Slipstream: Modern Fantasy That Doesn't Suck
By: Lawrence Person
"Bad money drives out good." Gresham's Law (after Sir Thomas Gresham, 1519-1579)
Readers will be forgiven if they don't see the connection between a sixteenth century economic maxim and fantastic fiction, but I want talk about fantasy.
We all know what "fantasy" is, don't we? It's got elves and unicorns and dragons, comes in trilogy or open-ended serial form, has wizards and warriors and magic and climatic battles and always, always has a happy ending. If this description sounds flippant and dismissive it's only because so much modern fantasy demands flippant dismissal. At ConDiablo, I heard Charles Brown of Locus label a book "corporate fantasy." You probably know what he's talking about: Those thick, ox-stunning volumes of never-ending fantasy series that embody every cliché in the genre. It is such as these that clog up the shelves at Barnes & Borders and make up the overwhelming majority of fantasy offerings from major publishers.
None of this is news. It hasn't been news for quite a while. What is news is the sheer success and ratio of bad fantasy to good. Here Sturgeon's law is far too generous by half. While there are still many fine fantasies being written (the work of James P. Blaylock, Barry Hughart, and Tim Powers come to mind, as does Mary Gentle's utterly brilliant Rats & Gargoyles), the ratio of bad fantasy to good seems to get worse every year. Indeed, if you were to count only those novels actually with the word "fantasy" somewhere on their spine, the crap ratio approaches 100%. And this is where Gresham's Law comes in. Gresham's observation originally applied to governments that started surreptitiously mixing baser metals into their gold coinage. What happened was that people withdrew the pure gold coins from circulation and discounted the new ones. Bad money drove out good.
A corollary (supply-side this time) can be found in the current state of fantasy: bad fantasy drives out good. Writers aren't stupid. They can see what sells. Derivative hacks get the large contracts, promotions and pushes for their series work, while truly original, ground-breaking, stand-alone novels either languish in obscurity or don't get published at all. It's a rare writer that's strong enough to swim against such tides. Many stop writing fantasy altogether, while weaker writers (or those with bills to pay) give in and join the herd. Never underestimate the power of avoiding a day job.
It's about this point that I should start bitching about all the myriad publishing forces that have turned fantasy into its current wallow of dreck. And The Sword of Shanarra begat Tolkien ripoffs, and the Tolkien ripoffs begat ripoffs of the ripoffs, and the ripoffs were fruitful and multiplied and lo there was a pestilence upon the land. Why bother? If you're reading a copy of Nova Express, chances are you've heard it all before. The question is, now that we've reached this sorry state of affairs, how do we go about towing the engine of fantasy out of its slough of despond?
Unfortunately, the short answer is: we don't. Sorry, Mrs. O'Mally, but that cow's left the barn. (And sorry, Michael Swanwick, whose "Hard Fantasy" article in the November 1994 Asimov's and The Iron Dragon's Daughter were brave, lonely attempt to stem the tide.) I fear that fantasy is going to have to go through the sort of terrible, wrenching shakeout that horror is just now coming out of before things get any better.
But if Bad Fantasy drives out Good Fantasy, where is all the good fantasy going?
Increasingly, it's showing up as slipstream.
If you look at some of the books covered in these pages (Denton's Lunatics, Bishop's Brittle Innings, Spencer's Zod Wallop, Prill's The Unnatural), you're looking at works that are fantasy by any rational definition, but which are increasingly marketed as mainstream novels. Anything the least bit contemporary, anything that moves beyond neo-Celtic clichés, automatically gets pushed out the fantasy genre's ever narrower confines . Fantastic fiction that falls into that not-quite-fantasy, not-quite-mainstream crack might as well be called slipstream as anything else.
Of course, this (non-)description only brushes the surface of what slipstream is about (if it could said to be "about" anything). Bruce Sterling's original slipstream article in the July 1989 issue of SF Eye (or our interview with him last issue) gives a much fuller description of this nascent genre than I have space to cover here. Though I might quibble with Sterling on emphasis (particularly with his placement of such post-modern writers as Kathy Acker at slipstream's center), his original article still brims with dead-on observations and insights that were way ahead of the curve.
So far slipstream shows no sign of fulfilling Sterling's wish of turning into a full-fledged marketing category. But as a roll-your-own genre, it has a number of advantages, not least of which is an ability to exclude lots of crap. Without a mandate to fill x number of wire racks with product every month, slipstream editors aren't buying rotten clones of last year's Big Thing ("the marketing department says it's important to put 'cyberpunk' on all our covers").
Another slipstream advantage is its ability to build a readership among genre and non-genre readers alike. The people who read slipstream tend to be either those who like really weird stuff, or those who like good writing, period, and don't care what it's labeled. There is quite a bit of overlap between the two, but neither group is likely to pick up DragonRage #5: The Squishing.
It's sad that fantasy, a genre that started out offering its readers infinite vistas of possibility, has retreated back into such a tiny conceptual pigeonhole. But sooner or later, even its dimmest readers are going to realize: "Hey, wait a minute! I've already read this book! In fact, I've already read this book ten times! I don't need to read it again!" It happened in horror, and it's happening right now in comics. Sooner or later (lets hope sooner), there will come a reckoning. In the meantime, Nova Express is going to cover Slipstream the same way we cover Science Fiction: With a critical eye, razor-sharp intelligence, and goofy in-jokes.
Well, now that I've raved on and on about High Literary Art, let me swing around 180° and talk about why we did the section on Hong Kong films. Just about all my friends are Hong Kong film nuts. Hong Kong cinema kicks Hollywood's lame ass and kicks it hard. Not only do they do better, more imaginative films than Hollywood, but they even beat us at our own game, with action films that are faster, funnier, and Blow Up Stuff Real Good better than American films.
I'd long enjoyed Walter Jon William's online reviews of Hong Kong films, so it was a natural to ask him if we could reprint them to go along with his interview. Plus it gave us an excuse to write about the films we like. So don't worry that Nova Express is going to morph into some hybrid media magazine the way New Pathways did right before it died. It's just that every now and then, even us arty literary types like to cut loose and have fun.
And speaking of fun (and Hong Kong films), Graphic Editor Richard Simental was way way way too busy to lay out this issue, so I ended up doing it myself. So any design work here that looks really cool is probably based on his original templates, while anything that looks really screwed up is probably mine. (And if the online version looks crummy, you know exactly who to blame, don't you? That's right! Microsoft.)
After holding the line for seven years, we finally raised our cover
price to $4. Also note that subscription prices go up as of January 1.
Finally, don't forget our Shameless Campaign for the 1997 Best Fanzine
Hugo Award, which you can help support by giving us all your worldly
goods large sums of money subscriptions and votes.
See subscription page for more details.