Or, Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos had just as interesting far-future Earth in 1985 than say, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, though SF readers didn’t pay much attention to Vonnegut at that time. Generally, his argument seems to go something like this: Toni Morrison’s Beloved was a better ghost book than any other ghost book in 1987, but wasn’t nominated for genre awards and it should have been. Sterling went on to say that writers from the mainstream (in and around 1989) were doing SF better than SF. Instead, SF has become a self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of bookstore rackspace.” “Science Fiction - much like that other former Vanguard of Progressive Mankind, the Communist Party - has lost touch with its cultural reasons for being. From the essay in which “slipstream” was coined: Context of this essay is relevant, because Sterling arrived at his defining of “slipstream” out of what seemed to be his personal frustration with the SF establishment. Innocently or not, this term originates with author Bruce Sterling, who, writing in SF Eye #5 in 1989 wondered about a word which might define a genre (or “category”) that wasn’t quite for hardcore SF readers, but might be too odd for mainstream readers, too. For one, the “definition” of slipstream seems to have been almost arbitrarily assigned sans its original context. I find this to be a tiny bit reductive and disingenuous for a few reasons. The way this piece makes it sound is that “slipstream fiction” is like reading a kitchen-sink drama only to have robots, ghosts, or fairies bust down the door screaming “nobody expected us to come into this story!” like the Spanish Inquisition in that old Monty Python sketch. The authors of the WSJ piece define “slipstream” fiction as being “the new weird” because it “borrows” from science fiction, fantasy or horror, to “surprise” readers who aren’t expecting such things in their allegedly normal fiction. While the WSJ article certainly reads as a positive reportage of what is presented to be a developing literary phenomenon, there’s still the sense that the article itself is preceding from a pessimistic or at least partially biased lens. Certainly, hurrah for Kelly Link - who is one of the best and most inventive writers in any genre - and definitely, hurrah for her writing reaching more people! But is “slipstream” really the newest way that genre-ish lit is breaking boundaries? Or, perhaps more urgently, why is the traditional media always firmly planted at the beginning of the genre conversation? The proof seems to be Kelly Link’s (excellent!) new collection of stories Get in Trouble getting a higher print run than her old books. Recently, a Wall Street Journal article titled “Slipstream Fiction Goes Mainstream” trumpeted, once again, the triumph of genre-bending writing’s apparent coup at overthrowing the supposed realism gods of the literary mainstream. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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