Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (52 page)

I blew up the plums

that were in the icebox

and which you were probably saving for breakfast

forgive me

I like fire

Theodora Goss

I like fire. I used to play with matches as a kid, as kids often do. Me and my best mate would buy a pack of matches from the newsagents in the housing scheme where we grew up; then we’d gather litter, and light little fires, down by the train lines in the scrub of dirt beneath the footbridge where the glue-sniffers left their crisp pokes and tins of Bostik empty of all but the stink.

Later, as an adolescent, me and a different best mate would have lots of fun burning my collection of Christmas aftershaves, turning cans of hairspray into flamethrowers (like in that Bond movie, you know), even trying to burn the word FUCK into a foo
tball pitch during the World Cup. I much prefer fire to football, you see.

I made up stories as a kid, to get myself to sleep, about a hero known as Flash. (I was a big fan of those old Flash Gordon serials.) As an adult I som
ehow ended up resurrecting him in my fiction, in a bomb-throwing anarchist called Jack Flash. In his first appearance, he was blowing up an orgone-powered airship. He has a Zippo.

—Peachy keen, says Jack.

Demolition is the new deconstruction.

Benjamin Rosenbaum

After a number of years attending the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle, in my early twenties perhaps, having had a number of short stories critiqued and having built up over the years a full shoe box of bits and bobs of background and plot ideas, chunks of paragraph and solitary sentences, novel synopses and poems and adolescent journals railing in petulant wrath against the inju
stice of the world, and notes, and more notes, and more and more and more notes, I found myself increasingly frustrated with my inability to bring it all into focus. The fragments refused to join up into stories. Or worse they latched onto each other, stuck and clumped together in ludicrous, jarring, clashing tales, misbegotten and misshapen by my inability to abandon what needed to be abandoned. I was a bit of a loon in those days, maybe—compulsively, almost schizophrenically syncretist, trying to “put it all together,” find the grand, unifying story that all of it could be fitted into. It’s still a tendency I have, to cross-wire, to combine, to cut-up-and-fold-in, smashing multiple stories into bits and splicing the smithereens back together as a single multi-threaded narrative. Krushing is fun. The point is that back then, no matter how I knew the theory—that old idea of painting out the bit you most like in the canvas, in order to let the picture work as a whole—I couldn’t seem to put it into practice. Sometimes a favourite character has to be taken out into the desert and have his head caved in with a lead pipe. Sometimes an elaborate city you escape to in your juvenile dreams has to be burned to the ground and the very soil sown with salt. If you want to control what you write, have conscious control over it, rather than let it just be a vessel for your most self-serving fantasies, I reckon, sometimes you have to show it who’s fucking boss. So one day I took my shoe box of scraps out to the same football pitch where I’d tried to burn the word FUCK all those years back, and I set fire to it, everything I’d ever written up to that day, every piece of fiction and non-fiction, all the sophomoric philosophy and puerile poetry, even the odd treasured tale that felt actually almost accomplished; I reckoned it had to be all or nothing. So I burned the whole fucking lot of it, and it felt fucking good.

However you take the whole wonderfully ludic and ludicrous idea of labe
lling a literary approach
infernokrusher
, I can honestly say, hand on my heart: fire is pretty. I much prefer fire to streams, whether they be mainstream, slipstream or a stream of yellow piss with which you write your name in snow.

How far is the distance between infernos and krushing?

Theodora Goss

How far is the distance between
genre
and
mainstream
? Are they distant enough to get to terminal velocity as you put the pedal to the metal and accelerate from one towards the other? Or are they so close that they’re already pressing in on one another, krushing what lies between them, in the interzone?

It didn’t take long to realise what was on those shelves. It wasn’t quite SF and it wasn’t quite mainstream either. It was all stuff that wasn’t one or the other, or books by mainstream writers that were marketed as mai
nstream but which, to the discerning SF fan were actually distant relations of SF; or books by SF writers which might be acceptable to people who didn’t think they liked SF; or mainstream novels written by SF authors, Iain Banks being a prime example… So it was obvious; slipstream was a catch-all for anything that [Forbidden Planet] thought they could sell, but which couldn’t strictly be marketed as SF.

Erich Zann

I shared a flat for a while with Gary Gibson in the early ’90s, while he and Erich were working on their slipstream magazine (even stood in for Erich at a convention once, in a Prisoner of Zenda ruse I probably owe apologies for), and in conversations with them and with the other writers of the Circle or m
ates who were fans of SF, it was interesting to see the division between those who just shrugged and pointed, able to say instinctively “this is slipstream,” and those who were just utterly baffled by the term.

