As a definition of a category of fiction, ‘slipstream’ is abused as much as it is applied. Part of this is due to the subjectivity of its definition and its implementation – as originally coined by author Bruce Sterling circa 1989 it referred to contemporary literature that utilized certain modalities of genre fiction in building a new postmodern extra-genre creation, but in practice it has long since abandoned the limits of this definition, with cross-pollination blowing furiously in both directions, because of which, like the category of magical realism before it, the term has become a confused plurality. As with the nature of the fictive reality slipstream describes, it is itself inconstant.

My sense also is that slipstream is not a new tradition so much as a new alloy, mercurial and shape-shifting. The reader, in approaching something so slippery, must come prepared to submerge in layers of possible meaning. The skimming reader who only engages with surfaces may find some purchase but will miss the breadth of examination, meaning and resonance, and probably come away dissatisfied.

The alloy that is slipstream requires of the reader an ability to roll with the punches, to shift through a kind of multitasking approach to the story. The reader must come at the story with a willingness to flow with such shifts even if unaware of the sources. Like someone from the pen and paper universe forced to interact with a computer for the first time, readers versed only in traditional, unadorned narrative may feel they are leaping into a void.