watching it rise

Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.
– Kim Stanley Robinson

Here’s a list of books in the slipstream genre, described loosely as the “fiction of strangeness”. I never knew the genre existed before tonight though Bruce Sterling identified it back in 1989. Between Sterling’s original list and this new one there are several of my favorites: Foucault’s Pendulum, Last Call, and On Wings of Song to name just a few. There’s also many I’ve never heard of, so it looks like I have a new list to work from.