Ben and Squirrel-Monkey -- Derek says thanks, but I removed your posts to make way for comments on slipstream. Didn't want it to get too confusing. Hope you'll both understand. And I moved Niall's comment over here from the other post. Meddling, meddling, meddling. I'm busier than the Dev.

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Scratch that last post. John already replied to Niall at the older post, so I'm just going to leave well enough alone and people can comment wherever they like. Onward.

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"Fowler's "Lieserl" is not an alternate history. It's a literalized metaphor."

I have no idea what this means. Maybe slipstream is being able to use those kinds of lit-crit terms. It's the kind of thing that makes me feel like a dumbass who doesn't know enough to be writing.

Wexler

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A very strong anthology that props up a mighty arcane premise.

rick bowes

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Sorry about the lit-crit talk. As a college teacher, it's all too easy for me to fall into that stuff. What I mean by a literalized metaphor is simply that in the story an abstract comparison or metaphor is turned into a literal fact. For instance, you can imagine that Kafka's "Metamorphosis" might have started with Kafka observing that some browbeaten salesmen was living a life like a bug. Presto: Gregor Samsa wakes up on page one and is literally an insect. The story then treats the practical problems of being an insect in a middle class German family, but it haunts us because it seems metaphorically correct.

I replied to some of Niall's questions and comments back on Jeff's earlier page. I hope some of that explains what I think we are about.

Jim Kelly, of course, may disagree with me. He tends to be a little more down to earth than I am, and is not responsible for my English professor spasms.

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John Kessel

I don't see how your term displaces Ellen's. Lieserl is altnernative history for me, and I think for most genre readers, because it treats historical figures and events in non historical ways. Metamorphosis is, as far as we know, pure fiction. Both stories turn metaphors into dramatic situations but that,I believe is a basic function of most fiction, alternate histories and otherwise. As surely the author of Buffalo must know.

Rick Bowes

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Rick:

I guesss I don't see how the central fantastic event of "Lieserl" fits into alternate history--Lieserl, the infant, ages from baby to old crone within the exchange of a few letters, while Albert (and Mileva) do not age at all. This is the thing that makes the story strange, not the fact that it's about Einstein's lost daughter.

A conventional alternate history about Einstein's abandoned daughter might tell what happened to her after she was left for adoption, grew up and pursued some career, maybe became a physicist, for instance, under some other name, and met Einstein under other circumstances. I can imagine a very good story arising from this, but it would not be slipstream.

Does "mostfiction . . . turn metaphors into dramatic situations"in the literal way of "Lieserl" and "Metamorphosis"? In most stories, metaphors are metaphors,not literal, physical facts.

Best,
john

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John

Events in Lieserl did not occure to the historical figures involved. This, obviously, is alternate history on a different scale and with a more subtle usage than Hitler's winning WW2.

Putting the metaphor up-front in the story as Fowler does and as Kafka does in Metamophosis works because that's usually maksed. It fascinated me once to see the Gielgud/Burton Hamlet done without sets and with the actors in rehearsal clothes. or recently to see Sweeney Todd with just 11 people singing, acting and playing instruments. But if this was done all the time I think audiences would stay away.

It's interesting to me how many of those stories you've selected were first published as genre pieces and accepted as such. I don't remember Karen Joy Fowler's place in the genre being questioned when her early stories were published. That seemed only to happen later when she had succeeded in the mainstream.

Rick

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I agree that this sort of story, like the modern dress Hamlet or the Sweeney Todd without the full attempt to gain "verisimilitude" is not likely to ever gain wide audiences. Slipstream (if it exists) as I understand it is not likely ever to be a majority taste. It's too edgy, and doesn't easily follow the rules we expect in genre or non-genre works.

Karen did come into SF and get accepted readily, which is a credit to our readers. But increasingly her stories were not very science fictional, or not like traditional fantasy. I would not say that all of her work is slipstream, by my loose and evolving definition, but she tends to play literary games more than most sf writers do.

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I'm not getting where "Liserl" can be read as alternate history. Fantasy, sure. But it has a person who ages at a fantastic rate, living decades in days. If this is alternate history, then Anne Rice's vampire stories are also alternate history, because, you know, they take place during *history*. What?

