Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
[Note from the Editors: This article was published in the April, 2008 issue of NYRSF. We thought our readers might like to see it again, so we're posting it here in honor of Ray Bradbury.]
I.
The appropriate place to think about the notion of slipstream— and by slipstream I mean those works that fall between genre borders but that either insist on some kind of genre identity even so, or else have defenders as to their genre identity—is in the realm of the short story, for what I think are good historical reasons.
The shaping laboratory of genre fiction seems to be the short story, as lots of people are happy to point out. Many of the most able practitioners of genre fiction have shown their expertise in the shorter realm. In science fiction, that may be because a fiction of ideas is most easily sustained over a short duration.
