same text but to very different effects
it's just like that New York Times review of Cunningham for a mainstream literary critic
the novel's lowly generic elements are a distraction from the characters and themes
of the book but for a science fiction reader the novel's procession into a distant future
of androids and aliens and space travel feels right and by focusing on those elements we want
to claim the book as science fiction but it's both I mean it's it it's literature it's science
fiction it's call it slipstream call it speculative fiction Ted Chang story which I had you read as
character-driven existentialist religious fiction set in a world extrapolated I think in pretty
rigorous science fiction fashion from the what if what if hell and god and angels were a visible
tangible part of our everyday world it's a pretty cool story I don't know too many stories that do
this the story routinely tops the like lists of Christian science fiction but is it even science
fiction there are lots of what we call inter interstitial forms or sub-genres out there in
SF land there's the new weird the new wave fabulous the new romantics the new space operas
the steampunks there's science fiction but before that it was science fiction and then it was
speculative fiction and then some people called it structural fabulation but call it what you like
it's all SF and I think that just as the new wave can most concisely be defined as the moment when
modernism came to science fiction slipstream not cyberpunk but slipstream is the moment when
post-modernism really came to SF the post-modernist like Pynchon and Bartleman and Vonnegut had taken
tricks from SF starting back in the 1960s and now the science fiction writers and their like-minded
ilk are taking their cues from the post-modernists the line now between post-modernism and slipstream
it's already so blurry that we want to go back and claim most of those old post-modernists that
slipstreamers all along see them all as part of a genre but why are writers collected in the
anthology feeling very strange a slipstream anthology or writing for McSweeney's which
is oftentimes full of slipstream stories and writing for the new yorker why are they writing
this way now why do they write slipstream for the same reasons writers have always written one word
after the next because it feels like the right thing to do and thank you I'm done