Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology

by James Patrick Kelly (Editor), John Kessel (Editor), Karen Joy Fowler (Contributor)

If it is true that the test of a first-rate mind is its ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, then we live in a century when it takes a first-rate mind just to get through the day. We have unprecedented access to information; cognitive dissonance is a banner headline in our morning papers and radiates silently from our computer screens. Slipstream, poised between literature and popular culture, embraces the dissonance.

These ambitious stories of visionary strangeness defy the conventions of science fiction. Tales by Michael Chabon, Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Lethem, Carol Emshwiller, George Saunders, and others pull the reader into a vivid dreamspace and embrace the knowledge that life today is increasingly surreal.

Contents

Introduction by John Kessel and Jim Patrick Kelly

"Al" by Carol Emshwiller
"The Little Magic Shop" by Bruce Sterling
"The Healer" by Aimee Bender
"The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link
"Light and the Sufferer" by Jonathan Lethem
"Sea Oak" by George Saunders
"Exhibit H: Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist" by Jeff VanderMeer
"Hell is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang
"Lieserl" by Karen Joy Fowler
"Bright Morning" by Jeffrey Ford
Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum
"The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon
"The Rose in Twelve Petals" by Theodora Goss
"The Lions Are Asleep This Night" by Howard Waldrop
"You Have Never Been Here" by M. Rickert
"I Want My 20th-Century Schizoid Art" I-IV (various contributors)

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Magical Realism

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2006

About the author

James Patrick Kelly (please, call him Jim) has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. His short novel Burn won the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award in 2007. He has won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award twice: in 1996, for his novelette “Think Like A Dinosaur” and in 2000, for his novelette, “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. He produces two podcasts: James Patrick Kelly's StoryPod on Audible and the Free Reads Podcast (Yes, it’s free). His most recent publishing venture is the ezine James Patrick Kelly’s Strangeways. His website is www.jimkelly.net.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the littoral between the turbulent lagoon of mimetic (that is, so-called "literary") fiction and the vast, wild ocean of... well, of everything else, lies the infinitely permeable barrier reef of slipstream.

The term's come up for me before, of course—most recently in the review I wrote just before this one, for Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn—but here is a whole bookful of the stuff. How could I resist?

Actually, though, I ran across Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology quite by coincidence, on a shelf just below Erickson's novel (my local library shelves anthologies by title, you see—not the worst possible way to catalog such works, although I prefer to alphabetize my own copies by editor).

At any rate, slipstream is a slippery sort of category, difficult to define and even more difficult to execute well without toppling over into absurdity. The stories in Feeling Very Strange, the third anthology I've read by the editing team of James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, have very few common traits, other than that feeling of strangeness—a feeling which, I'll admit, took awhile to build...

The stories are, in order (and please credit Tachyon Publications with the online Table of Contents info I've adapted below):

“Al” by Carol Emshwiller
Transposing Lost Horizon's Shangri-La to a contemporary American village made for a rather cold beginning to this anthology, I thought, though I've enjoyed Emshwiller's other work (in particular, The Mount).

“The Little Magic Shop” by Bruce Sterling
Sterling first attempted to define slipstream as a genre, or a mood, or something, back in 1989... but his contribution here didn't seem to me to be all that different from one of the whimsical modernized fantasies of the 1950s—something Fredric Brown or Fletcher Pratt might have penned. Which doesn't make it a bad story, not at all—I'm just not sure it truly fits into this particular container.

“The Healer” by Aimee Bender

There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.
—p.27

Bender's is the first story that really kindled that feeling of strangeness in me—the first sentence makes it clear this tale does not plan to stay within genre lines. One of the hallmarks of slipstream, I think, is that it does play fair with the reader; its logic may be dream logic, but slipstream never abandons sense altogether. Bender's story does deliver on that promise.

“I Want My 20th-Century Schizoid Art I-IV” (various contributors)
Distributed throughout Feeling Very Strange are these transcripts excerpted from the comment thread of a weblog, of all things—you young'uns might not remember when blogs were the newest, most exciting thing the Internet had to offer, but believe me, this is one time you'll want to read the comments.

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link
Two charming little girls talk with their babysitter about what it's like to be Dead, as they explore a grand old house that isn't really haunted, probably... Link's inimitable style is on full display here, and the eponymous hat does in fact come into play before story's end.

“Light and the Sufferer” by Jonathan Lethem
This would be just another sordid story of drug addicts and gun violence in New York City, if it weren't for the goddamned aliens.

“Sea Oak” by George Saunders
What could be sadder than a... cleft of aging guys working in a pilot-themed strip joint named "Joysticks"? Try going home to what they have to go home to after closing time...

At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx.
—p.88

"Sea Oak" is predictably unpredictable, brilliantly crafted and compulsively readable—in other words, typical Saunders.

“Exhibit H: Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist” by Jeff VanderMeer
VanderMeer's star has definitely risen since the publication of Feeling Very Strange. This Exhibit will feel very familiar to anyone who's ventured into the city of Ambergris, perhaps through one of his longer works, like (say) Finch.

