November 21, 2014

Why I Used to Love Slipstream Fiction

Do you remember there once was a secret boom of slipstream fiction? The term was coined by Bruce Sterling in 1989 to explain there were hidden treasures in literary fiction that could appeal to science fiction fans almost in the same way our genre hooked them. But the real treasures rushed out at the turn of the millennium when newcomers to our genre, Kelly Link, Jay Lake, Christopher Rowe, Benjamin Rosenberg, Christopher Barzak, and Jeff VanderMeer, started to explore their imaginations outside of our genre boundary. At the same time, coincidently or not, a lot of new literary newcomers also started to write with a lot more fantastic elements, borrowing ideas from science fiction and fantasy, and broke the genre barriers. Kevin Brockmeier, Amy Bender, George Saunders, Charles Yu, Adam Johnson, Arthur Bradford and many more tried to break out of the literary convention, enjoying the fresh weirdness which has been the tradition of our genre. It was a great time. Many tried chapbook zines, webzines, hypertext fiction, and original anthologies. Interstitial art movement and Literature's icons like Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, even Bradford Morrow encouraged them. It reminded me of the sixties, when the new wave and absurdist movement tried to go out of the conventions and ventured into new style of fiction. Its "Try Something New" spirit revived then again, seeking a new frontier of fiction. "Tear down the walls, Motherfuckers" we used to say, and the new writers actually tore down the walls and barriers of the literary genres.
But then what happened? There came the mashup novels. Imaginative freedom and whimsy look very alike and often come together. So when lazy writers learned they could do anything, they just played with their favorite characters and plots, mashing up different genres. In the spirit of entertainment, making fun, retrofit, exploiting our past literary resources. It's in the same contemporary capitalist greediness they do that. They don't explore the past to find something new, or forgotten treasures, they just have fun. Most of the steampunk novels are like that, too. No, that isn't wrong per se, fun and whimsiness, those elements belong to the pleasures of reading, too. But they did absorb the new movement of slipstream. Suddenly those new writers found that there were good market for the cross-genre fiction, and started to write mashup, or steampunk novels. Even some wandered off to game novelization. Lost was the spirit of "Try Something New" or weirdness, inherent trope of our genre. On the other side, those literary fiction's newcomers learned our genre and started to write the genre novels, post apocalypse, epic fantasy, or YA. Or they simply went back to the mainstream literature, being disappointed that there wasn't a market for their type of fiction.
Again it reminds me of the fact that there's no "us" anymore. Only a small community of the kin spirit can't support those writers. Nobody is looking for future, or newness, and we have to be content with what we already have. Even our genre readers have lost the appetites for new things, and go to pulp, military, comic, space opera, and more and more into traditional fantasy. I do miss those days of the new slipstream or "New Weird" days. Sigh.

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