Hm... is that dragonfly secreting beer or going Number 2?

@RusM: dude that's Schweppes

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

@fartron: It has also become a mandate that no science fiction elements are allowed in a novel of general American fiction.

@fartron: To quote from your link: "this is a kind of writing which 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." Update that to 21st Century, and you've got VanderMeer. His writing is quite literary as well, which is another aspect of slipstream writing.

@BlacklistedJoe: It has also become a mandate that no citations to real bodies of reference be included in a novel of general American fiction.

@BlacklistedJoe: There's no such thing as a mandate

@fartron: Whatever it means, please kill it. I don't see any reason to be paranoid about coverage extending beyond a strict definition here at io9.

@Tim Faulkner: OK, what term would you prefer? Surrealist? Scifi-horror? Actually, we should really invent a new word for it.

@fartron: what makes annalee's definition of slipstream any more or less accurate than the definition invented by bruce sterling and his friend richard dorsett?

i'm not even convinced they differ at all. the article discribes slipstream as media that is 'contemporary... which has set its face against consensus reality.' i do not think it is even the slightest stretch to say that the office politics in the story are not only contemporary but are also heavily set against the reality we are all familiar with it. the only real difference in one case the term is being used to describe a complete work of fiction and the other case the term is being used to discribe office politics.

I call my stuff "Occulto-spec-fic." Science fiction mixed with magic. Slipstream works too, and is shorter.

I'd suggest using "New Weird" for Vandermeer's works. It is often used to describe China Mieville and Neil Gaiman's stuff, so Vandermeer fits perfectly.

Slipstream I associate more with e.g. Kelly Link, Haruki Murakami, etc.. mostly "normal" writing with just a few small oddities, no?
Vandermeer is too odd to be labelled as slipstream.

In any case, please please don't try to make a new "-punk" genre, especially in this case which would become weirdpunk or even worse, fungipunk... :)

@Jeff-Minor: Ah, the Dan Brown genre

@Annalee Newitz: I don't think it needs a term. As it is now, it's anything that's not scifi that scifi wants to call scifi (if people get really honest about it). That's not a category or a genre. It's marketing.

Works that can't fit into a genre can be described as they are, which is probably multi-form. The scifi community may help itself by being so protective and concerned by what it is (anthologies, publishing houses, conventions), but it also hurts itself. The best "slipstream" has been around for a long time without needing to worry about its classification, unlike scifi. It can stand for itself. So if its nonsensical, surreal, absurd, occult, horror, metaphysical, fantastic, whatever... just describe it as so when appropriate.

But that's me: you and Charlie and Kevin can decide. Or you can try to pull a Sterling and probably outdo him. Or you could leave it up to us, the commentards.

@Tim Faulkner: Hmmm, but all genre terms are really marketing terms in the end. We still need something to describe "those books with science and a bunch of other weird stuff." I will think on it.

@Annalee Newitz: I confess, when I first came across the more organic (as in biological) forms of science fiction, like early Cronenberg and LEXX, the term I came up with for my own personal use was "Gooey Sci-Fi."

I don't necessarily advocate that for general use, but "gooey" is a fun word to say.

Maybe we should know better than to box a creation, it makes a duller world to live in.
Hey, all this talk about validity of genres and not about Ambergris! A chaotic yet wonderful city, dark, decadent, oniric, borgian. A thing of terrible beauty. Read it.
In fact, Ambergris and Resnick's Kirinyaga should have been on this week list of must read books.

@Annalee Newitz: Speculative Fiction is the prefered term in some circles, but it's all SF to me.

Those cities are both totally ripped off from M. John Harrison!

@Liz Henry: Really? I am cornfused.

@Annalee Newitz: It's funny--I never put City of Saints and Madmen in the SciFi category. That one, and China Mieville's stuff--I've been calling it "Industrial Fantasy."

But no one else calls it that, so no one ever understands what I mean.

I am a prisoner of the dessicated paradigms and archaic restrictions of language!

@Annalee Newitz: Yes! new name, please. Slipstream sounds like a generic cousin of Ambien.

"Slipstream may cause bug eyes, frothing at the mouth and cranial leakage in nerds under 30. Consult your doctor before taking slipstream."

Maybe io9 can run a competition to properly name the sub-genre formerly known as Slipstream.

@Gyrus: Well, to do it right, you'd need about five new names. Unless we want to just switch "Slipstream" to "Miscellaneous"?

Haha, I almost posted an aggravated "stop saying slipstream!" in the post on The Situation, but I figured io9 needed some word that they/you can fit in the "sci-fi" umbrella, since it seems to have a "no fantasy" mandate (which IS silly, because a lot of good "fantasy" is speculative, politically aware, thought-experimental stuff that is just as analytical, intriguing, whatever, as the best science fiction, and in the service of similar impulses and purposes). The issue for me is that the word slipstream has been applied consistently enough to a narrow enough body of work before that "I know it when I see it", and VanderMeer ain't slipstream.

Bluntly, "slipstream" is a word for corralling mainstream and "literary" stuff under the speculative fiction umbrella, not for corralling fantasy under the science fiction one.

Oh and P.S., could always go with the backlashy but generally accepted term "New Weird," for works like Mieville's or VanderMeer's that mix elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

@RusM:

For most beer, there's no difference.
-Kle.

Unless you've got at least decent knowledge of genre history, saying that new names for genres is not worth it is sort of like noisy tourists in a modern art museum complaining that this whole Cubism thing is just icky, and why not just call it all "art"?

Arguing over the definition of slipstream though, is going to fall to people who're publishing anthologies of what they think it is, or people who're in some way involved in classifying the genre - critics, essayists, and John Clute, who gets his own zip code in the genre hierarchy.

Am I getting this whole Gawker style cattiness thing right?

Also, what about I'm surprised i09 has yet to catch that trend. Perhaps it peaked already.