Hugo Award-winning SF author James Patrick Kelly was born 1951 in Mineola, N.Y., and began publishing in 1975. His stories frequently appear in Asimov's Science Fiction, where he also has a nonfiction column about the Internet called "On the Net." His novella, Burn, is a current Hugo Award finalist and is available for free online as both an electronic text and a podcast. Although he has written novels, including Wildlife and Freedom Beach (co-authored with John Kessel), he is primarily known for his short fiction, most of which has been gathered together in two stunning collections: Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories and Strange But Not a Stranger. He currently teaches in the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

SF author, editor and scholar John Kessel was born on in 1950 in Buffalo, N.Y. He currently resides in Raleigh, N.C., where he teaches American literature, science fiction, fantasy and fiction writing at North Carolina State University. His novels include Good News From Outer Space and Corrupting Dr. Nice. His fiction has been awarded the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. He is also an organizer of the Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop for professional SF writers.

Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Kelly and Kessel via e-mail in May 2006.Your new anthology, Feeling Very Strange, attempts to provide a definition of and a canon for slipstream fiction. What inspired you to put together such a book?

Kessel: I've been interested in fiction that bends the genres for a long time, and have tried some of it myself. Ever since Bruce Sterling's essay of 1989 gave a new name to such fiction, I've wondered if it might become a recognizable form. One thing that I wanted to do in the anthology was show some of the writers not normally associated with SF or fantasy who are writing this kind of work. By putting some of their stories next to ones from writers normally associated with genre fiction, like Howard Waldrop and Ted Chiang, I hope that we can see more clearly what slipstream fiction might be. Although part of me objects to trying to take the magic these writers practice and turn it into a mundane genre, another part of me would not mind seeing a "Slipstream" shelf in every bookstore. We could debate which books belong on it and which should absolutely not be allowed to sully it.

Kelly: I agree with John, but then I almost always agree with John. However, it wasn't as if either of us woke up one morning and thought, "Hey, we ought to try to explain one of the most inexplicable kinds of writing ever invented." The idea for this book began with our prescient publisher, Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Publications, who thought the time was right for a serious attempt to understand slipstream by gathering together stories by some of its most accomplished practitioners. He approached us with just this idea and left it to us to decide how to proceed and whom to ask to be in the book. We hashed it out from there.So what is slipstream, anyway?

Kelly: We make the point in our introduction that slipstream isn't really a genre at the moment and may never be one. What it is, in our opinion, is a literary effect—in the same way that horror or comedy are literary effects achieved by many different kinds of dissimilar stories. What is that effect? We borrowed the term cognitive dissonance from the psychologists. When we are presented with two contradictory cognitions—impressions, feelings, beliefs—we experience cognitive dissonance, a kind of psychic discomfort that we normally try to ease by discounting one of the cognitions as false or illusory and promoting the other to reality. But in some cases we aren't well served by this convenient sorting out.

We think that what slipstream stories do is to embrace cognitive dissonance. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." We believe that such an ability is necessary to cope with life in the 21st century and that stories that ask us to exercise that ability are an expression of the zeitgeist. Do you really need a definitive answer as to whether an electron is a wave or a particle? Why? Maybe it's time to make room for uncertainty in contemporary fiction, even if the stories do make you feel very strange. Slipstream may use metafictional techniques to estrange us from consensus reality, they may rewrite history, they may mash up different styles or genres. But that's the point, as we see it. Slipstream has no rules, it has only results.

Kessel: One of the things that's come to me as I've thought about this is how often slipstream stories feel like parables. "The Little Magic Shop" starts out as a parody or deconstruction of the many traditional tales about magic shops and deals with the devil. Then in the end it turns into an allegory about fantastic fiction as art vs. publishers' attempts to make it a commodity. The main character saves the fusty proprietor of the old magic shop and brings him into the contemporary world, the way writers like Bruce Sterling seek to haul science fiction out of its musty traditions and make it face the 21st century. I like this double nature to slipstream. Slipstream stories always seem to be doing more than one thing at any time.

The other thing that strikes me is how often they are funny. This is one of the things I've always liked about Kafka—the first thing you think about him is that he's terribly grim. But there is dark humor everywhere in his work. That humor is in slipstream stories like "Sea Oak" or "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum," or "Bright Morning."

A story should give delight, pleasure and mystery. It should get at things that can't be gotten at any other way. We put a quote from Kafka on the cover of the book: "A story should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us."Where did slipstream come from, and why do you think it's so prevalent (and relevant) today?