“Hell Is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang
What if Heaven and Hell were unambiguously real—but still maddeningly inscrutable?
This story also appears in Chiang's amazing collection Stories of Your Life and Others. I agree with one recently-read fellow reviewer) that "Hell is the Absence of God" is excellent, but not that its theological purity is an issue—after all, this fable seems likely to be at least as accurate as any of the other fictions we've come up with to date about the Almighty...

“Lieserl” by Karen Joy Fowler
They grow up way too fast, don't they... and it appears that even Einstein and his family weren't immune to the swift passage of time.

“Bright Morning” by Jeffrey Ford
Masterful metafiction about a lost Kafka story. This one also appeared in one of Kessel and Kelly's other anthologies, Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka, which I read and enjoyed quite awhile ago, but I certainly didn't mind rereading it here.

“Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes’” by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Of course there are zeppelins. But that's a minor feature of this "plausible fabulation," where the laws of physics are more... open to interpretation. Rosenbaum's story pleased me more than just about any other in this anthology.

“The God of Dark Laughter” by Michael Chabon
Chabon's story about the ancient roots of coulrophobia also gives us another way to squint at slipstream:

{...}each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line.
—p.226

“The Rose in Twelve Petals” by Theodora Goss
This fairy tale retold starts slowly but is worth the effort needed to press one's way through the thorns.

“The Lions Are Asleep This Night” by Howard Waldrop
Robert Oinenke of Niger really is a good son, and what he's doing with that extra copybook really is worthwhile, even if his mother doesn't think so. Waldrop conjures up a strong, vibrant, and heartbreakingly plausible alternative Africa.

“You Have Never Been Here” by M. Rickert
Feeling Very Strange concludes with another tale that felt cold to me, its second-person form of address rather alienating. Maybe it's good, though, to circle back around, to create—or try to create—the same feeling with which this anthology opened.


The stories in Feeling Very Strange vary too broadly to be much help, if defining slipstream is your goal. As a fascinating collection of experiments, though, I think it succeeds rather well.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Feeling Very Strange" contains some of the best short stories I have read. Many of them, "Hell is the Absence of God" in particular, left me with a peculiar emotional/philosophical wistfulness that I quite enjoyed.

Slipstream is a genre attempting to make itself exist. Sort of a chicken/egg time travel paradox. Slipstream is not sci-fi, maybe fantasy, is definitely fiction, and is also a bit strange. The people that obsess about such things are only those who use not only setting, but purpose to define a genre. I respect their thoughtfulness. Whatever.

These stories are good writing. They are good reading. Look this book up when you're in the mood to feel strange.

[Mir]

I saw this book on a slipstream list, and that it had Kelly Link's amazing "The Specialist's Hat," and a number of author's I admire very much, so I definitely need to read this.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A variety of good stories whose variety actually underscores the fact that 'slipstream' fiction isn't exactly a genre. The anthology also includes an interesting discussion about the nature of slipstream writing and what constitutes 'making one feel strange'.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not your ordinary fiction. Is it weird fiction? Yes. However, the nature of the stories defy categorization, and slip between genres, bending structures and adding surprising elements. It can be surreal and strange, and certainly non-conventional.

Most of the stories are good to exceptional. In my humble opinion, one was longer than it needed to be, and there was one clunker. I am glad to have slowly consumed the anthology, particularly relishing the story by George Saunders.

If you are getting tired of conventional genre fiction, give this a whirl. If nothing else, you may discover authors whose work you'd like to explore further. I highly recommend the work of Ted Chiang, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kelly Link.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just discovered that "slipstream" is the name of the type of story I've always loved---one that is rooted in a regular world, but in which strange and unreal elements appear. I like it much better than straight fantasy or regular reality! This collection has some great stories in it, and, as is the case with this weird kind of writing, some I don't like as much, but that's okay! I loved the story by Ted Chiang, Jeffrey Ford, George Saunders (I always love him!) and Bruce Sterling. If you are a fan of weird stories, stories that kind of are between genres, you might like this.

[LDGreen79 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book so nearly has five stars. Four and a half.

The stories "Light and the Sufferer" by Jonathan Lethem and "The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon are each worth the price of admission.

The interstitial ruminations by selected authors on the genre-blurring and mind-bending of this hotly contested subgenre were very useful to me as a writer.

"Borges meets scifi" which is what the back says, is just too limited and vague.

Here's my attempt to explain it, with help from the writers in the book:

Some have called slipstream the merging of “literary” with “genre;” a hotly debated term was coined by Bruce Sterling seventeen years ago—“slipstream (…): a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal at times, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so” (qtd. in Kessel and Kelley 114). Rich Horton later added to this discussion, “slipstream tries to make the familiar strange—by taking a familiar context and disturbing it with science fictional/fantastical intrusions” (114).

One writer quipped "are we just talking about being Margaret Atwood?"

