21st Century Schizoid. & Face The Strange. Two Sci-Fi Short Stories.

Please try your request again later. I am author, April L. My works include a variety of science fiction shorts as well as children's books. First up is my series The Marionette Effect. This is a collection of short stories, centered around a common theme. Volume One is available now. Volume Two due out in early ! Together our accomplishments include short stories as well as a very unique and entertaining series called Reset. I write from the perspective of seasoned agent, Drew Morrow.

The story takes a winding and exciting path as our agents follow hot on the heels of some unexpected visitors to Earth. Book one of Reset, Alien Insurrection, is available now on Kindle!

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Stories like "The Hortlak" or "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" —stories that are more engaged with the mess of the world—would have fit here perfectly. Unfortunately, the same cannot, I think, be said of Ted Chiang. If you're going to make a case for Chiang as slipstream, "Hell is the Absence of God" , with its angelic visitations and old-fashioned style, is certainly the story to choose. But it's still not convincing.

Like most of Chiang's fiction, "Hell" is so committed to the old-school science-fictional approach of rational exploration of its world—and is so awe-inspiringly thorough about its task—that it makes no sense as slipstream. Still, four stories out of fifteen that I disagree with isn't bad going, and reading the other eleven with Kelly and Kessel's introduction in mind is enough to demonstrate that something is Going On. Like the New Wave Fabulists issue of Conjunctions , Feeling Very Strange is a tidemark left behind by the receding waters of genre; a marker in a new landscape.

Naming is useful, so getting the names right is important. Accepting that the work that Kessel and Kelly have presented here exemplifies whatever is Going On, we are left with a secondary question: All of the above assumes that it is, but I'm not so sure. Go back to "Hell is the Absence of God" for a minute. You could argue, perhaps, that the sense of dislocation induced by the story's stunning opening paragraphs is a form of strangeness, and that that is a valid basis for including it in this anthology.

But then, what would you do with a book like David Marusek's debut Counting Heads? That novel plunges you into one of the most densely-imagined futures written this decade: Heck, according to Darko Suvin all SF is about cognitive estrangement; why, then, are we accepting Kessel and Kelly's exclusion of traditional genre stories from consideration? Conversely, look again at "The Healer": The same question could also be asked of what is probably the most overtly postmodern entry in the book, Jeff Vandermeer's entertaining if minor Ambergris story, "Exhibit H: In picking these nits, I'm circling round to talk about the elephant in this anthology's room, which is Bruce Sterling's original essay on slipstream from Science Fiction Eye.

Although Kelly and Kessel quote the most famous passage in their introduction and David Moles quotes part of it again in his reprinted blog post, of which more later , the absence of the full essay from an anthology that aspires to be the slipstream anthology is conspicuous and baffling, not least because it clearly informs much of the editors' argument. Still, here's that same passage again, just so we're all at least somewhere in the vicinity of the same page:.

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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.

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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 Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books "slipstream.

Kessel and Kelly's description clearly takes this into account, but is not quite the same. And here's the thing: In the mid-twentieth century we had "weird stories" or "strange stories"; in the years since Sterling's essay was written labels have been springing up at regular intervals.

Liminal; interstitial; fabulation; even, in this very book albeit less-than-seriously , infernokrusher; take your pick. Arguably they are all better, cleaner words than "slipstream. As Kessel and Kelly note, this uncertainty is central to slipstream as they understand it. But then, you have to ask, why call it slipstream at all? This is essentially the question that David Moles poses at the start of the reprinted comment thread—a smart inclusion by the editors that brings the book to life—" I Want My Twentieth Century Schizoid Art ":.

Feel a bit like magical realism And it is, as they say, the question. Even if it's cherry-picking Sterling's words slightly, even if the literal answer to Moles's question is "five minutes after the essay was published," even if it's now the early twenty-first century: Again, although Kessel and Kelly position slipstream as a form with contemporary relevance, they take a different slant to Sterling:.

Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that "the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and still function. We have unprecedented access to information; cognitive dissonance is a banner headline in our morning paper and radiates silently from our computer screen. We contend that slipstream is an expression of the zeitgeist: For Kessel and Kelly, slipstream isn't as vague as it is for Horton, but their description is still very general.

The strategies they highlight can be used to make the reader feel very strange, but strangeness doesn't follow axiomatically from their use. As a result, what they've identified is a broad set of fiction that emerges as a response to the condition of living in the present. In contrast for me, and perhaps for Moles and Sterling, slipstream is more interesting when it's fiction that that isn't just a response to that condition, but is also a more conscious examination of it. For Kessel and Kelly, there's something about living now that inspires this kind of fiction; for me, slipstream is whatever makes you feel strange in ways that are specific to the time in which it was written.

