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oughts, sparked a considerable debate among writers and fans of “slipstream”
and those writers and readers of science fiction for whom
Fowler’s story had no legitimate place in the genre. The fact that “What
I Didn’t See” won the Nebula Award, one of science fiction’s highest
prizes, only adds to the irony.
Consider Jonathan Lethem’s “Light and the Sufferer.” Mysterious
aliens are a staple of science fiction, their motives and actions the subject
of much overheated speculation. They come in all flavors, from hostile
to godlike to benevolent to inscrutable. Lethem’s alien “Sufferers” are
inscrutable, all right, but the story is not about them. Lethem ignores
the commonplaces of the sf alien story; it’s almost as if he cannot be
bothered to take them seriously. On the other hand, Lethem uses his
aliens to comment on a story of character, and somehow this story
conveys more seriousness than the average alien story. Lethem obviously
knows his aliens, and while that knowledge hovers in the background
of the story, it never comes to the foreground. He also expects
his readers to know of sf’s idea of superior aliens, and to accept the conceit
without flinching. In this sense a slipstream story quotes genre in
pursuit of literary effect. A story like this would have had trouble being
accepted in a science fiction magazine of forty years ago. sf traditionalists
wring their hands when such stories appear in science fiction publications
today.
The writers of slipstream who do not come from the genre side of
the divide, however, never worry about its connection to science fiction,
and do not talk about it unless prompted by questioners attempting
to link their work to sf.
Dessert Topping or Floor Wax?
So what do we think slipstream is? How did we decide on the stories
that follow?
The problem is that, in the years since Sterling coined it, the term
has become smeared across several meanings. It is now a would-be literary
form, a publishing category, and most recently a fluid but discrete
group of writers who recognize in one another a common sensibility.
It is the literary form that most interests us. However, we see no
profit in penning the mutant. Science fiction has not been well served