If you'll see my next post about The Handmaid's Tale, which I just finished twenty minutes ago, Atwood is certainly not a bad writer to aspire to be like. Perhaps she does deserve her own designation--the one that she gives herself is "speculative fiction." Perhaps it's one of those things where slipstream includes spec fic and many other things. It may be the other things that irritate me. In fact, why this story collection gets four instead of five stars is for the few stories in here which are just a bit too precious, affected, or deconstructive for my tastes.

In Lethem's story, the focus is on character with the fantastic (freaky cat creature aliens!) elements serving as a heightening backdrop and chilling fugal counter-melody. Seriously. Read that story!

"The God of the Dark Laughter" about clowns (always scary) was also pleasing and fascinating, but with less heart than Lethem's.

Karen Joy Fowler's "Lieserl" is a stunning meditation on the character of Einstein and a jaw-dropping, virtuosic dramatization of the theory of relativity and the simultaneity of time! It made me look at Chapter Four in Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan on Mars) in a whole new way. Very crafty, but also with warmth.


Those are the highlights.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few good stories in here nothing new or groundbreaking. Initially sceptical when the introduction starts telling what emotions and themes i should be feeling for each story rather then let me do it for myself. Also the rather confused and irritating definition of the term "slipstream" which is made even more annoying by the continued documentation of the writers and editors pretentious correspondence with each other over the label and genre of "slipstream" which some rightly in my opinion state that it isn't a genre. The stories are nothing that wouldn't have been in an episode of outer limits or twilight zone or any comic book over the past 60 years. Seems the author who coined it doesn't read much outside his own work. Being a speculative fiction and urban fantasy fan the conversation just seemed to cover the so called genres i read and i've never heard the term slipstream as a genre until i read this.

[John Wiswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very fuzzy collection. It opens with an essay about how hard it is to pin down Slipstream as a genre or sub-genre, and later intersperses conversations between Slipstream authors about what the heck it is. If Slipstream really is the genre of stories that make you feel strange, then arguing over its boundaries is utterly futile, because like Horror being "the genre that makes you scared," what does it for one person does nothing for others. Eventually we defined Horror as "whatever looks like it's trying to scare you," and so perhaps eventually Slipstream will turn into "whatever looks like it wants to be weird." That essence is too malleable, though, too easy to stretch to fit anything you want it to. Here James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have done their best to use the stories as example of what Slipstream can be in practice, and they've at least assembled some great short fiction.

The collection immediately relays how hard it is to recognize this genre. Bruce Sterling "Little Magic Shop" tells a fairly straight-faced parody of immortality stories, with a young man making the devil's bargain to live forever, only to find he enjoys it, while the magician who granted it to him becomes increasingly miserable at the lack of moral development, and ultimately, it's the granter who is punished. The next story is Aimee Bender's "The Healer," which is a fairly straightforward story about two girls, one with power over fire and the other over ice. It's so straightforward that they're called "The Fire Girl" and "The Ice Girl." The girls neutralize each other's powers and grow up into different people, with fallings out and spats, not much different from many X-Men stories. "The Healer" is an entertaining parable of youth, but what it fine traits it has in common with "Little Magic Shop" is beyond me.

Sterling and Bender's stories are both strong regardless of their sub-genre, and later there are entries by Kelly Link and Michael Chabon, who always deliver style. It's well worth picking up the collection just for whichever stories hit for you, which ones make you feel strange, or simply stretch how Fantasy and Science Fiction normally work. Slipstream has the reputation for pretention or being more Literary with the capital 'L,' and the editors have selected many works of much stronger than average prose.

Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat" is the most formally close to our wobbly ideas of Slipstream. Two sisters who love to pretend they're dead and might actually be dead are babysat by someone who might the ghost of their house's previous occupant. Except if the babysitter is the ghost, how did she get this job? And if the child are dead, why doesn't their father notice? Like Magical Realism, the story never winks at its own oddities, never explains or even brings them up. They are subtle questions in the lining of the structure. Is the babysitter going to do something nefarious by teaching her kids how to perfectly play dead? Will we even have an ending that makes sense to our living minds? Link's prose, and particularly her penchant for dialogue that radically changes subjects based on the whims of character, keeps it spicy and engaging even as we try to figure out which impossibility is the case in her narrative. You can see the story trying to elicit strangeness.

The other stand-out was "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Yes, his name is in the title, because the story is about a version of him in another world where Eastern nations and religions conquered the globe and fight zeppelin-based wars. It is delivered in a crackling riff on 19th century proper prose. Consider its opening:

"On my return from PlausFab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and inquiry, which styles itself “the World’s Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly”) aboard the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know."

There are cheeky moments of meta-fiction, like that-Rosenbaum trying to compose a story for a world without zeppelins (perhaps something glider-based), and heavier ones, crossing over with our reality and trying to understand how our engineering comes not from the notion of intelligent design but from meaningless functionality. For a pure story it is brilliant, needling both theology and nihilism, and is one of the few I've seen that grasped how silly it is for fiction, which is clearly created to express a point, to have its characters think their existences are pointless. It's thoroughly strange to its own characters and rules, and might evoke strangeness in readers. For me, it felt welcoming and familiar.

