*Fire up the core cannons and lay down a barrage of theoretical activity... I was the first guy to write an essay about "slipstream," lo eighteen years ago, but this is a lot more work than I ever bothered to do.
Link: theinferior4+1 - Slipstream literature.
Nominations for a working Slipstream canon were received from F. Brett Cox, Paul Di Filippo, Ron Drummond, Theodora Goss, John Kessel, Victoria McManus, Graham Sleight, and Catherynne M. Valente, with supplementary titles suggested by John Crowley and Kelly Link.
The eight panelists then voted on every title on the resulting list of 264 books (plus four authors whose “complete works” were also nominated), assigning zero, one, two, or three points to each title. The results were tabulated and ranked by vote, and then separated into two lists.
On the primary list, “A Working Canon of Slipstream Writings”, which contains 112 books and three authors’ complete works, only works that received ten or more votes were included. Then, to sharpen the usefulness of the list, the top 27 items, listed in bold type, can be safely considered “The Core Canon of Slipstream”; these works all received 15 or more votes each. Only one work, Borges’s Collected Fictions, received 3 votes from all eight panelists, for 24 votes total (though the top nine titles received 20 or more votes each).
In creating the rankings, works sharing a single vote total are ranked chronologically by publication date, from earliest to latest (though posthumously-published collections and “complete works” are placed based on the year of the given author’s death). So, for example, Dhalgren and Burning Your Boats received 21 votes each, but the Delany is placed first because it’s the earlier work. Yes, the system is somewhat arbitrary, but the whole enterprise is as well: and this is a working list.A secondary list, of the bottom 152 titles (plus one author’s complete works), is provided as a list of “Other Important Non-Canonical Slipstream or Slipstream-related Writings”. Two supplementary lists are also appended: A list of women writers of slipstream, compiled by Theodora Goss from suggestions by panelists (see the previous two lists for specific suggested titles); and a list of slipstream-related works by the panelists themselves, compiled by F. Brett Cox.Panelist Ron Drummond compiled the voting list from panelists’ nominations, tabulated the voting results, researched the titles, compiled the primary and secondary lists and wrote their respective introductions.
The Core Canon of Slipstream
1. Collected Fictions (coll 1998), Jorge Luis Borges
2. Invisible Cities (1972, trans 1974), Italo Calvino
3. Little, Big (1981), John Crowley
4. Magic for Beginners (coll 2005), Kelly Link
- Dhalgren (1974), Samuel R. Delany
6. Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Fiction (coll, 1995), Angela Carter
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, trans 1970), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. The Ægypt Cycle (1987-2007), John Crowley
9. Feeling Very Strange (anth 2006), John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (eds.)
10. The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (coll 2001)
11. Stranger Things Happen (coll 2001), Kelly Link
12. The Lottery and Other Stories (coll 1949), Shirley Jackson
13. Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon
14. Conjunctions 39 (anth 2002), Peter Straub (ed.)
15. The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
16. The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka
17. Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf
18. The Castle (1926), Franz Kafka
19. The complete works of Franz Kafka
20. V; (1963), Thomas Pynchon
21. Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter
22. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (anth 2007), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.)
23. The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories [UK title Busy About the Tree of Life] (coll 1988), Pamela Zoline
24. Foucault's Pendulum (1988, trans 1989), Umberto Eco
25. Sarah Canary (1991), Karen Joy Fowler
26. City of Saints and Madmen (coll 2002), Jeff VanderMeer
27. Interfictions (anth 2007), Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.)
(((I've read almost all of those slipstream works, but I sure wouldn't want to read them all in a row.)))