As to whether it's "slipstream" or just "fantasy" -- well, you know, as I said on Moles' blog, I kind of hate the term slipstream. I hate particularly it's use as a synonym for "interstitial" (for which I rather prefer the more modest term "cross-genre"). And I hate the implication that it's something new, and that what it's about is being "between" SF and mainstream somehow. Feh.

But I do, often, love the things that the term is used to refer to, including the stories in that book. And I think John & Jim do a yeoman job, in their introductory essay, of pointing to what we could usefully mean by slipstream, if we're stuck with the word.

"Lieserl" is non-realist. It posits a superrapidly aging daughter, but *not* as a *speculation*. It does not look at what would happen, logically, if the world in fact contained superrapidly aging daughters. It does not have Einstein react the way he would if he *actually* had a superrapidly aging daughter. It does not introduce a novum and extrapolate consequences. It does not take the conceit *seriously* in the way that a classical genre fantasy story would. It is not rigorous -- in that way.

The logic of what happens is a dream logic, an emotional logic.

This isn't a new thing. It's squarely in one camp of modernism, the camp where the irreal, surreal, absudist movements live.

"Slipstream", if we have to call it that, is not outside of, alongside of, or half-in-half-out of fantasy. "Liserl" is 100% fantasy. But it's non-realist, non-naturalist fantasy -- it doesn't have the epistemolical conservatism, the "we all know how the world works, now let's change a few things and then dramatize what honest-to-God really would happen if those things were different like that" of 99% of genre fantasy.

Mind you, I like (and write in) both modes. I like realism. I'm not knocking it.

But to say that Lieserl is just fantasy, because it "couldn't really happen", and there's nothing more to be said about the matter, is, I think, to miss the point.

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I'd have to agree with Ellen on "The Specialist's Hat" — brilliant and chilling and pure horror story. I don't see how it "plays against the long history of ghost stories" (emphasis mine).

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I agree that a lot of other Link stories, from "The Hortlak" to "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" to "The Girl Detective" would be more squarely slipstream. I think it's a lot easier to read "Specialist's Hat" as "just a ghost story" than it is to read many of her stories as "just" whatever.

But I do think the effect "Hat" goes for -- and I think K&K are right in arguing that "slipstream" is a name for an *effect*, like humor and horror, not for a *genre* or even a subgenre -- is not merely fear, but alienation. In a straight-up horror story, the girls would be *dead* -- or turned into ghosts -- and we would simply feel pity and terror. But they're not dead, they're Dead, and we don't actually know what Dead means. We can collapse it, sure, into the traditional understanding of being a ghost -- the girls are now immortal haunts, etc. But I think a careful reading of the story suggests more. Dead is clearly frightening as hell, goosebump-inducing, so that "Hat" is definitely, utterly horror, just as "Liserl" is 100% fantasy. But being Dead also seems joyful, there's a frisson of excitement in it. And more than that, it's just other -- unknown. The story opens up a huge empty space of potential being and drops the characters into it. You can fill the space, if you like, with ideas from outside the story, and if you do, you read it as a non-slipstream horror story. But if you don't fill it, if you allow Dead to remain something essentially undefined, the feeling is one not so much of simple fear as of alienation, strangeness, being unmoored. That's what makes the story function as "slipstream".

Is it between genres? Not a whit. It is straight-up horror. Horror is its only conceivable content-based genre classification. I do not read it, particularly, as John apparently does, as a "deconstructionist" story "commenting on" or playing with the history of horror, the way "The Little Magic Shop" explicitly messes with the magic shop story tradition. I think it's an immersive story. I don't read it as pointing out that it's a story.

Nonetheless, the alienness of being Dead, the opennness of it, makes its effect something I'm willing to call "slipstream".

Compare this to, say, the powerfully effective horror story Peter Crowther "Bedfordshire". Similar, in its use of surprise, and in that the protagonist ends up in a vividly realized, chilling afterlife. It's incredibly horrifying. But there's no ambiguity or fluidity about what being dead and in hell means in that story. It's absolutely clear, absolutely believable, and absolutely horrible. It's fresh, it's interesting, it's not a cliche Hell, but it's well-defined. We are anchored in the bad thing that happens to the protagonist. We feel shock and horror and pity and maybe anger -- but we don't feel any "strangeness" of the "hold on. what? what the hell? what the hell just happened? what do you mean?" variety.