So while Link and Rosenbaum's entries were strange, none of these stories made me feel strange. I don't see how something like Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God" could do that to someone, particularly not the average SciFi reader who has been bombarded with so many secular takes on religious ideas that they're common tropes, and displeasure with religion almost a prerequisite for SF these days. So, again, Slipstream feels like Horror, for Horror very seldom scares me, but its trappings entertain. The real question before you is if you want Slipstream's trappings, which as best as I can peg, are telling stories that are further from SF and Fantasy's major conventions; no knights on horseback, no scientists racing for the cure or encountering aliens with awe, but stories that are deliberately set up to seem unusual. As far as genres go, that is a tenuous place to exist. Yet if Slipstream ever developed tropes akin to the haunted house and axe-wielding maniac, they'd become familiar and thus no longer be Slipstream.

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Normally when I give an anthology three stars it's because it has a mix of good and bad stories. Here, the quality variation was minimal; there's nothing here I hated reading, but also nothing I fell in love with. They're all . . . solid, which is a weird thing to say about slipstream, but then, despite all the introductory material, I'm still not sure, having read this, that I have any idea what slipstream is.

Still. Some solid stories. Worth picking up, if you see a copy floating around.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were a couple stories I didn't like, and a bunch of forum threads I wasn't interested in, but in all honesty the stories are mostly incredible and I'd really recommend this one.

I love how the cheesy Kafka quote on the cover becomes a pretty clever joke once you read "Bright Morning."

[Pearl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, I should have a more nuanced take on this (mostly fantastic) collection of stories, but that meme was playing in my head, at top volume, the whole time I was reading.

The authors even defend themselves from the easy attack of ‘are you ashamed to write fantasy bro?’ —but I still think the moniker of ‘Slipstream’ (sometimes touted as opposed to ‘mainstream’ sometimes as a sort of non-South American Magical Realism) is so so silly.

It’s fantasy what you’re writing lads, or maybe weird fiction at best. The only thing that’s unusual is that you’re not copying Tolkien, and honestly, thank vaguely Norse gods for that novelty, because fantasy is so much more than Beowulf pastiche, as evidenced by these kick-ass (!!) stories.

[Yev · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Slipstream, the Genre That Isn’t - James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
The editors discuss the history of Slipstream and what they believe it to be. In each anthology I've read that's tried to define a style I've appreciated the historical context provided by these introductions.

Al - Carol Emshwiller (1972)
A strangely written story about a woman providing observations and judgments on the events and people in her life that she finds interesting. Its style was intriguing, but I didn't enjoy it.
Meh

The Little Magic Shop - Bruce Sterling (1987)
A young man goes into a little magic shop and buys the water of youth because he'd like to live a good, happy, life without any consequences for as long as possible.
Enjoyable

The Healer - Aimee Bender (1998)
One girl has a hand of flame and the other a hand of ice. The former harms and the latter heals. A self-important third girl with a penchant for watching and inducing self-harm becomes involved.
Meh

I Want My 20th-Century Schizoid Art - various writers (2005)
Excerpts from David Moles's blog with writers discussing what Slipstream is and isn't, and whether it's meaningful in any way, seventeen years after Sterling coined the term.

The Specialist’s Hat - Kelly Link (1998)
Claire and Samantha are ten year old twin sisters. They enjoy life. They are curious and like to explore the world. Their house may be haunted. Their babysitter used to live there. Their favorite game is Dead, which they don't play when grownups are around. These are their strange days.
Meh

Light and the Sufferer - Jonathan Lethem (1995)
A bored man goes with his younger brother to rob some drug dealers because his brother likes using drugs and money. An alien starts following them around because this is a normal thing that happens. They find this annoying, but there's nothing that can be done about it.
Enjoyable

Sea Oak - George Saunders (1998)
Sea Oak is an great story that's equally utterly hilarious and tragic. It's a satire of American life and a pop culture parody. I'm amazed by everything it does. Idiocracy has nothing on this. It's so moving, so empathetic, and so darkly humorous.
Highly Enjoyable

Exhibit H: Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist - Jeff VanderMeer (1998)
A guidebook for tourists for the city of Ambergris. This short story is an except from a guidebook to a fictional Weird city, which was a nice conceit.
Enjoyable

Hell is the Absence of God - Ted Chiang (2001)
Visitations by angels are a relatively common event and they bring both miracles and destruction. A man's wife dies during a visitation and ascends to heaven. He's bound for hell, which is basically the same as Earth, but he desperately wants to reunite with her. The only way to do so is to truly and sincerely love God without reservation, but how could that be possible now?
Enjoyable

Lieserl - Karen Joy Fowler (1990)
A story speculating on the mysterious circumstances surrounding Albert Einstein's first child Lieserl, of whose existence only became known four years before this story was published.
Blah

Bright Morning - Jeffrey Ford (2002)
A writer often compared to Kafka muses about the influence of Kafka has had on his life, especially a lost story, perhaps cursed even, by Kafka entitled Bright Morning. This is autofiction with a twist.
Enjoyable

Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum - Benjamin Rosenbaum (2004)
A particularly silly self-insert power fantasy action adventure thriller that also has philosophical and religious internal monologues.
Blah

The God of Dark Laughter - Michael Chabon (2001)
An investigation into the gruesome murder of a clown in which the occult may be involved.
Ok

The Rose in Twelve Petals - Theodora Goss (2002)
This was a strange mix of alternate history and parodies of fairy tales, primarily Snow White. It's satirical, but I didn't find it more than marginally humorous.
Meh

The Lions Are Asleep this Night - Howard Waldrop (1986)
Robert Oinenke, a thirteen year old Nigerian boy, loves theatre plays, especially those of early 17th century England, and is an aspiring playwright himself. This is set in an alternate Africa at the end of the 19th century. If the history presented in the story is accurate, then the historical events that occurred are quite different from our own and explain why their Africa became ascendant.
Enjoyable

You Have Never Been Here - M. Rickert (2006)
An especially strange second person story of an unknown protagonist going to a mysterious "hospital" where they do special surgical operation on seemingly terminally ill children for the benefit of others.
Meh

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ironically, my only real complaint about this book is the concept behind it: I'm not sure that the term "slipstream" (coined by sf writer Bruce Sterling to describe superficially mainstream literary works that nonetheless incorporate genre elements) is really a useful or even meaningful term. For the most part works described as such seem to end up being defined more by what they aren't than what they are: science fiction whose "scientific" aspects are nonsensical or only tangential to the plot, fantasy whose magical aspects may be imaginary, horror that goes for the slow burn rather than the outright scare, "magical realism" not written by South Americans, and so on. Attempts to define it as a hard-and-fast category seem born out of the same geeky compulsion towards rating and categorization (affectionately parodied by Nick Hornby in HIGH FIDELITY), that leads indie music journalists to get into flame wars about who was the best country-ska fusion band of the mid- to late 80s and so on.



That said, though, I also have to admit this is one of the best collections of short stories I've read lately. There isn't a dud in the bunch. The editors have chosen a superstar lineup of the best writers working this particular vein from both sides of the literary/genre divide, including Sterling himself, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Jeff VanderMeer, and others. Even though most of these stories would fit quite comfortably into anthologies of sf, fantasy, horror, or quirky New Yorker-type mainstream fiction, it was great to have them all in one volume, so if the term "slipstream" has any utility at all, this would be it.w

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems fitting that I attempt to write a review while in an allergy stupor because slipstream stories can sometimes make me feel like my head's in a fog and I'm looking at the world through a haze.

I learned of this sub genre only a couple of years ago (at an ICFA where I got the lovely Jim Kelly to sign the book...I have no idea why I didn't nab John Kessel for his signature too). The intro by the editors, Kelly and Kessel, alone is worth the price of the volume, in my opinion, but there many gems in here. Two of my personal favorites were "Bright Morning" by Jeffrey Ford [Kafkaesque Kafka riff] and "The God of Darkness" by Michael Chabon [I wasn't sure whether to laugh hysterically or throw up...or both]. While I'm a huge fan of the brilliant Ted Chiang, I wasn't as fond of his "Hell is the Absence of God." Benjamin Rosenbaum always reads well, though I usually get the feeling that he's 400 steps ahead of me and I'll never be as clever as he is.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wondered what slipstream is as well as those who don't think quantum physics is weird enough.

[Matthew Gatheringwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite Kelly and Kessel's introduction, I'm still not sure what the "slipstream genre" is or if it even exists, but I did find several notable stories in this collection. All of the stories were good, but these were hauntingly memorable:

Light and the Sufferer
Johnathan Lethem
Aliens in science fiction are often cast at extremes of predation or benevolence, but this story seems to ask, "What if aliens arrive and they just aren't much use?" I was pleased to see this has been made into a film.

Sea Oak
George Saunders
Poor aunt Bernie never had any fun in life but she maintained a cheerful and hopeful outlook until the day she died. The day after that, she changed her mind.

Hell Is the Absence of God
by Ted Chiang
Deadpan narration is effectively unnerving in this story about a man who is desperate to find devotion to God in a world where the Age of Miracles has not yet passed.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology isn't really a cohesive whole, and that's a good thing. The stories contained within are supposedly from a newish genre called slipstream. According to Bruce Sterling, slipstream's unifying force is cognitive dissonance. What this anthology demonstrated is that Slipstream isn't a genre at all, and that's there nothing new about it. It is, in fact, anti-genre, and a demonstration of how some our great young writers don't give a damn about genre boundaries. Much of the fiction here felt influenced by Borges and Kafka, with a hint of Calvino.

I was familiar with many of the stories here, but it was nice to see such a broad variety of stories in one Anthology. There are other names for the type of fiction contained in this book: interstitial arts seems to be the latest term. Don't be fooled: these stories are fiction without genre, and it works best when the authors aren't trying too hard. Highly recommended.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a solid anthology that invites critical discussion. I've actually seen several of these stories before, in various collections. It's interesting to see them in this editorial context, and to think about what they may (or may not) have in common.

