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Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
01/08/2006 . Source: Danny O'Connor 
pub: Tachyon Publications. 286 page enlarged paperback. Price: $14.95 (US). ISBN: 1-892391-35-X. Buy Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology in the USA - or Buy Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology in the UK  check out website: www.tachyonpublications.com
'Psst! Hey dude! Yeah you! The smart-looking cat. C'mere. Got something for you here under the cover of this brown paper bag. Watch out, cops about. Be the first one on the block doin' this new kind of thing. It's called 'slipstream'. You inject it straight into your brain, man, through your eyeballs.'
Well that's one sort of come-on. The other is to entice you into the 'slipstream debate'. Is it a genre or not? Kelly and Kessel's equally seductive come on in their introduction to the book gets you just as hooked as any new kind of smack.
What you get in this anthology are fifteen short stories that show the warp and the weft of the thing and a four-part roadmap of the seventeen year history of the slipstream debate.
It's been known for compiles of anthologies to have their 'best' two stories as first and last. With the last plotting the future for the genre. For me, the first story 'Al' was too self-referential and too knowing and therefore one of the least satisfying. Me? I've never been hip, never been in the in-crowd and part of my alien abduction experience in the 1970s was when they gave me an unasked for humour-ectomy. It was my not laughing to the 'hilarious' 'Catch 22' that exposed this foul deed. I didn't get 'it' then and with regard to 'Al', I don't get 'it' now.
The last story, 'You Have Never Been Here', ticks the slipstream boxes in that I did feel strange or unsettled after having read it but the overall effect was somehow unsatisfying. If there had been more clarity of plot then maybe the story would not have been 'slipstream' enough; that I think is part of the dichotomy of the 'genre'.
Like all collections you get some stories that are better than others. My favourites are most of the stories in the book actually but I'll mention in page number order. 'The Little Magic Shop' which doesn't answer all the questions it poses but then it doesn't have to. 'Light And The Sufferer' which, in my opinion, if re-written with the SF element replaced with psychological inferences it would be a more rewarding read. 'Lieserl' which does what slipstream claims for itself, dissonance and troubled emotion.
'Bright Morning', a fine melding of fact and fiction. Finally, 'The God Of Dark Laughter', a credible tale with a believable cosmology. The best single piece of writing that I found in the whole book was Section IX, 'The Tower' in the post-modernist(?) fairy tale 'The Rose In Twelve Petals'.
Worth buying? Well if you want to be the hippiest cat on the block, then yes. If not, wait until the hippiest librarian in town orders it in. Even more radical, take that overcoat, the one with the deep pockets, go to the bookstore and read one of the shorts that I've pre-selected for you and then do the right thing. You know it makes sense. Oh and remember to send me a postcard from jail.
I'll leave it up to you and the high faluting doyens of literature, Kelly and Kessel to define something by 'what it is not'.
PS. My contribution to the debate is to say that 'slipstream' can also be a verb: a doing word.
PPS. check out your dictionary for the words: trope, ontology, epistemology and metaphysics before dooking it out with the good professors Kelly and Kessel.
Danny O'Connor
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