Feeling Very Strange - Site de Thomas - Free

xiv | John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly
behind them, or acknowledgment that genre tropes are anything more
than pawns on a chess board.
You Have Never Been Here
In his essay “Kafka and His Precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges said, “every
writer creates his own precursors.” New genres arise from existing
genres. Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells were not “science
fiction” writers when they wrote (are there three works more different
than Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and When
the Sleeper Wakes?), but in retrospect they can be identified as such
once the genre has been “invented.” Similarly, if we place Kafka’s “In the
Penal Colony,” Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” John Collier’s “Evening
Primrose,” Shirley Jackson’s “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” Damon
Knight’s “The Handler,” Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” Fritz Leiber’s
“The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity,” Donald Barthelme’s
“Robert Kennedy – Saved from Drowning,” Thomas Disch’s “Descending,”
Italo Calvino’s “The Argentine Ant,” and Barry Malzberg’s “The
Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady” side by side, we can discern the
shape of slipstream.
The ideal version of this anthology would include such precursors.
Instead we have confined ourselves to writers active today, primarily in
the period since Sterling’s essay. We have included writers from both
sides of the genre divide, and some who seem to traverse it without
noticing. We have taken only stories published in the United States,
though it would have been easy to extend the selection to Great Britain
and Canada, and to work not originally published in English. We have
tried to focus on writers who have spent much if not all of their careers
writing slipstream. But still there are at least a dozen other writers who
belong in the pages that follow, had we but enough space.
Where does slipstream go from here?
Within the last fifteen years, magazines and one-shots like Crank,
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Say. . ., McSweeney’s, Polyphony,
Zoetrope, Century, The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, Trampoline,
The Third Alternative, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, The Infinite
Matrix, and Strange Horizons have provided a showcase for slipstream.
This nascent publishing niche may or may not develop into a genre in