[Aaron Levy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were extremely good while others fell flat. Overall good though

[A.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I nearly gave this 4 stars, but going back through and averaging my ratings for each story, I came out closer to 3.5 stars. All the stories have some interesting, inventive features, but like so many anthologies, it is a bit of a mixed bag and only a few of the stories really stand out.

As far as the effort to lock in on a definition of "slipstream," Kelly and Kessel stumble around in their introduction--consciously so. And this effort is made a focus in subsequent sections featuring text from an online discussion on the subject. They get into the history of the term, which was coined by Bruce Sterling in 1989 to describe a trend he was noticing in speculative fiction at the time. Much of the difficulty of slipstream is due to the fact that Sterlin's definition is pretty ambiguous, more descriptive of a feeling or approach that hints at a modern sort of strangeness that's rather hard to pinpoint. While Kelly and Kessel admit to this ambiguity, they go ahead and dare to pin it down to a few features, which along with the strangeness include a certain post-modern attitude to genre and narrative.

Whether all the stories in their collection actually meet their proposed (albeit still general) definition is debatable. A number of the stories are not what I'd call strange or weird in a distinctly modern sort of way and read more like vaguely post-modern takes on traditional speculative genres. I say "speculative," because despite what the cover says, most of the stories aren't science fiction. On the one hand, it's hard to fault them for struggling to put forth a cohesive group of works for such an ambiguous grouping. But they seem to shoot themselves in the foot by attempting to even pose it as a genre or style and then failing to present a cohesive body of stories.

As someone struggling to even understand the term "slipstream," this didn't really help me pin anything down. It did confirm my notion that oftentimes "slipstream" denotes a weird-ish SF with literary ambitions, or vice versa (weird-ish literary/mainstream w/some SF elements). In addition, I got the sense that meta-fictional devices and a generally "post-modern" outlook seem prevalent, but then those things in themselves are not necessarily strange or strictly modern. So I'm back at square one.

As to the stories themselves, I was only familiar with the one by Ted Chiang, which I'd recently read. Several of the writers were familiar to me, though I would say they have better works. The ones I rated in the 3.5-4.5ish range include:

"The Specialist's Hat," Kelly Link
I have surprisingly not read any of her work, but have generally heard good things. While not mind-blowing, this was a solidly written ghost story with a somewhat expected twist. Not what I would call strongly post-modern, though it plays with a familiar ghost story format. For me, it fits more in that range, or in that strange/weird tales tradition, with some self-awareness for good measure. 4 stars.

"Light and the Sufferer," Jonathan Lethem
I have read another Lethem story and found this one to be weak in comparison, but there is still that grittily elegant style and insight into characters and human behavior that I liked. Unfortunately, the science fiction element is so incidental that it fails to add much, and the effort at symbolism seems a bit weak. 3.5 stars.

"Exhibit H...," Jeff Vandermeer
I've already Vandermeer, albeit not the Ambergris material that this fits into. It's a sliver of a story in the form of a chapter from a travel guide. Weird in his usual fashion, though less atmospheric and more cheeky than his work in Veniss Underground. Solid 4 stars for amusing me.

"Hell is the Absence of God," Ted Chiang
Great story, brilliant concept, 4-4.5 stars easily. Not sure it fits "slipstream," being that it's a basically science fictional take on religious concepts. As I said in my review of Chiang's Stories of Your Life, he is definitely in a classic SF tradition, not really strange or sneeringly post-modern (though certainly acquainted with Borges).

"Lieserl," Karen Joy Fowler
I'm torn about this story, as it's beautiful written and a really clever concept based on Einstein, his wife, and the child they had before they were married. It's a bit puzzle-like and kinda confounded me, so 3.5 stars. I really don't get how this fits the definition of "slipstream," though. Mildly unsettling, I guess, but nothing really genre.

"Bright Morning," Jeffrey Ford
This guy is on my to-read list. I loved this story, best one in the collection IMHO. Post-modern meta-narrative is so hit-or-miss with me, but he pulls the self-reference off very well without forcing the issue. Also, it's about a mysterious lost story by Kafka, and I love Kafka, so that made me all squishy. I was almost convinced this story existed. Damn. Strange, though. Great writing that got me itching for more. Solid 4.5 stars.

"The God of Dark Laughter," Michael Chabon
I really just love the way Chabon writes. This was less overwrought than the last story of his I read and was just a really effective tidbit of strange, unsettling mild horror with an overtone of the ridiculous. A modern strangeness? I dunno. It makes use of fictional text, reminding a bit of Lovecraft. 4 stars.

"Rose in 12 Petals," Theodora Goss
Ironic, post-modern take on "Sleeping Beauty" with some alternate history for good measure. Slipstream? I don't know. I kinda loved the way it was written, with this subtle self-aware irony to offset the aching beauty of some language and imagery. This is a very difficult balance to strike, but she manages it. The only writer I didn't really know that made a strong impression. 4 stars.

