by Duncan, Hal
Call it the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks. Call it the Order of the Blue Flower. Call it the fucking New Modern Army.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, in the era of mass-production, in the apotheosis of the Enlightenment, it seemed the strata of humanity and history were peeled away by new ways of understanding—psychoanalysis, evolutionary theory, archaeology. In an increasingly interconnected world, the strange realities of other cultures were being brought home to us. As were the horrors of mechanised warfare. A new form of fiction, some thought, was required to represent a world as savage as it was civilised, as driven by passion as by reason. So an audacious project began, to wire together the best bits of both Romanticism and Rationalism, create a Frankenstein’s fiction which was more virile and imaginative than the middle-class melodrama of the Realists but more relevant and subtle than the florid self-delusions of the Romantics. The result was modernism.
Like the mimetic fiction of Literature this fiction had the drive to document the details of reality, offering no easy ride, no penny-dreadful diversion, but like the semiotic fiction of Genre it freely utilised the mythic, the oneiric, the psychotic, the strange, accepted dreams and delusions as a part of that reality. Across the arts they sought to reinvest the modern era with something of the archaic—as in Picasso, influenced by cave paintings, painting the Minotaur-like bull in his Guernica, as in Joyce’s use of the Ulysses myth, of Daedalus, of the giant Finn McCool. Perhaps this came from the nature of the project, constructing its representations out of fragments of perspective scaled up to experience scaled up to knowledge. Through cubism and collage, Modernism attempted to tackle the chaos of our world, to deconstruct and reconstruct it into a semblance of order. Where the Romantics and the Realists failed to fully face this unfathomable world, revelling in the unreason or rationalising it away, modernism took the absence of meaning as a challenge.
Modernism heard Nietzsche’s dread pronouncement on the death of God and rolled its sleeves up: time to get to work. Nihilist, existentialist, postmodernist from the start—because postmodernism is only the strain of modernism that takes the end of metanarrative as its metanarrative—it was a project so grand that the whole of history had to be material, including that history that hadn’t happened yet—the future. That future is history now, with the sculptures of the Futurists as its memorials, the mechanical landscape of the Machine Age remembered, fetishised in the dynamics of steel forms fragmented to show movement, change. SF is the annals of that historical future, the chronicles of the twentieth century’s kinetic potentials as they emerged—fascists on the moon and communist aliens, feminist and capitalist dystopias and utopias—typewritten on a counter-top of shining Formica in the SF Café, amid the accreting kipple of broken Bakelite and plastic dreams—kipple accreting into a truth coded in trash.
The psychological landscape, to the Surrealists, was as much grist for the mill, a similar terrain of fragments thrown together out of context, mundane images juxtaposed to create cognitive dissonance and, perhaps, new meaning: a man in a bowler hat with an apple where his face should be; a man in a bowler hat with one false eyelash; fish people; mushroom people. The best of what we call SF is a similar cut-up-and-fold-in of the imagery of reality, of the structures of history and myth, the future and the psyche, steel dreams of a new Daedalus. Take a little bit of this culture, a little bit of that, splice and dice, fold and unfold. The best of what we call SF is engaged on the same project, using the same techniques and tools as the most highbrow of the highbrow modernists, every imagistic phrase another petal on a blue flower.
The modernist monster rampaged through literature, roaring in the cloisters of the Temple of Academia, tearing up the Bistro de Critique, pissing on conventions, gobbling up Genres and spewing them out in pastiche, searching for meaning everywhere, anywhere, in the Fourth Dimension or in the lint stuck in a belly-button; and, in the absence of any absolute certainty, it was left howling its emptiness, or simply laughing madly at the futility of it all. In the end, it was such a damn freak that the backlash of horror and incomprehension left it out on the frozen wastes. A black hole always already at the heart of the beast, what put the post in (post)modernism (and the reason that post is bracketed) was not the failure of that project, only the recognition that the one metanarrative worth shit was a blank page in a nihilist’s notebook.
The modernist experiment and its fall-out left most outside the Temple of Academia, and many inside, utterly aghast.
—What the fuck is this madness, they cried, this gibberish, this self-absorbed, self-referential, stream-of-unconsciousness fiction-which-ate-itself? Take your crazy-ass Finnegans Wake and get the hell away from me, ya goddamn loon.
So the uptown mimeticists stepped in, offering a nice and safe Literary Fiction for readers and critics averse to the outré excesses of semiosis. And the downtown semioticists stepped in, offering a nice and safe Genre Fiction for readers and critics averse to the mundane banalities of mimesis. But on either side of the barricades, uptown with the bores at the cocktail party or downtown with the whores in the ghetto, a few writers furtively carried on the tradition. They had to play the game in each environ, but at the end of the day there were at least havens for the hobo pomos and the homo bohos in the Bistro de Critique and the SF Café.
In the Bistro de Critique they still have the bones of that modernist monster, holy relics wired-together and made to play-act in the puppet-show of (post)modern archness, the semiosis couched in intellectual irony for the uptown crowd. In the SF Café, the mimesis had to be similarly couched in sensational rapture for the downtown crowd, but we have the heart of that big old Frankenstein’s fiction, that lumbering patchwork creature obsessed with all the grandiose tales of creation, muttering with mad eloquence about Prometheus and God, Adam and the Devil, but deep down craving only empathy, membership in the human race. We have the heart of modernism, with all its insane ambition, wired into the golem that is clawing its way up out of the cellar even now.
This Cannibal Creation
The sociography of SF is a sociography of abjection after abjection, of denial 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 awful 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 fo
lks. 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.
Slipstream or Infernokrusher
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 become a category…
…is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus 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 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…
Bruce Sterling
Or we could call it…INFERNOKRUSHER!!!
Of Loose Threads, Shreds, Scraps
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.
A Cold Inferno
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 image 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.
In That Same Interzone
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, because 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 speculative 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 literary conventions, reality is just another g
enre.
Impact Zone
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.
