Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (53 page)

Are we just watching the repressed aggression of people who were bullied in elementary school, or is something else going on here?

Matt Cheney,
The Mumpsimus

It seems almost banal for me to say—as if it’s news to anyone—that there’s something of a tendency for put-upon geeks to revel in revenge fantasies of intricate detail, imagining sublime immolations and sledgehammers upon skulls. When you’re a scrawny geek faggot growing up in small-town Ayrshire, it’s quite easy to reach a peak of suicidal, homicidal fury and frustration that’s almost ecstatic in its breathless height. You crank up the volume on the heavy metal, you pull on your black leather Gothgear and you re-imagine yourself as the very avatar of the Jungian shadow, righteous in your narcissistic rage. It’s all bullshit, of course, pipe dreams of pipe bombs…until the day you actually walk into your high school with a shotgun.

What I’ll say then, is: that’s not infernokrusher; infernokrusher doesn’t give a shit about such petty rationales as revenge. Infernokrusher takes that little posturing puerile ego out behind the bike sheds, gives him a cigarette and says, settle down. It’s no fun blowing stuff up if you do it out of anger. Infe
rnokrusher finds that sorta psychological self-abusing and self-excusing wish-fulfilment just plain dull. Infernokrusher is, as Benjamin Rosenbaum has quite rightly pointed out, as much about being krushed as it is about doing the krushing. The mere presence of monster trucks does not make art infernokrusher; it’s what you do with them that counts.

Fuck Art. Gimme a goddamn knife.

Dr Adder,
Alligator Alley

As Sterling characterises it, in terms of composition, slipstream

contains non-realistic literary fictions

which avoid or ignore genre SF conventions

not using fantastic elements which are

clearcut departures from known reality

futuristic

beyond the fields we know.

neat-o ideas to kick around for fun’s sake

but using fantastic elements which are

ontologically part of the whole mess

integral to the author’s worldview

in the nature of an inherent dementia

tending to:

not create new worlds

but to quote them

chop them up out of context

turn them against themselves.

has unique darker elements which often

don’t make a lot of common sense

imply that:

nothing we know makes a lot of sense

perhaps nothing ever could

Slipstream—sorry,
infernokrusher
—takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the way Burroughs treats Interzone. Smash and grab. Cut up and fold in. Chuck a Molotov in behind you as you leg it. With a swaggering disregard for both the extrapolative thought-experiments of Rationalists and the escapist worldbuilding of Romantics, this approach to fiction is often, it seems, one that dissects pre-existing realms, drives an idea right through the heart of them, smashing them down to their constituent parts and then crushing those parts against each other to see what gives.

To me, that’s as much a method or mode of writing as a genre, and maybe it
is
all down to what Sterling calls a postmodern sensibility. The mix of intellectualism and archness that I always think of, and that always makes me cringe, when I hear the word
postmodern
is maybe just my illusion, an occluded view of a process that’s really part aesthetic reckoning (rather than dry, intellectual analysis) and part innocent, playful demolition job (rather than arch and knowing deconstruction).

Much of what we call science fiction rationalises the irrational, the fanciful, the fanta
stic, with its futurologies and extrapolations, while in much of what we call fantasy and horror those irrational elements are already rationalised, made sense of in their associations with desire and fear, the sense-of-wonder and the sense of the uncanny, rationalisations which may well play no small part in the subtextual psychodramas underlying even some of the hardest of
Hard SF
novels. Perhaps infernokrusher is confused with domestic realism because it takes an approach at once more playful and more serious. What if we allow the irrational to remain irrational? What if we reject the Romantic and Rationalist worldviews and say maybe there are no easy answers? What if we neither explicate nor excuse? What if we do not even allow the reader to compartmentalise the strange, to exile the incredible to a constructed elsewhen?

What if we just rev up the engine of the monster truck, lean forward over the steering wheel with a mad glint in our snickety-sharp grin, pull the hand-brake off and floor it? Destination immolation.

HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAW
LING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS.

The Burning Man jaunted.

Alfred Bester,
The Stars My Destination

On a hot summer day, about a thousand years ago, it seems, when I was sixteen years old, my brother stepped out into the path of a Ford Capri.

Death is full of surprises.

Fire up the inferno of a star with enough fuel and it’ll go nova. Take it as far as it’ll go and that star collapses under its own weight crushing itself into the singularity at the centre of a black hole, where the laws of physics themselves break down. That’s a good metaphor for sorrow, I think, that great catastrophe of emotion, which hits us not unlike a big motherfucking monster truck.

We believe we know what “could have happened” and “what could not have happened.” We’re full of shit. Strange fiction, in its exploitation of the incre
dible, has always reminded us of that uncertainty, of the potential catastrophes awaiting us.

Infernokrusher is always intense.

Karen Meisner

As Sterling characterises it, in terms of style, slipstream

may be conventional in narrative structure

may screw with representational conventions, pulling stunts that

get all over the reader’s feet

suggest that the picture is leaking from the frame

such techniques as

infinite regress

trompe-l’oeil effects

metalepsis

sharp violations of viewpoint limits

bizarrely blasé reactions to horrifically unnatural events

concrete poetry

deliberate use of gibberish.

If strange fiction manifests the alethic modality of “could not have happened,” the strangest of the strange is that which does so with the sutura, shattering the very coherence of the narrative, the representation of an event as a process that runs from A to B to C, from beginning to middle to end. Acknowledging its own nature as fiction, this (post)modernism tears up its own structure, fucks with linearity, plays fast and loose with point-of-view, and generally challenges all aspects of mimesis in order to force the reader to recognise the process of semiosis at play. It breaks the fourth wall not to distance the reader from the narrative but to engage them with it directly, to drag the reader
into
it by rendering the experience of reading an aspect of the drama, to make the act of reading a dramatic encounter in its own right.

What this strange fiction is doing is upping the ante in terms of impossibi
lity. Here we are offered not simply temporal impossibilities, not simply nomological impossibilities, but logical impossibilities, outright self-contradictions. The events shown contradict not just that set of contingent truths we hold to as known history and known science, the laws of nature; they contradict each other, contradict themselves, contradict reason itself. Beyond the counterfactual, hypothetical and metaphysical conceits of strange fiction, these quirks of narrative are best described as
pataphysical
.

Call it slipstream or infernokrusher, this is the strange fiction I found when, having stumbled into the SF Café, sitting down at the counter with my hand-made map of the ghetto of Genre in front of me, the ghost of a dead brother haunting me with visions of countless counterfactual worlds where history recorded no blood on the tarmac and i
nnumerable hypothetical futures as yet unrealised, I turned from a burning box of text to look out from this entirely fictional scenario, through the shattered wall of a greasy spoon, at the reality of myself, sitting on a leather sofa, tapping out this sentence on my laptop:
As I look out my window now, through the curtains that close the room off from the night, I see that:

• the crescent sun is high, the moon low;

• life is not for the faint-hearted;

so why the fuck should art be?

Scottish author
Hal Duncan’s
debut novel,
Vellum
, garnered nominations for the Crawford, Locus, BFS and World Fantasy awards, and won the Gaylactic Spectrum, Kurd Lasswitz and Tähtivaeltaja awards. He’s since published the sequel,
Ink
, the novella
Escape from Hell!
, various short stories, a poetry collection,
Songs for the Devil and Death
, and two chapbooks,
The A-Z of the Fantastic City
from Small Beer Press and the self-published
Errata
.