So about 8 of the stories worked some magic on me, issues with definition aside. The rest, as I said, had interesting elements and some clever bits but failed to excite. Actually, I liked the way Carl Emshwiller's "Al" was written, I just felt it was *too* ambiguous to be read. Though I believe she might have been going for that irreal sensibility that cares not for congruity. This kind of ambiguity is rampant throughout the book, revealing the difficulties of pulling off this kind of thing. Beautiful language or a clever twist can only do so much. Other stories simply suffer from not leaving a strong impression, like Sterling's own "The Little Magic Shop."

The only two stories I did not care for much at all were George Saunder's "Sea Oak" and Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Biographic Notes to a Discourse...." The former fits into a variety of post-modernism I've read before, with a self-aware, satirical take on modern life that creates displacement through sheer ridiculousness. Happily, it isn't intolerably sneering in its approach, and I think Saunders was implying sympathy for the poor "white trash" family. But then it also keeps them as the butt of the joke. No clear SF elements either, confused why this is slipstream. I wanted to like Rosenbaum's rich, quasi-archaic style and surreal/irreal approach to imagery, but it went almost too far and loses itself in the dreamlike and confusing shifts in action and scenery. It attempts to be self-referential and ponder the nature of causality and narrative, but feels more like rambling than anything profound. Disappointing. These both got about 2-2.5 stars.

All in all, this collection contained a few good tidbits and might be worth reading for anyone like me, looking for new stories by writers they don't know so well. Otherwise, you may already know the writers or stories well enough to pass. Those seeking clarity in terms of defining or learning about "slipstream" will likely be as lost, though it might help clarify the difficulties of definition and ongoing discussion on that subject.

By the way, I do recommend another anthology from Kelly and Kessel, "A Secret History of Science Fiction." For some the content might be mostly familiar, but I thought it was a more consistent collection that provided some deeper pleasures and introduced me to a few writers of note. Also, the scope is intended to be broader and clearer in terms of genre. I wrote a review of it, which can be read here.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feeling Very Strange is an odd anthology. Now that slipstream is more widely recognized as a genre, the sections titled "I Want My 20th-Century Schizoid Art"--while intriguing from a historical perspective--comes across as counterintuitive to the overall goal an anthology like this implicitly seems poised to accomplish: the creation of a slipstream canon. This is because these sections mainly focus on how slipstream is not a "real" genre, that the genre is invoked only when mainstream writers successfully write science fiction, horror, or fantasy. The stories themselves vary in quality. Carol Emshwiller's "Al" and Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat" are phenomenal, but others are less than ideal. Jonathan Lethem's "Light and the Sufferer" feels implicitly racist regarding how Black American identity is presented in the text, albeit I do not suspect this racism is intentional. However, Lethem's story is an anomaly. What's more prominent is what is present in stories like Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God," wherein the prose has an essayist quality that creates some distance between these stories and the reader. Consequently, the ideas in these kinds of stories may be fantastic but it can be difficult for readers to immerse themselves in these stories at time.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I discovered slipstream it sounded like it's going to be a mix of sci-fi and Borges. Not so. It's more like if Borges was boring or just didn't finish his short stories. There is one brilliant short story and a few I liked in here, and they were worth reading the whole book for, but most feel like half-baked experiments in literature, some are okay, some are just frustratingly empty. The lengthy introduction and the four internet forum conversations scattered through the short stories deliberating whether slipstream is even a thing or not, and introducing some of the worst short stories as the ones that are too good to be slipstream doesn't help. It feels forced as fuck.
The one I think is brilliant is "Hell is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang. I will try not to spoil because everyone should read it, but the world we find ourselves in is a brilliant idea, which could be summarized in just one sentence, but Ted Chiang delivers on that idea all the way through, we see all the things that are different there from our world and it's fascinating. If you have any interest in theology or christianity more generally, you must read this short story and think about it.

[Isaac Tawyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feeling Very Strange was a slipstream book. This meant that it was a combination of short stories that had little to do with each other. They were all set in the modern world, but each had some sort of sci-fi twist on them. The point of the story was to make the reader feel strange. Throughout the book, there are multiple essays and stories about just what slipstream is as a genre. Mixed in with the analysis were some incredible short stories that leave the reader feeling very strange and an ending that makes the reader question their entire existence.

I gave this book 3/5 stars because I enjoy the traditional style of a book. I enjoyed about half of the stories and disliked the other half. The good half was packed with deep meaning and crazy plot-lines while the bad half was hard to follow and easy to skip over. If I could edit this book, I would drop some of the worse stories altogether, and focus more on the good ones. I would recommend this to someone who wants something new with their book. The slipstream genre is definitely worth looking into but only for someone who can get through the slow parts of a story.

