by Duncan, Hal
Fire is Your Friend
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 football 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 somehow 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.
And the Very Soil Sown With Salt
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 injustice 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 labelling 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.
The Answer is Yes
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?
The Area of Turmoil
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 mainstream 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 mates 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 mimetic 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 conscripts, only kill-crazy berserkers.
T-Birds and Splatter-Patterns
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 realistic. 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.
An Inner Identity
We only want Humour if it has fought like Tragedy… We only want Tragedy 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 slipstream. 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 homosexuality,” 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, horrifically 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.
That Little Posturing Puerile Ego
Are we just watching the repressed aggression of people who were bullied in elementary school, or is something else going on here?
Matt Cheney, The Mumpsimus
It seems almost banal for me to say—as if it’s news to anyone—that there’s something of a tendency for put-upon geeks to revel in revenge fantasies of intricate detail, imagining sublime immolations and sledgehammers upon skulls. When you’re a scrawny geek faggot growing up in small-town Ayrshire, it’s quite easy to reach a peak of suicidal, homicidal fury and frustration that’s almost ecstatic in its breathless height. You crank up the volume on the heavy metal, you pull on your black leather Gothgear and you re-imagine yourself as the very avatar of the Jungian shadow, righteous in your narcissistic rage. It’s all bullshit, of course, pipe dreams of pipe bombs…until the day you actually walk into your high school with a shotgun.
What I’ll say then, is: that’s not infernokrusher; infernokrusher doesn’t give a shit about such petty rationales as revenge. Infernokrusher takes that little posturing puerile ego out behind the bike sheds, gives him a cigarette and says, settle down. It’s no fun blowing stuff up if you do it out of anger. Infernokrusher finds that sorta psychological self-abusing and self-excusing wish-fulfilment just plain dull. Infernokrusher is, as Benjamin Rosenbaum has quite rightly pointed out, as much about being krushed as it is about doing the krushing. The mere presence of monster trucks does not make art infernokrusher; it’s what you do with them that counts.
Deconstruction/Demolition
Fuck Art. Gimme a goddamn knife.
Dr Adder, Alligator Alley
As Sterling characterises it, in terms of composition, slipstream
contains non-realistic literary fictions
which avoid or ignore genre SF conventions
not using fantastic elements which are
clearcut departures from known reality
futuristic
beyond the fields we know.
neat-o ideas to kick around for fun’s sake
but using fantastic elements which are
ontologically part of the whole mess
integral to the author’s worldview
in the nature of an inherent dementia
tending to:
not create new worlds
but to quote them
chop them up out of context
turn them against themselves.
has unique darker elements which often
don’t make a lot of common sense
imply that:
nothing we know makes a lot of sense
perhaps nothing ever could
Slipstream—sorry, infernokrusher—takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the way Burroughs treats Interzone. Smash and grab. Cut up and fold in. Chuck a Molotov in behind you as you leg it. With a swaggering disregard for both the extrapolative thought-experiments of Rationalists and the escapist worldbuilding of Romantics, this approach to fiction is often, it seems, one that dissects pre-existing realms, drives an idea right through the heart of them, smashing them down to their constituent parts and then crushing those parts against each other to see what gives.
To me, that’s as much a method or mode of writing as a genre, and maybe it is all down to what Sterling calls a postmodern sensibility. The mix of intellectualism and archness that I always think of, and that always makes me cringe, when I hear the word postmodern is maybe just my illusion, an occluded view of a process that’s really part aesthetic reckoning (rather than dry, intellectual analysis) and part innocent, playful demolition job (rather than arch and knowing deconstruction).
Much of what we call science fiction rationalises the irrational, the fanciful, the fantastic, with its futurologies and extrapolations, while in much of what we call fantasy and horror those irrational elements are already rationalised, made sense of in their associations with desire and fear, the sense-of-wonder and the sense of the uncanny, rationalisations which may well play no small part in the subtextual psychodramas underlying even some of the hardest of Hard SF novels. Perhaps infernokrusher is confused with domestic realism because it takes an approach at once more playful and more serious. What if we allow the irrational to remain irrational? What if we reject the Romantic and Rationalist worldviews and say maybe there are no easy answers? What if we neither explicate nor excuse? What if we do not even allow the reader to compartmentalise the strange, to exile the incredible to a constructed elsewhen?
What if we just rev up the engine of the monster truck, lean forward over the steering wheel with a mad glint in our snickety-sharp grin, pull the hand-brake off and floor it? Destination immolation.
The Nature of the Catastrophe
HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS.
The Burning Man jaunted.
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
&n
bsp; On a hot summer day, about a thousand years ago, it seems, when I was sixteen years old, my brother stepped out into the path of a Ford Capri.
Death is full of surprises.
Fire up the inferno of a star with enough fuel and it’ll go nova. Take it as far as it’ll go and that star collapses under its own weight crushing itself into the singularity at the centre of a black hole, where the laws of physics themselves break down. That’s a good metaphor for sorrow, I think, that great catastrophe of emotion, which hits us not unlike a big motherfucking monster truck.
We believe we know what “could have happened” and “what could not have happened.” We’re full of shit. Strange fiction, in its exploitation of the incredible, has always reminded us of that uncertainty, of the potential catastrophes awaiting us.
A Burning Box of Text
Infernokrusher is always intense.
Karen Meisner
As Sterling characterises it, in terms of style, slipstream
may be conventional in narrative structure
may screw with representational conventions, pulling stunts that
get all over the reader’s feet
