Slipstream

Slipstream is a literary genre or category of speculative fiction that blends science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction, staying outside conventional genre and narrative boundaries. The name was coined when Richard Dorsett suggested "Why not slipstream?" to Bruce Sterling, as Sterling related in an interview with the Mythaxis Review, and Sterling set out the mode in SF Eye in July 1989: "a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange". Kafka and Borges are its prototypes.

The category is contested ground: James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, call it "not so much a genre as a literary effect, like horror or comedy" and argue cognitive dissonance is at its heart; others lump it with metafiction, magical realism and surrealism. The practical test for a writer between literary fiction and genre fiction: if the strangeness produces dissonance rather than delivering a genre's promise, the story is slipstream.