Feeling Very Strange - Site de Thomas - Free

xii | John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly
the success of a friend when it comes at your expense? If you believed
destroying weapons of mass destruction justified the invasion of Iraq,
how do you feel about the war now? If God created everything, then
who created God? And don’t even try to think about what happened
before the Big Bang.
In a memorable fake commercial from the first season of Saturday
Night Live, a husband and wife are arguing over a new product called
Shimmer. He claims it’s a dessert topping; she says it’s a floor wax.
Suddenly the announcer steps in and tells them that they’re both right,
demonstrates on the kitchen floor and a bowl of butterscotch pudding,
and closes by saying, “Shimmer, for the greatest shine you ever tasted!”
The skit works precisely because it tickles our cognitive dissonance. F.
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.”
However, it is our fate to live in a time when it takes a first-rate
mind just to get through the day. 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: it embraces cognitive
dissonance rather than trying to reduce it. Again and again in the stories
in this volume, writers present us with contradictions and then,
deliberately and with great skill, elaborate on them without trying to
resolve them. Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron
a wave or a particle?
Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.
How to Be Strange
So then, if slipstream is a literary effect rather than a fully developed
genre, how is it accomplished?
1. Slipstream violates the tenets of realism.
2. Although slipstream stories pay homage to various popular
genres and their conventions, they are not science fiction stories,
traditional fantasies, dreams, historical fantasies, or alternate
histories.
3. Slipstream is playfully postmodern. The stories often
acknowledge their existence as fictions, and play against the