Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (51 page)

The sociography of SF is a sociography of abjection after abjection, of den
ial upon denial. The Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicuspids hasn’t fallen yet. There are still those among us who think the Order of the Blue Flower is a nefarious sect bent on perverting SF with fantasy. The League of Fusion Fry-Cooks still have to sell their haute cuisine as hamburger. The Kipple Foodstuff Factory is still a blight on the cityscape of the ghetto of Genre. We bitch about the Bistro de Critique even as the Last Realist bewails our victory over it. We still deny—
abject
—most everything there is in SF that makes it great.

We’re not
Fantasy
. We’re not
Sci-Fi
. We’re not
Literary Fiction
.

We deny our Pulp bitch-dam’s streetwise
nous
, deny that we’ve been hustling our asses because we chose to, because life in the ghetto means freedom. We deny everything we’ve learned suckling on our dear old momma’s plentiful paps, deny that we’ve learned how to turn tricks like real pros, paint ourselves up in pretty colours to hawk our wares on the street corner. Yet each day, each night, we straighten up the red leather miniskirt or guddle the bulge of our denim cut-offs, and stare at our face in the mirror as we put a fake eyelash on.

Even as we do so we glimpse this strange thing looking back at us, the part of ourselves inherited from this cannibal creation, ugly and miserable and a
wful to look at, what with both eyes on the same side of the face and all—our golem and our doppelgänger. It’s not gonna win any popularity contests. It’s not gonna have the punters oohing and aahing with that old sense-of-wonder satisfaction. But there’s something intriguing about the images reflected in its eyes, about the echoes in its voice as it whispers in the back of our head, the voice of the ghost that possesses both it and us.

We deny this too.

That’s not us, we tell ourselves. No, we’re weird but not
that
weird. We’re outré but not
that
outré. The ghetto is accepting of freaks but not
that
accepting. That old monster’s just too damn
out there
for most folks. We’re not pulp, but by God, we’re not modernist. No. Let’s just call ourselves SF, because then no one can ever accuse us of being, God forbid, “pretentious”.

So we fix our dress and head out into the street, a harlequin and a hustler.

Category is a marketing term, denoting rackspace. Genre is a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent esthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will…

…what seems to me to be a new, emergent genre, which has not yet b
ecome a category…

…is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against conse
nsus reality […] fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a “sense-of-wonder” or to systematically extrapolate…

…simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twe
ntieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility…

Bruce Sterling

Or we could call it…
INFERNOKRUSHER!!!

Slipstream, ultimately, is just a wussy term. We should be drawing names less from wishy-washy words (slip, stream) and more from monster trucks (krusher, inferno.)

Meghan McCarron

At the heart of this term
slipstream
is an image of a zone of turbulence, where
mainstream
and
genre fiction
mix. It is an image of a sleek chrome bullet-train of
Genre
dragging up dead leaves and detritus from the mainstream tracks as it rockets relentlessly forward. It is an image of that Gernsback-Campbell Express already gone, past in the blink of an eye, the sonic boom of the New Wave still echoing, but the most noticeable mark of its passing simply the way our hair still whips across our faces, the cloud of dust still whirling around us, the air sucked from in front of our mouths, the tug we feel to follow in its path…the effect of its passing…the slipstream. It is an image of the perturbation of mainstream by
Genre
, of ragged edges where modernity has torn through an otherwise tranquil and reflective fictive mode, of loose threads, shreds, scraps sucked up and tumbling in the wake of rocket-powered pulp prose. At the same time it is an image of genre as the pocket of air which is doing the disruption, an atmosphere of fiction that sort of travels with the genre but is not genre, which sloughs and swirls off to settle in the mainstream, like a piece of litter dropped from the window of that train.

Monster trucks, bullet trains or rocket ships—SF likes its technotoys. The Golden Age sent rockets into the deep space of ’50s and ’60s imaginations. The New Wave watched them plummet down to apocalypse. Slipstream—or infernokrusher, to give it its correct name—puts a warp drive on a Winnebago and then fires it at a black hole. Or drops a burning angel on an Airstream trailer in the middle of the Mojave. Or doesn’t.

It is important to note that an infernokrusher sensibility does not require literal infernos or crushing.

David Moles

An image that crops up time and time again in my writing is, I have realised, the i
mage of hot air shimmering over tarmac on a summer day. I suppose it represents a tremulous, tenuous quality to perceived reality, the idea that mirages and distortions are essential parts of this world, entirely natural if illusory products of sweltering heat. I wonder if that image doesn’t suggest that somewhere down that road, at that point in the distance where the tarmac and the blue sky meld into rippling artifice, reality itself is warping, coming apart in the heat of the summer sun, such that the road, if one could reach that tissue-thin but always distant portal of illusion, might lead us into worlds of utter strangeness. I’m sure it suggests the haze of summer days, the dreamy daze of memories of childhood, because summer is, of course, the cyclic childhood of the soul. Ray Bradbury, that great pre-proto-infernokrusher writer, blowing up genre conventions left, right and centre with his speculative, horrific, marvellous, domestic, rhapsodic fictions, knew how important summer is symbolically and sentimentally. He knew that it also represents the shattering of those dreams, the end of innocence, the tearing of that numinous idyll’s very fabric in the last day. All summer in a day, and if that day ends, and you miss it…

Hot summer days always make me think of death, by the way. It’s fucking gorgeous today, so of course my thoughts turn towards sorrow, a less literal form of crushing, a cold inferno.