Kessel: I think Jim's point about cognitive dissonance is part of the reason it's common today. Many people feel that the world doesn't make sense according to the structures that held during the 20th century. Maybe it never has made sense, to a person of a certain sensibility; there have been individual stories that resemble slipstream around for a long time, from writers like Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and Shirley Jackson outside of the genres, to say nothing of so-called genre writers like Damon Knight, Barry Malzberg and Fritz Leiber.

Kelly: See above. But yes.To take one example from the book, "Hell Is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang—what makes that story slipstream? That story is overtly fantastic; what makes it slipstream and not just fantasy?

Kessel: Most slipstream is overtly fantastic—it's not a matter of hiding or soft-pedaling the fantastic element, of slipping a dragon or mermaid into what would otherwise be a mainstream story. It's a matter of how you treat that element. To me you can't separate slipstream from broad-spectrum "fantasy" just on the basis of whether it's openly fantastic. The thing that makes Ted's story slipstream is the way it evades normal storytelling structures—or maybe harks back to old-fashioned ones. For instance, this is a novelette without a single line of dialogue in it. People just don't do that in conventional fiction. It adopts the so-called "God's-eye view" more common to a parable or tale. Appropriately, the story is about the God's-eye view of human existence. It takes as literally true a Calvinist theological vision of the universe, offers physical, scientifically measurable consequences of spiritual manifestations, and in the course of taking them seriously shows us the inhuman (and inhumane) nature of such a vision. Reading it, you are whipsawed between the cruel absurdity of the universe it presents and its absolute mundane reality.

Kelly: Ted was dubious when we told him that we wanted his story for the book. We had talked with him about the project in general terms, and so he knew what we were about before we asked for his story. Sure, he may think it's a fantasy, but a key question for me is, what other fantasy is it like? What tradition does it fit into? One of the reasons that "Hell Is the Absence of God" has received so much acclaim is that, as John points out, on so many levels it is unlike any other story. Does that make it slipstream?

We think it does. But if it isn't, then tell us what it is. All of the stories in the book are reprints, except for M. Rickert's story, "You Have Never Been Here," which appears here for the first time. How did you come to include this story in the book?

Kelly: I had not been tracking Mary Rickert's career in any organized way until recently, although I had read a couple of her stories and liked them quite a bit. When she signed on for Sycamore Hill in 2005, I pulled several years of F&SF off the shelf and went on a Rickert binge. You can experience much the same thrill by buying her new collection, Map of Dreams from Golden Gryphon Press in October. Anyway, I could see immediately that she was someone we ought to think seriously about including in Feeling Very Strange. But with what story? [Photo: Beth Gwinn]

I must admit that I was not able to immediately parse "You Have Never Been Here" when I first read it. It does not yield its secrets to a cursory inspection. But it suggests hauntingly. When we agreed that Ben Rosenbaum's "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum" would be in the book, I thought we were pretty much up to date. "Discourse" came out in 2004. But if memory serves, it was John who suggested that maybe we ought to ask Mary for this wonderful story to point out that slipstream is not some butterfly collection we were exhibiting in a display case in the Museum of Defunct Literary Schools, but rather a movement that is still gathering momentum.

This is also the reason that we included huge chunks of a commentary and argument about slipstream from David Moles' blog, on which some writers we expect to be the stars of the day after tomorrow had posted.

Kessel: M. Rickert's story just knocked me out when we saw it at the Sycamore Hill Workshop in summer 2005. We were not seeking originals, but as the book took shape it seemed to us that Mary's story was quintessential slipstream. It is both clearly written and profoundly disorienting. It does not resolve itself easily into any simple category. At times it seems like a dream. At times it seems like a dystopian fantasy. At times it seems to be a rational story told from the point of view of a madman. Just when you think you've got it figured out, it takes a left turn. Yet it does not feel arbitrary. This story makes me feel very strange.Anthologists often place a greater significance on the stories that open and close their anthologies—that is, those slots are often reserved for the two best stories in the book. Why did you choose to open with Carol Emshwiller's "Al" and close with M. Rickert's "You Have Never Been Here"? Were they simply the most slipstreamy stories in the book? If so, why?

Kessel: Carol Emshwiller was one of the writers we agreed from day one would have to be in this book. She's been writing stories that fit our definition since the 1960s and earlier. I think it's significant that, though she has been published in SF and fantasy magazines since the 1950s, she has only come to be widely appreciated (and to win major awards) in the 1990s and 2000s. She was ahead of the curve. Her stories were playfully distorting genre tropes as early as "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" back in Dangerous Visions.

