Feeling Very Strange - Site de Thomas - Free

viii | John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly
selections. It is not as if there were only a handful of stories to choose
from. Many writers who are primarily known for their work either in
the mainstream or the various genres have dipped their toes into what
we consider the slipstream. In fact, it was this depth and breadth of stories
that encouraged us to make the attempt.
Call of the Ghetto
The term slipstream was coined by Bruce Sterling in a column he wrote
for a fanzine called SF Eye in 1989. Sterling was attempting to understand
a kind of fiction that he saw increasingly in science fiction publications
and elsewhere. He quite rightly asserted that it was not true
science fiction, and yet it bore some relation to science fiction. In a key
passage of his essay, Sterling wrote,
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.
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 a Postmodern
Sensibility. . .for the sake of convenience and argument, we will
call these books “slipstream.”
Two points need to be made about Sterling’s essay. First is that it
includes a reading list of writers, of whom only a vanishingly small
fraction were identified with a genre. From the outset, Sterling defined
slipstream as largely a mutant form of the mainstream. The second
point is that the essay was addressed to an audience of science fiction
writers and readers. Nobody calls mainstream writers “mainstream”
except for those of us in the ghetto of the fantastic. The very notion
that slipstream writing needed to be placed in a genre of its own comes
from measuring it against science fiction and fantasy. Building a wall to