Novels of Postmodern Sensibility: The Core Canon of Slipstream

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From Slipstream by Bruce Sterling:

This genre is not "category" SF; it is not even "genre" SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is a fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a "sense of wonder" or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction.

Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books "slipstream."

"Slipstream" is not all that catchy a term, and if this young genre ever becomes an actual category I doubt it will use that name, which I just coined along with my friend Richard Dorsett. "Slipstream" is a parody of "mainstream," and nobody calls mainstream "mainstream" except for us skiffy trolls.

Nor is it at all likely that slipstream will actually become a full-fledged genre, much less a commercially successful category. The odds against it are stiff. Slipstream authors must work outside the cozy infrastructure of genre magazines, specialized genre criticism, and the authorial esprit-de-corps of a common genre cause.

[ Arsen Savadov, from the series Bloody Mary, 1998 ]

The Core Canon of Slipstream

1. Collected Fictions (1998), Jorge Luis Borges
2. Invisible Cities (1972, trans 1974), Italo Calvino
3. Little, Big (1981), John Crowley
4. Magic for Beginners (2005), Kelly Link
5. Dhalgren (1974), Samuel R. Delany
6. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (1995), Angela Carter
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, trans 1970), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. The Ægypt Cycle (1987-2007), John Crowley
9. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (2006), John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (eds.)
10. The Complete Short Stories (2001), J.G. Ballard
11. Stranger Things Happen (2001), Kelly Link
12. The Lottery: And Other Stories (1949), Shirley Jackson
13. Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (1973), Thomas Pynchon
14. Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists (2002), Peter Straub (ed.)
15. The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
16. The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka
17. Orlando: A Biography (1928), Virginia Woolf
18. The Castle: A new translation based on the restored text (1926), Franz Kafka
19. The Complete Works of Franz Kafka
20. V. (Perennial Classics) (1963), Thomas Pynchon
21. Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter
22. The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (anth 2007), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.)
23. The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories [UK title Busy About the Tree of Life] (coll 1988), Pamela Zoline
24. Foucault's Pendulum (1988, trans 1989), Umberto Eco
25. Sarah Canary (1991), Karen Joy Fowler
26. City of Saints and Madmen (coll 2002), Jeff VanderMeer
27. Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (anth 2007), Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.)

via Beyond the Beyond

What's the difference between a duck?

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Q: What's the difference between a duck?
A: One leg is both the same.

(From Metafilter via plep)

Skull-A-Day

From Skull-A-Day:

A skull image every day for a year. You can see them all here...

Via Make

Independence Day: Final Revolution

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There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

- Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961.

(via Cyrano)

Amazon Link: Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

Jim Woodring: The Curled Tail of Conscience

From The Woodring Monitor

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

- Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), U.S. journalist. A Preface to Politics, ch. 6 (1914).

Amazon Links:
A Preface to Politics by Walter Lippmann
Seeing Things by Jim Woodring

From Wikipedia: Walter Lippmann:

It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. He argued that people—including journalists—are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than come to judgment by critical thinking. Humans condense ideas in to symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation." Citizens, he wrote, were too self-centered to care about public policy except as pertaining to pressing local issues.

[...] Lippmann came to be seen as Noam Chomsky's moral and intellectual antithesis. Chomsky used one of Lippmann's catch phrases for the title of his book about the media: Manufacturing Consent.

From Noam Chomsky Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley:

C: In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can't produce evidence. There's even a name for it -- I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It's called "concision." He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn't have me on Nightline, and his answer was -- two answers. First of all, he says, "Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands it." But the other answer was, "He lacks concision." Which is correct, I agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can't say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you're expected to give evidence, and that you can't do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can't talk.

I think that's a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

Q: This is why so much of your work in the area of politics has been focused on what you call "manufacturing consent," meaning the framing of issues, the way topics are put off the table for discussion. So in the end, what your work suggests is that in coming to understand that, then there's hope for understanding the problems we confront.

C: Oh, yes. Actually, I should say, the term "manufacturing consent" is not mine, I took it from Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual and leading media figure of the twentieth century, who thought it was a great idea. He said we should manufacture consent, that's the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds. That's the leading idea of democratic theorists, and the public relations industry and so on, so I'm not making it up. In fact, I'm just borrowing their conception, and telling other people what they think.

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