It's a persnickety distinction, but in terms of the usefulness of slipstream as a concept, I find it makes all the difference in the world. Take George Saunders's " Sea Oak " , which is not the best story in the book but which might seem at first glance to be one of the more obviously slipstream stories.

It takes place in a present so satirically exaggerated it almost has to be read as the near future, and is about a squabbling extended family living on the poverty line somewhere in urban America. Two thirds of the way through the story their aunt Bernie dies, and then comes back to life—not as a ghost, but as a decomposing corpse who bosses them around. Clearly a cross-genre story elements of both fantasy and science fiction , clearly a fabulation the reasons behind the reanimation remain obscure , but not, I think, slipstream: We stand outside the story; it never attempts to draw us in to feel the strangeness for ourselves.

Part of the problem here is that all fiction is a response to the time in which it's written. The most ambitious stuff is likely to mirror our times most accurately, but that shouldn't mean that it's all slipstream—and I don't think that Kelly and Kessel intend to say that it is, but it might be a consequence of using their description. To put it another way, I'm arguing that the lens-flare of the present is always distinctive, and that it gives a story a quality of strangeness that we can point to; a quality that can be found not just in post-cross-between-genre work, but in traditional genre work as well.

If we're going to talk about slipstream as a reader-response genre in any coherent fashion, it seems to me we have to talk about it top-down: Inevitably there is an overlap between the two kinds of tales, which is good, because I need to give some examples. Indeed, for the most part, the slipstream I'm arguing for is a subset of Kessel and Kelly's slipstream. The four stories in Feeling Very Strange that don't meet their criteria don't meet mine either.

Admittedly usually for different reasons: Of the remainder, I'd keep about half. These are the stories that, I suggest, examine the present ambitiously and relevantly in the way that stories like "Sea Oak" or "Bright Morning," good as they are, do not. Benjamin Rosenbaum's and Theodora Goss's stories I've already discussed.

In addition to these, there is Bruce Sterling's "The Little Magic Shop" , which demonstrates a corollary to my argument: James Abernathy's gaming of a standard fantasy trope ends with the '80s love of wealth and success heartily undermined; we can see that, but it doesn't strike a chord with us now in the way that it might have done then. On the other hand, Karen Joy Fowler's haunting "Lieserl" demonstrates that you can embody the contemporary by looking at the past. Despite being set in , the story re-creates its chosen historical moment as seen from the vantage point of its writing.

The narrator is clearly a modern woman who knows that Einstein is standing on the brink of the twentieth century, and imagines what it might be like for him to metaphorically look down, and what kind of vertigo he might experience. Two other stories should be mentioned. We're in the early '90s, in Manhattan, in drug culture. Unlike the Sterling, it still seems near enough to be familiar.

The Sufferer is an alien that seems to have decided to follow Don around for some inscrutable reason or other: The brothers are trying to escape to California. More specifically, they are the down-and-outs in a dystopian spaceport trying to escape to the paradise planet. The freeway roared above us, but the nearby streets were vacant.

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The people in the cars might as well have been in flying saucers, whistling past stragglers in the desert. It was like they were in collusion now. For these characters, in this place, at this time, it might as well be. The inscrutable presence of the Sufferer drives the point home. And though there could be a logical explanation for how the world got this way—as a mild alternate history—it's never given, and not important. The story derives its power from the refraction of a situation we think we know through a science-fictional prism; it's not about the science fiction of it, it's about how the juxtaposition of the familiar and unfamiliar pushes us away and draws us in at the same time.

And then there is the quintessential slipstream story—by my lights, and by Kessel and Kelly's—the last story in the book, and the only original: It casts you as an observer of the world, looking in, life happening around you. Unlike "Sea Oak," however, it is told in the second person, making you unavoidably involved, a part of the story from the start.



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And something is not right. You don't look at people's faces, because:. David Moles, come on down! We've got some twenty-first century schizoid art right here. Read on, and sooner rather than later you find yourself in a hospital that is "one of the mysteries" p. They're offering a treatment for which the unorthodox first step is love, and which when revealed—if the story really happened—explains your malaise as a heart-rendingly modern loneliness, or—if it didn't—damns you to be who you're afraid you really are.