“Slipstream is just the area of turmoil where any two genres meet (in my opinion),” Erich wrote in his first editorial.

Many people complain about the vagueness of the term “slipstream,” but I think a more precise definition for slipstream could conceivably be constructed from Sterling’s article. Yes, slipstream is a grouping of fiction which largely consists of: a) mainstream works picked up by the genre; b) genre works splintered off into the mainstream. But what Sterling says is:

…Slipstream might seem to be an artificial construct, a mere grab-bag of mainstream books that happen to hold some interest for SF readers. I happen to believe that slipstream books have at least as much genre identity as the variegated stock that passes for science fiction these days…

Bruce Sterling

What these works have in common, I think, may be that they fuse the m
imetic impetus of “mainstream” (i.e.
Realist
) works with the semiotic approach of “genre” (i.e.
Romantic
) works, while rejecting the formal strictures of both modes. Slipstream is, because of this, partly defined by the purists who identify these works by the absence of conventional strictures (and therefore reject them from the traditional canon, as not-quite-proper-SF or, conversely, not-quite-proper-mimetic-realism), and partly defined by the eclectics who identify these works by the presence of features of strangeness shared with SF (and therefore conscript them into the new canon).

Infernokrusher is more interested in cannons than canons. We have no co
nscripts, only kill-crazy berserkers.

Core infernokrusher fiction would never forget to fill up the tank.

Karen Meisner

One of the stories that went up in smoke when I burned everything was an adolescently “hilarious” balls-to-the-wall splatterpunk piece of nonsense called “Janet and John Go Shopping” or “T-Birds And Splatter-Patterns.” I never could decide. It still survives in a critique copy or two somewhere out there, I suspect; there are members of the Circle who are inveterate hoarders. Craig Marnock is virtually our bloody archivist, in fact; I’m sure the bastard still has one hidden somewhere.

In its comic-book violence, the story wasn’t exactly what you’d call reali
stic. Most of the action centred around a psychotic android (of sorts) and an equally psychotic Thunderbird-driving heroine. And most of it involved wanton destruction in a shopping mall. I believe I may have just discovered Hunter S. Thompson at the time. Or K.W. Jeter’s
Dr. Adder
. Or
Alligator Alley
, by (allegedly) Dr Adder himself. Gonzo journalism, gonzo fiction, whichever it was, it rubbed off on me. I was never particularly interested in futurology. I just wanted to blow stuff up. But then, as David Moles’s fragmentary (or is it fragged?) “Notes Toward an Infernokrusher Manifesto” tell us, so does Nature, so does God.

Well, yes. Blowing stuff up is fun, after all. Things go boom.

Peachy keen.

We only want Humour if it has fought like Tragedy… We only want Tra
gedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb.

The Vorticist Manifesto

Sterling, in his essay, identifies a range of characteristic qualities to sli
pstream. If he doesn’t quite give a satisfactory definition he does at least give a description of slipstream’s basis in “an inner identity, a coherent esthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will.”

As Sterling characterises it, in terms of attitude, slipstream

sarcastically tears at the structure of “everyday life”

has an attitude of peculiar aggression against “reality”

has, towards its material, a cavalier attitude

opposed to the hard-SF “respect for scientific fact”

violating the historical record of, for example

history

journalism

official statements

advertising copy

treating these:

as raw material for collage work.

not as real-life facts

In other words…Fuck that shit. Fuck the laws of nature. Fuck known history and known science. Fuck the strictures of logic. This is strange fiction as the fiction of the stranger, the fiction which deliberately sets out to challenge even the epistemic modality of reportage, those texts which claim that the events they describe “
did
happen.” At best these texts, in truth, manifest an alethic modality of “could have happened”.

I’ve always been suspicious of everyday life, of the mundane world of newspapers and those who believe everything they read in them. When you’re a sixteen-year-old queer and the papers are telling you all homosexuals are child-molesters, so the children must be safeguarded, so this law must be passed preventing teachers from “promoting hom
osexuality,” when you can’t even debate this fucking Clause 28 in the school debating society because the law says you can’t, well that makes for a pretty cavalier attitude towards the discourses out of which the “everyday” is constructed.

I’ve said elsewhen that I saw Clause 28 as some sort of absurdly, horrifica
lly real Catch-22. Felt like I’d slipped right into another stream of time, you might say, a parallel world designed by Heller with a little hand from Kafka. I was never one to cry myself to sleep at night though in a—you know—girly kinda way.

Hell, no. When the world’s fucked up like that it’s time to reach for the flamethrower and the laughing gas.