(Re)Name This Nerdy Literary Movement

Admittedly, I never really thought about it, but I have found I often have a hard time characterizing to others the type of fiction I like, and the “slipstream” definition seems to fit it best. So, I really hope it catches on, so I can just tell people I like “slipstream” and actually be understood.

Check out the “Year in Review” section of any of Gardner Dozois’s “Year’s Best SF” for the last decade, and you will see that you are hardly the only person in the field wrestling with this label. For something even more amorphous, try to get a grip on “new weird”.

I’m still catching up on the Old Weird. Though that reminds me I should have mentioned China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer and probably lots of other people in there …

Singularity Fiction sounds good to me, but you’d have to coin it. It’s sort of in reference to the Technological Singularity “coming up” where you can’t tell the difference between where the life form begins and the computer does. So, maybe even a longer version would be Speculative Singularity Fiction, but that’s a mouthful.

I like the sound of Slipstream, I’d just never heard of it. Find a couple professors and get them to teach seminars on Singularity Fiction at the right colleges that pump out guys like you and name drop it as much as possible, I’m sure we’d see it somewhere.

Speculative Fiction works for me. It’s more commonly used than Slipstream, anyway.

I could write a disparaging review comparing it all to fusion cooking or jazz fusion, but I suspect it won’t be easy to wear as a badge of honour a word with those connotations.

How about “Literature By Authors Who Don’t Want To Admit They Wrote a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel”?

I love you for writing about this. I myself have always written fantasy, but would say that my writing now also has elements of literary fiction and horror– so I’ve just been calling it ‘steampunk’ when talking about my manuscript.

I don’t love slipstream, but I do think a new term is necessary. I like the fusion idea- fuze fiction. OR someone just has to write something both awesome and racy and we’ll get that critic. I think that’s what’s missing- a successful and well-known author who will stand up and say ‘call it what you want to, but this is something different.’

Remember that piece by Katie Roiphe in the NYT a couple of months ago? And all the NEGATIVE feedback that she received? Yes the article was on a very specific idea about male authors (aggressive male authors vs the cuddly kind) but the letters to the paper were all on how she limited her authors to an elite group. She was stuck in a narrow limited box, completely missing the diversity that brilliant and creative authors that have developed.
Point being, the writers listed (and I’ll put Lev’s book in this category) do not fit in any box. So your writing includes SF or Fantasy or Mythology with Historical Fiction and some Post Modernism; it shouldn’t typecast you. It means that you’re willing and open to explore topics and meld it… because it’s a good read, and not because it was part of your post doc comparative lit class. It means that people need to give up the snobbery associated with “literature” and realize that there is so much more out there. If you want to call it anything other than a “good read”, I’d like to call it the Anti-“Literature” movement.

Fantasy + Literary Fiction= FanLit

Okay, maybe not such a great idea…

http://e6n1.blogspot.com/

I did an article a few years back on this amorphous not-quite-genre for the NoveList Plus database (found in libraries), and wound using the term “Slipstream,” as well surreal and fabulist (grasping at straws). However, in talking with (the many) readers who especially enjoy this sort of thing at the library where I work, I don’t find any specific labels coming up to capture the range of things out there. Possible exception: folks do sometimes apply the term “Magical Realist,” perhaps for want of a better one, and since that has academic/lit-crit cred.

Most of the time though we’ll go from discussing some author they like who is not strictly naturalistic, and this could be anyone ranging from Haruki Murakami to Katherine Dunn to George Saunders to Etgar Keret to Kelly Link to Italo Calvino or Borges, and extrapolate from there. A little surreal, or kind of fantastical, or authors who seem to leave the ground a little, or that get deeply strange, or Kafkaesque, or faintly otherwordly – these are the kinds of things I hear in conversations I have with readers, while suggesting books for them at the library.

Though I’m tempted at first to say there’s no term broad enough to capture such a range of voices, on second thought that is just silly – we do it all the time w/ terms like “mystery” or “science fiction,” referring to a staggering diversity of forms and types of story. So – Fabulism/Fabulation? This is another term that has been coined for this purpose, and is rather less bewildering to the novice than “slipstream.” Or why not stretching Magical Realism to fit – that is a term that many already use and are familiar with, and a not inappropriate one for the thing described. Or what about good old Surrealism? Or does that carry too much baggage?

I did always love “interstitial,” for a genre that refuses to be genre-fied, but I don’t think that would ever get much popular use.

I have to say, I love ‘interstitial’ despite never having heard it used this way. I end up with ‘speculative fiction’ a lot, but that doesn’t cover enough of this territory — going to adopt interstitial instead. Thanks!

I like this post and discussion, but it’s an argument that’s been brought up many times before. I don’t know that there’s really a need for a label, because there’s such a wide variety of styles across that group, nothing will fit for all. I love the fact that it defies genres, and that no one can really pin it down.

Isn’t it just another way of telling a great story? We could go back to Swift and Hawthorne as examples for that.

PS: Don’t forget to include one of my faves, Karen Joy Fowler in this “new” genre (whatever you’re going to call it).