Doug Davis Article on Slipstream Fiction re Neil Gaiman (and other post 2000 texts)

 
Davis, Doug. "Understanding Slipstream Fiction" A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction. Ed. Lars Schmeink. Web. 2012. <http://virtual-sf.com/?page_id=331>. 1-8.

Understanding Slipstream Fiction Doug Davis

EXCERPT

...on the one hand, slipstream happens when serious literary authors write books that contain elements of science fiction. On the other hand, slipstream happens when SF writers write something that is not set in our real world but that doesn't quite fit the conventions of science fiction or fantasy either. For instance, SF authors such as Ted Chiang and Neil Gaiman often write a kind of speculative fiction that isn't really scientific or focused on technology or science. Ted Chiang's short story, "Hell is the Absence of God," reads like a work of reli- gious fiction; Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" is a Sherlock Holmes story mashed together with H.P. Lovecraft's mythos. Cunningham's and Chiang's and Gaiman's kind of genre-mashing speculative fiction has been written at least since the 1960s. Back then it was called post- modernism.

....

 I realized that slipstream had made it into the official canon of literature when I came across it in a textbook I use in a creative writing class I teach. In her introduction to Imaginative Writing, Janet Burroway informs writing students that

[t]he tendency of recent literature is in any case to move further away from rigid categories, 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. So "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 Thorpe ends the novel Ulverton in the form of a film script; [New York Times] columnist Maureen Dowd frequently 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 results that have been called "slip- stream" or "interstitial" fiction.

Now that slipstream has slipped into the contemporary canon, I propose a fifth – and final – speculative definition for slipstream fiction, a definition that contains the prior four: slipstream is the literature of our contemporary "structure of feeling."  Raymond Williams uses the phrase "structure of feeling" in his 1977 work Marxism and Literature and elsewhere to describe each generation's artistic forms and conventions as developed in a particular world-historical situation. Cultural forms, for Williams, may be emergent, dominant, or residual. They either anticipate emerging historical formations, or they define and operate as part of them, or they lag behind them, speaking as it were to a past age.

In the 1960s postmodernist/slipstream literature was avant-garde or, in Williams's terminology, emergent. By the turn of the century it had become increasingly prevalent across culture, part of what Williams would call the cultural dominant of postmodernity. Slipstream has become an acceptable term in creative writing classes, for example, and slipstream stories regularly appear in the pages of both venerable pulps such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the toney New Yorker.

By the second decade of the 21st century, postmodernist mash-up albums, electronic music, DJ mixing, avatars, multitasking, crossposting, photoshop retouching, architectural reskinning and repurposing, trans-media culture (comic, game, film, viral campaign tie-ins), and slipstream fictions are ever-familiar mainstream effects. None of these things feel at all strange to the generation doing or making or consuming them. They feel normal. Slipstream fiction, like DJ music, is part of the contemporary "structure of feeling."

Referring to books from the 1980s, 70s and 60s, Bruce Sterling writes in 1989 that slipstream "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" (n.pag.). That may have been the case back in 1989. The reviewer for the New York Times seems to have felt strange reading Cunningham's book even in 2005.

However, in the second decade of the 21st century I argue that this fiction doesn't feel strange at all. Reading it feels right. (It might have felt strange for Sterling, but that is because, in his heart of hearts, I think Sterling (like many SF writers) is a refugee from what Williams would call a residual form of culture. He is a Romantic – but that's another lecture.) Reading Cunningham or Gaiman or Chabon or Chiang or even Barthleme feels like the way life is now, even if their stories are all fundamentally speculative. They don't feel strange. They feel natural, normal.

Speculation drives the political economy of the 21st century. Every gadget we own is one month away from being made obsolete by the next generation of gadget, about which there are endless rounds of speculation. Science fiction and capitalism are deeply tied together because both are inherently speculative ven- tures; slipstream fiction hijacks science fiction's speculative ethos to become a kind of fiction that fits our stage of postindustrial digital-media capitalism just right, a stage of capitalism that is about making money off of hybrid forms and multiple and virtual identities. Every form of culture can be morphed into any other form of
culture on any device with a microchip. We can create, watch, edit and retouch video anywhere and tell stories across media and device.

Literature is not an exception to this cultural development. The kind of speculative genre blending found in slipstream fiction is going on all over literature and, indeed, the arts. It is a tendency that was avant-garde, emergent, in the 1960s, but now it is becoming increasingly dominant, common, normal. There is little structural difference between what Gaiman has done with Sherlock Holmes, for instance, and what the music producer Danger Mouse does with The Beatles and Jay Z in his Grey Album of 2004. In The Grey Album Danger Mouse mixes Jay Z's The Black Album with the Beatles' The White Album. The results are amazing – but what is it? Rap? Progressive Rock? It's a mash-up, but the result is a new organic whole, a fine new album. It's not slipstream, but it comes out of the same structure of feeling as slipstream fiction. Structurally, The Grey Album is the same as Gaiman's story, which is a mash-up of Doyle and Lovecraft. What is Gaiman's story? A detective story? A Cthulhu story? It may even be an alternate history in which literary characters become real, for on top of his genre mashing Gaiman performs all kinds of fun, post- modernist typographical tricks with his story, printing it up like a broadsheet from the 19th century and filling it with advertisements from notorious Victorians such as Dr. Jekyll.

In his comprehensive survey of slipstream fiction published in the venerable and invaluable SFRA Review, Pawel Frelik 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.

The postmodernists such as Pynchon, Barthelme and Vonnegut had taken tricks from SF starting back in the 1960s. In the 21st century, SF writers are taking their cues from the (science-fiction-inspired) postmodernists while the postmodernists continue to draw from SF. The distinction between SF and post- modernism increasingly blurs. Slipstream is the fiction that happens at the inter- section of SF and postmodernism. Why are writers collected in the slipstream anthology Feeling Very Strange or writing for the magazine McSweeny's or the New Yorker – why are they writing in this genre-bending way now? Why do they write slipstream now? For the same reasons writers have always written one word after the next: because it feels like the right thing to do.  

Works Cited: Barthleme, Donald. "The Balloon." Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. New York: Farrar, 1968. 15-22. Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. Third Edition. New York: Long- man, 2010. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000. Frelik, Pawel. "Slipstream 101." SFRA Review 290 (2009): 3-6. Kelly, James Patrick and John Kessel, eds. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2006. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rafferty, Terrence. "Specimen Days: Mannahatta My City." The New York Times Jun 26, 2005. Web. Oct 29, 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/review/ 26RAFFERT.html.> Sterling, Bruce. "Slipstream." Electric Frontier Foundation. Web. Oct 29, 2012. <http://w2.eff.org/ Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Catscan_columns/catscan.05.> Stout, Frappa. "History and Imagination." Ellenburg Daily Record Jul 15, 2005: 10. Web. Oct 29, 2012. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=20050715&id=Ny4fAAAA IBAJ&sjid=jMcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4823,2166409.> Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.  Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.