Not all of what I would call SF is marketed as such. My understanding is that Kurt Vonnegut (for example) intentionally distanced himself from what was then considered the SF ghetto, in a (successful) bid for mainstream appeal; Slaughterhouse-Five is obviously an SF novel in the sense that it contains SF elements (coming unstuck in time, aliens), but was published and received as literature. Other fiction with major speculative elements that’s been published as mainstream literature includes Donald Barthelme’s stories (a king with a donkey’s head, putting buildings in envelopes to mail them, and so on), Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale (a flying horse, extrapolation into the future), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (in which a ghost features prominently). This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course; many older works containing prominent speculative elements (ranging from Gulliver’s Travels through Frankenstein and Dracula to Brave New World and 1984) weren’t labeled as science fiction or fantasy, and are still widely considered literature rather than science fiction.
And that’s one definition of slipstream: fiction with fantastical elements that’s published in a marketing category other than speculative fiction. (As I understand Sterling’s essay, this is fairly close to one of his original definitions of the term.) By that definition, of course, no speculative fiction magazine or publisher has ever published any slipstream.
But at another end of the multidimensional and slippery concept of slipstream, there are works with few or no traditional speculative elements that are published as speculative fiction. Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, for example, is widely considered a fantasy novel, and it reads and feels like a fantasy novel, but it lacks the major element that marks most fantasy as fantasy: it contains no overt magic. It takes place in a world other than our own, populated by humans, in a culture that in many ways resembles a historical human culture; and it was published by Tor Fantasy, with a Thomas Canty cover. All of which are hallmarks of a certain kind of fantasy. But unlike other fantasy novels, this one violates no laws of physics, contains no humanoid races or talking animals or fantastic monsters; it owes more to Georgette Heyer than to Tolkien, and Gene Wolfe described it as “Noel Coward [writing] a vehicle for Errol Flynn.” It seems reasonable, then, to label the book (as the author does) interstitial: a work that falls into the interstices between traditional marketing categories. (I should note that my cavalier uses of terms like speculative fiction and fantasy should not be seen as an indication that those terms have simple definitions. I’ve encountered a few people lately to whom fantasy means specifically what I would call high fantasy (which has a lot of overlap with what Interzone calls Big Commercial Fantasy): Tolkienesque elves and dragons. Whereas by my definition, anything containing magic is fantasy, whether it’s urban fantasy, magic realism, high fantasy, science fantasy, dark fantasy, or none of the above.)
And then there are hard-to-classify items like the comic book Love & Rockets (in which one of the two major sets of stories starts out with spaceships and dinosaurs and superheroes and various other sci-fi trappings but rapidly evolves into being largely non-fantastical and heavily character-driven; while the other major set of stories drifts back and forth across the line between Latin American-style magic realism and literary fiction). Not to mention children’s picture books, which largely aren’t market-categorized by whether they contain speculative elements. (Someone suggested some years back that Dr. Seuss should be awarded a posthumous lifetime-achievement Hugo; I think the suggestion was intended mostly as a joke, but I thought it was a brilliant idea and I wish it had happened.)
Sterling noted in his essay that slipstream was a new genre but not yet a new marketing category. That was true at the time, but I think slipstream may be on its way to slowly becoming a marketing category, even if nobody yet is quite sure what it means. At WorldCon 2000, we talked with someone from one of the SF book publishing companies about Strange Horizons; she tried to help us find a short catchy label or category that we could use to describe the magazine, to give readers some idea what to expect and therefore draw them in. We used the word slipstream in passing, and she said something like, “Oh! So you’re publishing stories with a slipstream mentality. That’s the kind of description readers will understand.” (That’s not an exact quote; she phrased it more clearly.) She was looking for a marketing category to put us into, to improve our advertising, and “slipstream” was one that made sense to her.
So What Exactly Is Slipstream, Anyway?
These days when most people use the word slipstream, they’re generally talking about a particular feel that some fiction has. (As Mary Anne wrote in her editorial a few months ago: “In the end, [genre seems] to come down to a matter of language and tone.”) Jonathan Carroll is the usual canonical slipstream example: a fluid mix of reality and fantasy, published as literary fiction. And much of what genre authors publish as literary fiction is slipstream—that’s certainly how I’d categorize some of Le Guin’s more literary work, such as “Half Past Four,” a story published in The New Yorker in 1987, which presents several disconnected permutations of a set of characters and character names, as if showing several alternate-universe versions of the ways these characters might interrelate.
Another way of putting it is that slipstream is fantasy (generally set in a world much like our modern world) that doesn’t read like fantasy; it usually Feels Like Literature, but has fantastical (often extravagantly fantastical) elements that are fundamental to the story. It’s often a little harder-edged than magic realism—more often William S. Burroughs than Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but then again, it can be construed as being a subset or a superset of magic realism.
I think it’s reasonable to say that (as noted in Sterling’s booklist) Barthelme and William S. Burroughs and Pynchon are all slipstream writers. They get weirder and more hard-edged than most of what I’d call magic realism (though fully exploring the overlaps and differences between the two terms would take another essay), and the magic and weirdness is often less fluidly integrated with reality—it’s often a bit jarring and somewhat over-the-top, whereas a lot of magic realism (at least the Latin American kind) is so dreamlike that you can almost forget that that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the real world. Slipstream is also sometimes a catch-all “weird stuff that doesn’t fit any other category” category; Sterling says that on being given a vague definition of the term, any SF reader can immediately add books to the slipstream reading list, but I think that’s partly because there are several overlapping definitions, some of which are very vague. Anything that doesn’t have any overtly and unequivocally fantastical elements but does contain things that might be fantastical could probably be labeled slipstream. By a loose definition of slipstream, probably the majority of the fiction that we at Strange Horizons publish could be labeled that way, but calling us a slipstream magazine would probably give the wrong idea.
In the end, defining slipstream is at least as difficult as defining speculative fiction; I’m sure others’ definitions will vary. Work that has no clear fantastical elements sometimes hangs out in the general neighborhood of slipstream; whether you call it slipstream or not depends on your definitions.
Aspects of Genre
Sterling provides other definitions of slipstream as well. For example, he notes that the kind of writing he’s talking about could also be called “Novels of Postmodern Sensibility.” He adds: “It seems to me that the heart of slipstream is an attitude of peculiar aggression against ‘reality.’ … [T]hese works … often somehow imply that nothing we know makes ‘a lot of sense’ and perhaps even that nothing ever could.” But here I think Sterling is conflating a couple of different aspects of what he’s labeled as slipstream: on the one hand, slipstream as a fuzzy label for items that don’t quite fit into traditional genres, and on the other hand, slipstream as defined by a particular attitude shared by certain of the writers.
So I think it’s worth looking at a couple of different aspects of what constitutes genre. Even if the following areas don’t quite manage to define slipstream, I think they’re useful to think about when attempting to categorize various kinds of fiction.
Content
Content—whether a work contains “speculative elements” or not—is what I’m usually talking about when I attempt to put genre labels on fiction. Science fiction, for example, most often is set in the future and involves some sort of technology that’s beyond our current understanding but doesn’t contradict currently known/believed physical laws. Slipstream, too, often contains fantastical elements of some sort, or elements that verge on the fantastical or in some way appear to be fantastical. But you can probably come up with a dozen counterexamples to each of those descriptions without trying hard.