Review:
Feeling Very Strange,
A Slipstream Anthology |
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Review by Rev. Brian
Worley |
Something is happening.
It's easy to miss because it isn't happening in bookstores, at least not visibly. But there is a genre that isn't. Some people call it magical realism (and sometimes magical-realism-that-isn't-Latin-American), and it was briefly christened infernocrusher fiction. The people who write it often don't know that they write it. The people who compiled this anthology call it slipstream.
You're probably familiar with it if you read small press fiction. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet seems to publish it a lot. We at Susurrus probably publish it, at least sometimes. But what exactly is it?
That's the million-dollar question. The anthology actually published a forum discussion whose primary debate is defining slipstream. It's the sort of fiction that is somewhere between fantasy and literary. Think Murakami. Think Borges. And yes, you might want to think Kafka (more on him later). It's that kind of fiction that should occupy a place in the bookstore that doesn't exist. The problem is that, if you like reading this kind of fiction, it's dificult to know where to get it. It gets split between the literary and SF/Fantasy section of the bookstore based on where the publisher thinks it will make the most money, and while you're in the bookstore, there's no way of knowing whether an arbitrarily selected book will contain any element of it or not.
Enter this anthology. Collected by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, it serves as a collecting place for slipstream. Writers from both sides of the genre divide are represented in fifteen stories that span from 1972 to 2006. The first story made me a little leary that maybe I'd made a poor choice at the bookstore (not that it was bad, but it didn't pull me in), but every other story was a fantastic read. The stories ran the whole gamut from surreal, to practically low fantasy, to making me wonder why one was included because it seemed completely mundane (though it was one of the best stories in the anthology).
I also enjoyed the introduction and the forum discussion that they published, which were primarily aimed at describing the difficulties with defining the genre, as well as attempts to explain what the genre is and where it came from, through a series of definitions, qualifications, corrections, defenses, and the occasional joke. This could possibly be dismissed as exercises in semantics, especially if you're hungry for more fiction, but the forum discussion is split into several short sections occasionally put between stories in a way that makes it unobtrusive and a good way to sort of clean one's pallette between stories.
The variety in this anthology may make it seem as though slipstream isn't very cohesive as a genre, but the stories have a sort of common feeling that lets you know that while the scope is broad, there are definitely shared traits that go beyond the fact that nearly all the stories are great reads. They serve as evidence of a sort of collected idea, picked up from a little bit of SF/Fantasy, a little bit of literature, and varying amounts of postmodernism or surrealism to show that despite what the bookstores say, something is happening. And though it's hard to define exactly what is happening, it's a pleasure to read.
To learn more, visit the publisher here.
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