I participated in some of the background for that panel on slipstream, or rather, I was asked to contribute a title or two, and required my interlocutor to explain to me the difference between slipstream and interstitiality. Which, actually, I got a really good explanation and it clarified a great deal of confusion in my mind.
One of the things it clarified, for me, is that slipstream is, as you say, not a genre. It's a technique. It's a technique for creating and sustaining uncertainty in the reader as to modality (as you define modality). Which is why that long list of novels is such a harebrained and diverse list: it's like listing all the novels that use first-person narrators. What else do they have in common? Anything! Possibly nothing!
And that made me happy, that after 4 years of con-going in my adult life, where there was always at least one slipstream panel (and at least one, separate, interstitiality panel), I finally understand what exactly it is the slipstreamers (and, to a lesser extent, interstitialists) are talking about, and why they call other people to themselves to show what new cool thing they can do with the literary yo-yo.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2007-07-14 04:15 pm (UTC)One of the things it clarified, for me, is that slipstream is, as you say, not a genre. It's a technique. It's a technique for creating and sustaining uncertainty in the reader as to modality (as you define modality). Which is why that long list of novels is such a harebrained and diverse list: it's like listing all the novels that use first-person narrators. What else do they have in common? Anything! Possibly nothing!
And that made me happy, that after 4 years of con-going in my adult life, where there was always at least one slipstream panel (and at least one, separate, interstitiality panel), I finally understand what exactly it is the slipstreamers (and, to a lesser extent, interstitialists) are talking about, and why they call other people to themselves to show what new cool thing they can do with the literary yo-yo.