Most times, when a story makes us say "what the hell does that mean?" it doesn't *work*. We aren't drawn in, we don't stay in the story. We withdraw. We are alienated from the *story*. The effect is dimmed, lessened, by unclarity.

It takes a master like Link to hold us so powerfully, that when we get to that unclarity, we stay with the *story* and are alienated from *the rest of life* -- from ourselves. We are lost, bewildered.

I think that "intensely engaged pleasurable confusion" is the effect that K&K want us to see as the core of "slipstream".

And I like that definition. Let's jettison this "between genres" business.

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I defend, above, categorizing "Specialist's Hat" and "Lieserl" as what K&K mean by "slipstream".

I'm less sanguine -- though I like the stories -- about "The Little Magic Shop" and "Hell Is The Absence of God" being slipstream.

I think that a case can be made that they are both playful, and playfulness is perhaps a necessary condition of "slipstream". But I don't think it's a sufficient one.

"Little Magic Shop" is what John Gardner calls "deconstructionist" -- it's making fun of the little magic shop story the way "Hamlet" made fun of the revenge tragedy, turning its premise on its side, playing around with it, taking the stock parts of it that we are meant to simply accept seriously and challenging them. And that's one thing you could mean by "slipstream", but I don't think it's the most interesting thing.

And to me that kind of cleverness does not produce the self-alienating "wow", the "feeling very strange", that the "Specialist's Hat" does. If "Hat" produces the feeling of being on unsafe ground, of an intensely engaged "oh my god -- what? what's going on here?", the commenting-on-genre-history of "Shop" produces more of a "heh, good one".

"Hell" is a brilliant story. And it, certainly, is *interstitial*. We can argue all day about whether it's SF or fantasy -- it cleverly straddles the line, applying sfnal rigor to a premise that defies sfnal cultural norms. Which makes it, of course, squarely SF in the pre-1969 sense of the term (I'm using the Tolkein-inspired launch of Ballantine's Lin Carter's Adult Fantasy line as the point where the two genres split). It also, yes, does very interesting narrative stuff with how its told.

And I guess it did make me feel strange in a sense -- made me feel philosophically, religiously challenged.

But I don't think it unmoors the reader. You know exactly what Chiang means, where his polemic is grounded. The story goes about its business with ruthless inevitability. It is absolutely a *speculation*, as "Lieserl" and "Specialist's Hat" and "Bright Morning" are not.

Maybe I'm making the definition too narrow; maybe it's okay for "slipstream" to mean a grab-bag of vaguely related things. But I'd sort of like to avoid conflating "irrealist" (refuses to extrapolate, follows a logic of dream), "deconstructionist" (plays with conventions while winking at the reader), "interstitial" (neither fish nor fowl), and "slipstream" proper (produces an effect of intense, engaged self-alienation, confusion, or existential doubt).

There's a relation between these. Deconstructionist techniques can produce the slipstream effect. Irrealist premises, by calling into question our consensus reality, can produce the effect too. Slipstream-effect stories may often be interstitial, in that they may draw from different traditions for material to produce the effect. Deconstructionist and irrealist genre stories are by their nature arguably interstitial, since they involve in the first case both the text and an implied metafictional comment on it (which is sort of another genre) and in the latter case an introduction of a mode we're less used to in the genres. And so on.

But they don't have to go together. "Hell" is interstitial but not irrealist or slipstream-effect. "Hat" is slipstream-effect and irrealist but not interstitial or deconstructionist.

(And "Biographical Notes...", my story in there, is deconstructionist, interstitial, and borderline irrealist, but I don't actually think it's slipstream-effect. I mean, did it make you feel very strange? *That* kind of very strange?)

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Ben: Great stuff. I'll post notice at the front of the journal that you've opened the discussion up here again and put links to lead readers back to this post in case anyone would like to read or respond to your ideas. Thanks for posting.

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