Slipstreams, Paraspheres, Interstices

The fracturing of sf into ever more specialized categories, as Pawel Frelik notes elsewhere in this issue, follows the parallel rise of postmodern literary techniques and their transfusion—first by New Wave writers and then by cyberpunks and so-called slipstreamers—into the arteries of sf, with each subsequent manifesto an attempt to revivify a body of generic conventions labeled artistically moribund. The resulting avant-garde hybrids have sent critics scrambling to contain and taxonomize the trend in order to legitimate the contours of a developing aesthetic as well as identify points of meaningful divergence. This situation has given rise to a colorful array of identifying terms—slipstream, Avant-Pop, New Wave Fabulism, New Weird, and so on—often coined (or capitalized upon) by publishers eager to cash in by successfully branding the Next Big Thing. In some ways this publishing landscape is the polar opposite of the “Iron Curtain of category marketing” lamented by Bruce Sterling in his “Slipstream” jeremiad, as the marketplace now accommodates a greater range of “in-between” content than ever before. Niche communities, championed by Mark Amerika in his “Avant-Pop Manifesto” as the net-based collectives who would destabilize the

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