The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif’s chauffeur.

William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch

The first ever issue of
Interzone
I bought, at the tender age of Xteen years old, was the one that had Ian Watson’s “Jingling Geordie’s Hole” in it, a fucked-up little tale that might well be called horror but which reads, in parts, like one of those contemporary realist tales of English childhood, of imagination at play in bleak post-war reality, of innocence lost. Two boys lark about in a cave associated in local legend with a mythical worm. Flirting, facilitating stranger games with readings from Marlowe’s
Edward II
, one of them seduces the other into sexual experimentation and, following the blood and the semen of their tawdry encounter, there’s a dark, impossible and increasingly disturbing pregnancy. As I say, it’s a fucked-up little story.

As a queer, of course, I found the story fascinating, even more unsettling, perhaps, b
ecause of its—for me—erotic charge. But as turbulent as the tension between lust and revulsion in that story was, and as much as that turbulence reflected my own adolescent confusion of desire and fear, the real tension at the heart of the story, the key source of the strange, strained, estranged feeling of the story is, for me, the tension between the mundane and the monstrous. Like many of the plays of Dennis Potter, I think, “Jingling Geordie’s Hole” positions itself between these things we call
genre
and
mainstream
. Devils and frozen heads and noir detectives and musical numbers shear off the pulp world and are turned into the stuff of Potter’s plays. I remember discussing Potter’s last plays,
Cold Lazarus
and
Karaoke
, with fellow members of the Glasgow SF Writer’ Circle when they were shown on TV shortly after (or was it just before?) his death. Fans of the rackspaced strange recognise a kindred spirit in his essential weirdness, and they scoop it up into their big net of like-SF-but-not-SF as the bullet train of Genre whips it up into their reach, into that
slipstream
zone. Potter ripped up reality time and time again in his work, but often in subtle ways. Middle-aged adults playing children in summery idyll of
Blue Remembered Hills
transforms the meaning of the play in a fundamentally strange-fictional way, a conceit that gives it the faintly creepy quality of something not quite natural.

Watson’s story, born in that same interzone of the mundane and the strange, snatches scraps of reality to integrate into its horror—grammar schools and cruel childhood games, skinned knees and scraped elbows—enough to give it not just the superficial mimetic quality of a plausible backdrop for a specul
ative thought experiment or a marvellous adventure, but to make that mimesis a purposeful component in its own right. Horror might be said to involve, more often than not, the irruption of the monstrous into the mundane; here, it can be argued, I think, there is an irruption of the mundane into the monstrous, in terms of the mode of storytelling, the purpose, the whole approach. As I say, it’s a fucked-up little story.

Given that
Interzone
took its name from Burroughs’s city, while “Jingling Geordie’s Hole” lies, as I recall, at the extreme end of its output at that time, I think it’s fair to say that a certain “fucked-up” aesthetic was at play in those early days of the magazine, before Cyberpunk, before the New Space Opera, before the New Weird, or Mundane-SF, or even Infernokrusher. Me, I always thought of it as a logical follow-on from the New Wave that gave us Ballard with his classic apocalyptic novel,
The Krushed World
, and Moorcock with his Infernal Champion series.

Oh, okay, yes. I made those up. So fuck? When you’re driving a monster truck at lite
rary conventions, reality is just another genre.

So are we as much reacting to the horror and absurdity of the post-9/11 world as we are being ironic and silly?

David Schwartz

Imagine that bullet-train of slipstream derailed and crashing through brick walls of factory yards, ploughing its way across allotments, carriages whiplashing and shearing, sideswipes shattering garden sheds and greenhouses, bursting gas mains so they spout and blossom in great blooms of flame where the sunflowers should be; and imagine passengers or parcels scattered from their appointed places—numbered, lettered seats or shelves—thrown through the windows and French doors of inner-city flats or suburban semi-detacheds, to land in broken, bloody bits in the kitchen sinks and drawing rooms of Little Britain. (There’s a decapitated head in the fruit bowl, Harold. That’s nice, Marjorie.) Fuck that smeared zone of sliding, slithering meanings, of insubstantial streaming whirls of involuted definitions. Fuck that shit. Slipstream? The slipstream is an impact zone, not the confusion, not the area of collusion of separate forms of storytelling—of strange and mundane genres—but the
collision
.