by Duncan, Hal
suggest that the picture is leaking from the frame
such techniques as
infinite regress
trompe-l’oeil effects
metalepsis
sharp violations of viewpoint limits
bizarrely blasé reactions to horrifically unnatural events
concrete poetry
deliberate use of gibberish.
If strange fiction manifests the alethic modality of “could not have happened,” the strangest of the strange is that which does so with the sutura, shattering the very coherence of the narrative, the representation of an event as a process that runs from A to B to C, from beginning to middle to end. Acknowledging its own nature as fiction, this (post)modernism tears up its own structure, fucks with linearity, plays fast and loose with point-of-view, and generally challenges all aspects of mimesis in order to force the reader to recognise the process of semiosis at play. It breaks the fourth wall not to distance the reader from the narrative but to engage them with it directly, to drag the reader into it by rendering the experience of reading an aspect of the drama, to make the act of reading a dramatic encounter in its own right.
What this strange fiction is doing is upping the ante in terms of impossibility. Here we are offered not simply temporal impossibilities, not simply nomological impossibilities, but logical impossibilities, outright self-contradictions. The events shown contradict not just that set of contingent truths we hold to as known history and known science, the laws of nature; they contradict each other, contradict themselves, contradict reason itself. Beyond the counterfactual, hypothetical and metaphysical conceits of strange fiction, these quirks of narrative are best described as pataphysical.
Call it slipstream or infernokrusher, this is the strange fiction I found when, having stumbled into the SF Café, sitting down at the counter with my hand-made map of the ghetto of Genre in front of me, the ghost of a dead brother haunting me with visions of countless counterfactual worlds where history recorded no blood on the tarmac and innumerable hypothetical futures as yet unrealised, I turned from a burning box of text to look out from this entirely fictional scenario, through the shattered wall of a greasy spoon, at the reality of myself, sitting on a leather sofa, tapping out this sentence on my laptop: As I look out my window now, through the curtains that close the room off from the night, I see that:
• the crescent sun is high, the moon low;
• life is not for the faint-hearted;
so why the fuck should art be?
About the Author
Scottish author Hal Duncan’s debut novel, Vellum, garnered nominations for the Crawford, Locus, BFS and World Fantasy awards, and won the Gaylactic Spectrum, Kurd Lasswitz and Tähtivaeltaja awards. He’s since published the sequel, Ink, the novella Escape from Hell!, various short stories, a poetry collection, Songs for the Devil and Death, and two chapbooks, The A-Z of the Fantastic City from Small Beer Press and the self-published Errata.
