<![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People - io9 Comments]]> http://cache.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People - io9 Comments]]> http://io9.com Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:27:10 PST Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:27:10 PST http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4587688 Also, what about I'm surprised i09 has yet to catch that trend. Perhaps it peaked already.

JoshJasper

]]> 8:364857:c4587688 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:27:10 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4587590 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?

JoshJasper

]]> 8:364857:c4587590 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:23:47 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4586925 @RusM:

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


Klebert L. Hall

]]> 8:364857:c4586925 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:00:00 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4585787 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.

Crash Launching

]]> 8:364857:c4585787 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:06:49 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4585733 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.

Crash Launching

]]> 8:364857:c4585733 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:02:32 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4585104 @Gyrus: Well, to do it right, you'd need about five new names. Unless we want to just switch "Slipstream" to "Miscellaneous"?

braak

]]> 8:364857:c4585104 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:25:59 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4584886 @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

]]> 8:364857:c4584886 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:09:28 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4584641 @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!

braak

]]> 8:364857:c4584641 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:37:13 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4581893 @Liz Henry: Really? I am cornfused.

Annalee Newitz

]]> 8:364857:c4581893 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:20:41 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4581405 Those cities are both totally ripped off from M. John Harrison!

Liz Henry

]]> 8:364857:c4581405 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:34:22 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4581261 @Annalee Newitz: Speculative Fiction is the prefered term in some circles, but it's all SF to me.

codydog

]]> 8:364857:c4581261 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:22:17 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4579628 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.



MarlboroTestMonkey7

]]> 8:364857:c4579628 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:13:36 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4579310 @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.

Rus

]]> 8:364857:c4579310 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:54:28 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4578895 @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

]]> 8:364857:c4578895 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:33:27 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4578420 @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

]]> 8:364857:c4578420 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:10:14 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4578309 @Jeff-Minor: Ah, the Dan Brown genre

BlacklistedJoe

]]> 8:364857:c4578309 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:04:45 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4578274 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... :)

Cloudypants

]]> 8:364857:c4578274 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:02:39 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4578194 I call my stuff "Occulto-spec-fic." Science fiction mixed with magic. Slipstream works too, and is shorter.

Jeff-Minor

]]> 8:364857:c4578194 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:59:03 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577838 @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.

tetracycloide

]]> 8:364857:c4577838 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:42:26 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577765 @Tim Faulkner: OK, what term would you prefer? Surrealist? Scifi-horror? Actually, we should really invent a new word for it.

Annalee Newitz

]]> 8:364857:c4577765 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:38:59 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577701 @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

]]> 8:364857:c4577701 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:36:12 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577685 @BlacklistedJoe: There's no such thing as a mandate

BlacklistedJoe

]]> 8:364857:c4577685 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:35:32 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577659 @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

]]> 8:364857:c4577659 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:34:41 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577636 @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.

Annalee Newitz

]]> 8:364857:c4577636 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:33:40 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577570 @fartron: It has also become a mandate that no science fiction elements are allowed in a novel of general American fiction.

BlacklistedJoe

]]> 8:364857:c4577570 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:30:42 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577396 You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

fartron

]]> 8:364857:c4577396 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:24:43 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577351 @RusM: dude that's Schweppes

BlacklistedJoe

]]> 8:364857:c4577351 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:22:57 PST <![CDATA[Inside the City of Insect Motors and Mushroom People]]> http://io9.com/364857/inside-the-city-of-insect-motors-and-mushroom-people#c4577237 Hm... is that dragonfly secreting beer or going Number 2?

Rus

]]> 8:364857:c4577237 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:18:21 PST