“Talk of the changing relationship between the speculative genres and the mainstream surely predated Bruce Sterling’s now-canonical 1989 essay on slipstream, but the past several years have seen an enormous proliferation of collections based on Sterling’s concept or a related one. What now seems most significant is that, two decades later, slipstream is finally selling. Of course, not everyone is sold on it, so to speak, and slipstream is surely selling rather modestly in comparison with “mainstream” SF and fantasy. Even so, the anthologies are steadily accumulating, and “slipstream” is beginning to lose its scare quotes, at least in some circles. Fans, editors, and even writers seem less afraid to apply the label or have the label applied to them. For instance, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s 2006 collection Feeling Very Strange soon lost its self-proclaimed title as “The Slipstream Anthology,” when not two years later Allen Ashley released Subtle Edens: An Anthology of Slipstream Fiction. (Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers’ Slipstreams, also 2006, seems to have kept a lower profile.) Many other anthologies and periodicals have tended to ignore the word “slipstream” even when voicing what are arguably similar ideas—and even when including many of the very same writers: a follow-up to Interfictions was released last fall, and ParaSpheres 2 is scheduled for release early this year.. They just keep coming!”

“Chabon’s earlier editorial work deserves our serious consideration now, not because it predated what may come to be known as “the slipstream boom” (or possibly “the slipstream bubble”), but because Chabon comes at the ongoing “slipstream” debates from a very different place and at a very different angle. If you’re at all interested or invested in these debates, his introduction to MECOAS may prove the most interesting part of the book. On the other hand, if you’re tired of the debates, skip Chabon’s intro and admire the selling point of another (possibly) slipstream anthology, Small Beer Press’s 2003 collection Trampoline: “does not contain a manifesto.”

“For those interested in the Great Debate, it’s worth looking at the concept behind MECOAS. Chabon makes the familiar gesture of locating the best contemporary fiction in a mutually fruitful synthesis of genre and mainstream: “it might be possible to argue… that our finest and most consistently interesting contemporary writers are those whose works seem to originate from both traditions”. Almost immediately, however, he shifts focus from a discussion of genre conventions and distinctions to the sheer pleasure of genre. One of the definitions usually proposed—and then dismissed—for slipstream is something like “science fiction with literary sensibilities,” but what Chabon seems to advocate here is the reestablishment of pulp sensibilities in any kind of fiction, whether genre or mainstream: suspense, heavy plotting, entertainment, and downright fun. Chabon’s introduction represents a total inversion of the way some science fiction writers and fans turn to concepts like “slipstream” out of some half-admitted desire to legitimize their endeavor. Chabon, without a doubt a mainstream figure, seems comfortable “legitimizing” the genres without appealing to any kind of literary sensibilities at all. In fact, he’s tired of literary sensibilities, because by now they’re just plain boring.”

A Look Back at a Tributary of the Slipstream Review of McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Michael Chabon, by T. S. Miller – Internet Review of Science Fiction, January 2010.

Image: Ed Valigursky, Amazing Stories May 1958, Brother Robot.

“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 it 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 consensus reality. It is 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 century 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.”‘

“Two points need to be made about Sterling’s essay. First is that it includes a reading list of writers, of whom only a vanishingly small fraction were identified with a genre. From the outset, Sterling defined slipstream as largely a mutant form of the mainstream. The second point is that the essay was addressed to an audience of science fiction writers and readers. Nobody calls mainstream writers ‘mainstream” except for those of us in the ghetto of the fantastic. The very notion that slipstream writing needed to be placed in a genre of its own comes from measuring it against science fiction and fantasy. Building a wall to pen the mutant up is a very skiffy thing to do; the impulse is generated from an understanding of genre built up over fifty years of category publishing in the United States.

“This is primarily a social distinction. Science fiction, since the birth of the genre magazines in the 192os, has been seen as a category of pulp publishing more than as a literary form, and still carries this meaning (and associated stigma) despite fifty years of scholars and writers attempting to define it as a mode of writing rather than a mode of publishing. As such, sF was isolated from developments outside of pulp genres. Although the writers themselves may have been well read and educated in other forms of fiction, the genre for better or worse retained its separate identity.

“So when the New Wave SF writers of the 1960 and 1970s adapted techniques and attitudes of literary modernism to SF materials (stream of consciousness, fragmented narrative, cinematic techniques, intense concentration of the sensibility of the protagonist, psychological ‘realism”), it was seen within the genre community as a revolution, even though these techniques had been commonplace in Dos Passos and Hemingway and Stein and Joyce since the 1920s.

“Slipstream as a publishing category has meaning only to those coming from the genre side of the divide. Sterling, chief propagandist of the cyberpunk movement of the 198os, was trying to come to grips with other forms of ambitious visionary fiction being written in the 198os that could by no means be categorized as cyberpunk. In a way, his essay was an attempt to identify a form of fiction in opposition to cyberpunk so as to differentiate it. In the ensuing seventeen years, many writers in the genre who have been trying to establish an identity separate from category SF and fantasy, and in relation to literary fiction, have seized upon Sterling’s formulation. They have taken it to places that Sterling did not intend, and created a subcategory of publications, editors, magazines, and critical opinion within the world of SF discourse and yet separate from it. But in all discussions of slipstream we have seen, at some point the relationship of slipstream to genre science fiction is entertained and defined.”

James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, eds. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. 2006. pp iix-ix.