As I said above, I really like Rickert's story. Also, it felt right to put the oldest story in the book first and the brand-new one last, though I suppose we might have reversed that to equal effect.

Kelly: Like John, I also admire the way both these stories invite intense scrutiny and then squirm under it, morphing into something that even the most astute reader would never have been able to predict from the opening paragraphs, and sometimes even from the penultimate paragraphs. For me, this is one of the aesthetic strategies that sets the slipstream writer apart from the fantasist. When I finish many slipstream stories, I am often hard pressed to state with certainty what other outcomes might have been possible, while I would feel cheated if I didn't have a rough understanding of the ecology of possibilities at the end of a fantasy story. I am well satisfied by the conclusion of both of these stories, even though I arrive at the last sentences with a raft of unanswered questions. But let me propose a thought experiment. Say I was the God-Editor of the Slipstream Empire and could compel Carol and Mary write one more page to "finish" their stories. What would those pages look like?

I haven't a clue.

When we started this project, the three writers I thought absolutely, positively had to be in the book were Carol Emshwiller, Kelly Link and Karen Fowler. With all three there were literally dozens of stories we could have chosen. But as John points out, there was an opportunity with Carol to chart one the sources of slipstream back in the New Wave. I remember paging through Damon Knight's Best of Orbit for potential progenitors, rereading "Al" and knowing immediately that it had jumped to the top of my list.

John has already used the "q" word for Mary's story (um ... quintessential) so I won't repeat it here. What I will say is that I think Mary is a writer who has years and years of astonishing work ahead of her, and I'm pleased if by putting her story in a place of honor we can help bring her the greater attention she deserves.Out of all the stories in this anthology, which of them do you think best encapsulates what it means to be slipstream?

Kelly: Well, I'm going to dodge this question, if you don't mind, because I think it postulates 1) that there is a some Platonic ideal of a slipstream story, and 2) that some one story in the anthology comes closest to that ideal, and 3) that I as an editor have some special checklist that allows me to rate stories on the Slipstream Scale. Since we believe that slipstream is more of a literary effect than a true genre, what you're really asking is which of these stories made me feel the strangest. It's like asking, which is the funniest: Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Heller's Catch-22 or Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces?
Or which inspires the greatest horror: Shelley's Frankenstein, Conrad's Heart of Darkness or King's Misery?

That being said, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around George Saunders' "Sea Oak." And Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat." And "Al." And ...

Kessel: I don't know if I can pick one. Slipstream isn't just one kind of story, but an effect that can be generated within a group of related story types. But if you want a title, I'll go with "Lieserl" by Karen Joy Fowler. Or Mary Rickert's "You Have Never Been Here."Your anthology covers a broad spectrum of slipstream short fiction—what are some of the best slipstream stories told at novel length?

Kessel: Before speaking about novels, let me add that, though we tried to cover a broad spectrum, we had to leave a lot of great stories and writers out. We somewhat arbitrarily confined the anthology to U.S. writers. For the most part we picked only those writers a substantial portion of whose work can be seen as slipstream. In the end we found it necessary to leave out such excellent writers as Rikki Ducornet, Jim Shepard, Terry Bisson, Michael Swanwick, Eliot Fintushel, Richard Butner, Andy Duncan, Doug Lain, Jay Lake, Ray Vukcevich, Molly Gloss, Barry Malzberg, Leslie What, Lucius Shepard and a dozen others we considered—including, against the demands of ego, ourselves.

About novels, then. A novel I just read that fits my feeling for slipstream is Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead. Older books?: Geoff Ryman's Was and 253. Lisa Goldstein's Tourists. Damon Knight's last novel, Humpty Dumpty: An Oval. In my experience the true slipstream feel comes through more fully in short fiction. The novel demands more superstructure of plot and characterization. I don't feel that slipstream is fundamentally about such rational matters.

Kelly: I am reading an advance copy of Eliot Fintushel's new novel Breakfast With The Ones You Love and finding it very slipstreamy so far. Leslie What's Olympic Games, definitely. Jonathan Lethem has often dipped into the slipstream at novel length, for example, in Gun With Occasional Music. But I take issue with John on this one: I believe that as the population of readers and writers who get slipstream grows, readers will demand slipstream novels and writers will write them.

We're only just at the start.