Rickert's story embodies cognitive dissonance, but it also forces you to examine it, and in doing so, to examine the distance between yourself and the world. The two readings are buttressed against each another, in tension: Here we are, then, on the other side of the book, with just four more points for me to make before we can all go home. In case it got lost in the above, you should read Feeling Very Strange , if only so you can argue with it and me. If, as I'm arguing, the stories making up the trend that this book identifies might more accurately be thought of as Clutean fabulism than slipstream, we might also suggest that part of why twenty-first century genre fiction is evaporating at all is that it's started to doubt its authority.

Its practitioners may no longer believe that they can see the world entire, and tell it in words. The stories in this book are mapping the revealed land at the water's edge, and the clouds above; and while to me slipstream is a part of that exploration, I don't think it's all of it. If we're looking for the stories that we should be describing as slipstream, I think Benjamin Rosenbaum's observation that "People with content-based definitions of genres are going to find themselves increasingly bewildered.

It's all about traditions and communities" p. If I'm right, and the most useful application of slipstream is to describe stories that examine the condition of living in the present—if only some of these stories are slipstream—then it follows that not only can slipstream stories be a part of any genre, traditional or otherwise, but that there's no reason slipstream has to be fantastic at all. So we need to widen our gaze: Hence the science-fictional present of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition ; hence the dislocated unease of Michel Faber's short stories, or the poised immediacy of much of Ali Smith's work, such as The Accidental ; hence the deadening effect of the modernising world on the characters in Simon Ings's The Weight of Numbers These sorts of stories can often be understood as part of the dissolution of genre, but they are all also something else.

Which leads us to the fourth and final point. Sterling included stories like those above in his original list of slipstream works. Indeed, the term was originally coined as a parody of "mainstream," in full awareness that nobody outside the SF community would use either word. You can argue—Hal Duncan has —that this sort of image of the relationship between the two communities is restrictive, rather than freeing, but I think it's the right basic metaphor, all the same. It's just that mainstream fiction isn't what slipstream is slipping in the stream of; at least, not slipstream as written by Gibson and Goss, Ings, Link and Smith, Rickert and Rosenbaum and the others I've mentioned.

Rather, slipstream stories swim in the wake of the world. And the best of them surf all the way to the shore. When he's not editing reviews for Strange Horizons , Niall Harrison can be found co-editing Vector , blogging , or writing reviews for various other venues. Sleep is now a fading memory. Is this any different from any other anthology? You say that slipstream is less codified than science fiction but the complaint that "why include X rather than Y? In fact, isn't the way such things become codified precisely through such "arbitrary" anthologies.

The fact this seems fundamentally wrong to me is my problem with the whole "feeling very strange" movement begat by Moles. M John Harrison's Light strikes me as a good example of a science fiction novel that is "the literature of cognitive dissonance and strangeness triumphant". I don't think it can be claimed as a slipstream work though. I guess I just reject the whole idea of slipstream as an effect-based category. Keeping with this theme: Still, four stories out of fifteen that I disagree with isn't bad going I am yet to read the stories in the anthology although I have read the introduction.

As you say this is a science fiction story with little interest in the science fiction in it. At its most reductive this story is a contemporary New York drug fiction with added aliens. Is this enough to make it slipstream though? Admittedly Sterling casts his net very wide in his Catscan piece, including any science fiction written by a "mainstream" writer.

Lethem doesn't really fit this bill though, and even if he did interpretting Sterling this broadly goes against the rest of the piece, against everything the term has since come to mean and against any meaningful definition. PS Wow, just seen this. Well, maybe not, although I think the risk is greater for this sort of book. As a personal measure, I can say that trying to say something coherent about what I think slipstream is which I may or may not have succeeded in doing was one of the hardest things I've tried to do in the past few years.

I revised and re-revised this review more than any other I've written. The fact this seems fundamentally wrong to me is my problem with the whole "feeling very strange" movement begat by Moles Odd that you say begat by Moles -- as I read it, he was trying to return to Sterling's original approach, not describe something new maybe he'll come along and tell us one way or the other. I am yet to read the stories in the anthology although I have read the introduction.

I think it works as slipstream because it makes you feel the strangeness inherent in the world it's describing. Fair enough if you don't find either position convincing, though. And if you don't think slipstream is effect-based, what do you think it's based on?

I don't really see the difference. Odd that you say begat by Moles -- as I read it, he was trying to return to Sterling's original approach, not describe something new Well, Sterling's article is not the most coherent document and Moles only quotes very selectively from it.