[Daniel Yellow · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I discovered slipstream it sounded like it's going to be a mix of sci-fi and Borges. Not so. It's more like if Borges was boring or just didn't finish his short stories. There is one brilliant short story and a few I liked in here, and they were worth reading the whole book for, but most feel like half-baked experiments in literature, some are okay, some are just frustratingly empty. The lengthy introduction and the four internet forum conversations scattered through the short stories deliberating whether slipstream is even a thing or not, and introducing some of the worst short stories as the ones that are too good to be slipstream doesn't help. It feels forced as fuck.
The one I think is brilliant is "Hell is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang. I will try not to spoil because everyone should read it, but the world we find ourselves in is a brilliant idea, which could be summarized in just one sentence, but Ted Chiang delivers on that idea all the way through, we see all the things that are different there from our world and it's fascinating. If you have any interest in theology or christianity more generally, you must read this short story and think about it.

[Corey Nyhus · Rating 3 out of 5]

a book that was on my radar way back that I finally pulled the trigger on. It contains one of my favorite short stories ever, Sea Oak by George Saunders, which I'm elated to now own. Aimee Bender's The Healer appeals to my obsession with oddball comics/manga and plops it into a moving magical realism fable about childhood. At least I was really moved by it.

I already love Vandermeer's Ambergris stuff so I obviously enjoyed his joint, as I did Lethem's VERY PKD inspired yarn about sharing your drugs with an alien. There's some meta steampunk and alt history stuff that I thought was a blast too. But for me the collection was also weighed down by work very characteristic of a kind of smirking, ironic intellectualism or Kafka pastiche that felt real dated, despite not even being especially old. Overly self-aware genre bending with a kind of tepid worldview that thinks returning to "basic unanswerable questions of life" like "is god mean?" or "is love REALLY all we need?" are interesting. They aren't! At least for me.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of stories that are ostensibly slipstream. As the sections in the book discussing what 'slipstream' fiction is decide, there is no real definition. I've always felt it's really work that isn't clearly SF/Fantasy/horror, but still has that slightly unsettling feeling that something isn't quite right.
This particular collection, twelve years after it was published, seems to unintentionally highlight how slipstream has been subsumed into what is accepted as SF/Fantasy. many of the stories would not be out of place in SF magazines.
This is a remarkably strong collection, with no 'filler' stories, and numerous potent ones that linger longafter finishing. My favourites were
The Little Magic Shop by Bruce Sterling
The God of Dark Laughter by Michael Chabon
The Lions are Asleep This Night by Howard Waldrop
and two absolute standouts
Hell is The Absence of God by Ted Chiang
Bright Morning by Jeffrey Ford

[Jami Lin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oof. This anthology was put together in the mid-2000s, and you can tell: but for a couple of exceptions, this collection feels very white, not just in the identity of the authors but in their perspectives/worldviews-- a particularly jarring example was Jonathan Lethem's short story using stereotypes of Black inner-city drug dealers, and his cringe-worthy approximation of AAVE. I'm usually a big fan of Lethem's (though his most recent work I've found much less fascinating than, say, As She Climbed Across the Table) and reading that was painful.

I picked up this book to find more writers who write in the Kelly Link vein, but I found that the few authors I really enjoyed I already knew about (Link, Aimee Bender, etc).

[Razzle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It, ahem, feels very strange to not love a book that contains three short stories that I find truly remarkable, and perhaps one or two others that are quite good.

But I had already read those works in collections of the authors' work; collections which were far more worthwhile than this anthology.

(The stories are "Hell is the Absence of God," "Sea Oak," and "The Specialist's Hat" -- nothing surprising there. If you have not read them, you should.)

The Aimee Bender was boring, and the Michael Chabon has left me with a desire to never read any more Michael Chabon. The Lethem was one of the quite good ones.

In any case, I knocked an entire star off for the tedious email back-and-forth sprinkled between the stories. This should not be encouraged.

[Alexander Pyles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was more of an educational experience for me, considering slipstream is brand new to me and my first real foray into true "weird" lit.

Most of these stories to me deserve a re-read, but for now I'm going to let them sit with me and marinate.

The few that to me were especially good and provided the most coherent "read" were really good, but it also proved to me that slipstream really defies everything about genre and literary categories in a way that nothing else has in my experience, truely slipping away into a fast moving stream...

My favorites were:
The Healer by Aimee Bender
Light and the Sufferer by Jonathan Lethem
Sea Oak by George Saunders
Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang
Bright Morning by Jeffery Ford

[Daniela L. Guzmán · Rating 4 out of 5]

No le doy cinco estrellas solo porque, como todas las antologías, tiene algunos cuentos meh. Pero los buenos son realmente maravillosos. Este libro me dio justo lo que estaba buscando: literatura extraña, transgresora, de esa que se atreve y construye la realidad desde los márgenes.

Me llevo los nombres de varios autores en cuyo trabajo me encantaría ahondar: Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, Benjamin Rosenbaum y Michael Chabon fueron mis favoritos.

Puntos también para la revisita a “El infierno es la ausencia de Dios”, de Ted Chiang, que es un cuento que ya conocía y amaba. Ahora que soy creyente me hiteó distinto porque empaticé mucho menos, pero sigue siendo un gran cuento.

Probablemente este libro ha sido de mis mejores lecturas del año <3