08/25/08
Text: Bianca Barragan
I had never heard of John Kessel until I picked up a collection he edited, Feeling Very Strange: A Slipstream Anthology. Slipstream was first named by science fiction author Bruce Sterling during the 1980s—not a good time for a sci-fi/fantasy writer who wanted to be taken seriously. It appeared that in the World of Literature, science fiction was doomed to be Sloth, living in the basement like an animal and eating fish heads. The only hope for science fiction rested with writers who were adopting S.F. and fantasy elements and using them outside the genre with much success. These writers were slipstream, taking science fiction to a place where it could be appreciated on literary terms.
Sterling's list of writers who carry on the science fiction tradition in their works contains some of the most influential writers and books of the last 50 years, and yet the diversity of the list underscores just how difficult it would be to explain why they all belong together. What do Toni Morrison's Beloved, Martin Amis' Einstein's Monsters, and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 have in common? The definition that was settled on by Sterling was tenuous: all the stories, in one way or another, make you feel very strange.
Despite the problem of nomenclature, slipstream continues the tradition of being aligned with some of the most creative and influential authors of the time. Many of the movers and shakers in contemporary fiction—vibrant talent like Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, Michael Chabon and Kelly Link—have all intersected with the slipstream label at one time or another. In their stories, clowns are really the last remaining descendants of an ancient, Zoroastrian-like cult; alien dogs follow drug addicts through the streets of New York and smoke crack with them; a convenience store's staff tries to figure out what it is that zombies want to buy so they can sell it to them.
Kessel's most recent contribution to the canon is a collection of short stories, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. The book contains many of the touches that one would align with sci-fi/fantasy: moon colonies, jaunts to alternate worlds, tales from the future. At times, The Baum Plan is bogged down by its science-fictional elements. Lengthy descriptions of exactly how soil from the moon is made habitable for plants and lessons on protein engineering are muddy points in the plot—time-consuming and tiring to get through.
What keeps the reader motivated to power through the slow points has to do with the deftness with which Kessel builds his characters. The stories are based around misfits, nerds, and criminals—people who, for one reason or another, lie about who they are. Kessel's accuracy is dead-on especially when writing adolescents and young adults; in "The Snake Girl," Kessel details the rituals of a first real break-up: the sleepless nights, the reading of and identifying with melodramatic poetry, and the continuous imagined discussions and interactions.
I wished that there had been more humor in The Baum Plan. Kessel's off-kilter sense of humor pops up in the strangest places and is so welcome when it does. One of the funniest, most persistent moments in the book is in a brief, non-sequitur of a story, "The Red Phone." A man and a woman are intermediaries for another woman and another man, respectively, who are having phone sex. The man is relaying phone-sex woman's stock "sexy" lines ("I'm wearing black lace panties and a garter belt... ") when he decides to start making up his own lines for phone-sex man—hilarious indecencies like, "I smear warm guava jelly over your perky earlobes... " It was weird, it came out of nowhere and went on its way just as quickly, but that story is what I will think of first when I talk about The Baum Plan for Financial Independence.
Purchase or download The Baum Plan for Financial Independence
