We in the Strange Horizons fiction department are definitely interested in slipstream, but we do generally require that stories we publish have a fairly clear speculative element. There are exceptions—stories like “Medusa at Morning,” for example, in which the snakes waver across a blurry line between metaphorical and literal. (Which is part of what I like so much about that story.) And we’ve published a couple of stories in which the speculative element is definite but very slight (though as we see it, other factors put those stories firmly in the speculative fiction tradition). But in most cases, if we can’t see something that looks undeniably fantastical to us in a story, we probably won’t publish it.
Not all magazines take that approach. Century, for example, publishes some stories that have no speculative elements; a review at Tangent suggests that it makes more sense to think of Century as a literary magazine with an interest in SF than as an SF magazine per se.
It sometimes feels a bit arbitrary to me to make a distinction between stories with speculative elements and those without, but we (the Strange Horizons fiction editors) want to publish speculative fiction rather than other kinds of fiction, and content is an element in perception of genre, so we continue to generally make that distinction.
Language
But as noted earlier, a reader’s perception of genre often has little to do with content; it’s often the language or prose style that makes the difference. Slipstream often is written in unusual prose styles; it’s often edgy and direct, sometimes choppy, sometimes lyrical. The language of classic science fiction is often transparent, using prose that doesn’t call attention to itself; the language of hard-boiled detective novels feels succinct and direct but is surprisingly full of metaphor; the language of high fantasy tends toward the archaic. One way to mix genres is simply to apply the language of one genre to the content of another.
Structure
Narrative structure is another area that, while not directly related to genre, is often indicative of genre. Slipstream and literary fiction use experimental and non-traditional narrative forms more often than science fiction does: nonlinearity (in a variety of forms), lack of traditional plot structure, breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience, inclusion of non-prose forms in the work (see Always Coming Home), and so on. Also, genre writers tend, in my experience, to be very concerned about keeping viewpoint strictly consistent and constrained, while literary fiction writers seem mostly to care less about following Standard Rules Of Story Construction and more about achieving specific effects.
Of course, unusual and experimental forms of fiction can be found in speculative fiction as well. There was plenty of experimentation back in the New Wave, and it’s still going on; Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Other Cities” is a good example of a work that doesn’t have most of the elements of a traditional narrative. Hyperfiction is another promising area of development for experimental narrative; I haven’t seen much that I’ve liked, but the field is still maturing.
Alan DeNiro introduced me to a useful analogy: if traditional narrative structure is like a window, more experimental writing is like a stained glass window. Alan notes that the former tries to be transparent, not letting style or structure interfere with clear gazing outside, while unusual styles and structures force you to look at the window, notice the colors, textures, and so on. These are two different approaches to writing (and reading), with different goals: as Alan puts it, “Sometimes you want to look outside, and sometimes you want to look at the window.”
Attitude Toward Fantastical Elements
Finally, one of the biggest elements in determining how a reader perceives a work’s genre is the attitude the work takes toward fantastical/speculative elements. If such elements are treated as satire, metaphor, or surrealism, for example, chances are the work will feel more like literary fiction; in science fiction and fantasy, they’re more often treated as literal fact in the world of the story. If it’s not entirely clear whether those elements are intended to be taken literally or not, the work may end up in the gray zones of slipstream or interstitial fiction.
By “speculative elements” I mean, more or less, things that couldn’t happen in the real world today as the world is generally construed by Western scientific/rationalist culture. By convention, nonexistent people and geography that are similar enough to real equivalents to seem realistic don’t count as speculative; also by convention, alternate history (contradicting known historical fact) does count. By convention and historical association, modernized versions of fairy tales and folksongs—retelling an old story in a modern and naturalistic context (even without speculative elements)—tend to loiter on the borderlands of speculative fiction.
In the introduction to her anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, Nalo Hopkinson writes: “Northern science fiction and fantasy come out of a rational and skeptical approach to the world…. But the Caribbean, much like the rest of the world, tends to have a different worldview: The irrational, the inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by each with the daily events of life.” This thread exists in North American and Western European literature as well, but more in the literary-fiction tradition than in speculative fiction. Stories are often told through the subjective filter of a character’s perceptions; most often in North American speculative fiction, when strange things happen to a character living in a realistic world, the simplest explanation is that the character is insane. (In the ‘40s, characters in SF stories spent pages trying to figure out whether they were insane or not; I don’t generally have much patience for that these days. I want a nod to the issue, but I also want a recognition that today’s readers are sophisticated enough not to need that kind of thing played out in great detail.)
Conclusion
In the end, then, what genre we assign to a work depends on a variety of different factors, from content, style, and structure to how the work is marketed. There are real and valid differences between genres, but works that fall on or between the borders of genres are hard to categorize clearly; and it’s those works that often provide fertile ground for expanding and enriching the cores of the genres.
I’ll leave you with a quotation from critic Larry McCaffery:
“…[T]alented artists nearly always find ways to loosen the corset of genre expectations to give themselves enough room … [to] produce [fresh and original] genre works…. [But T]ruly great writers like Theodore Sturgeon are rarely content with merely loosening these restrictive norms; what they are often after are much more thoroughgoing reconfigurations that will permit them to break on through to an entirely new textual space … where they can … begin exploring what they really want to write about.”
—Larry McCaffery, Foreword to The Perfect Host, volume 5 of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
So even if we can’t reconfigure the genre completely, let’s get to work loosening those corsets.
Parts of this editorial were originally posted to the Rumor Mill.
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Jed Hartman is a Senior Fiction Editor for Strange Horizons. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Further reading:
Bryan Cholfin’s editorial for the Crank! Web page talks about what he’d like to see in the intersection between speculative fiction and literary fiction.
Samuel R. Delany, “About 5,750 Words,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. All of my conversations about metaphor and style in science fiction end up coming back to this essay, particularly its discussion of “subjunctivity level” in phrases like “winged dog” and “the door dilated.”
An almost entirely unrelated use of the term interstitial fiction appears in “Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks,” by Stuart Moulthropan, an essay on hyperfiction, “interactive fiction,” and the future of fiction.
If you want more about slipstream, you could attend the Slipstream Conference at LaGrange College in Georgia.