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The Next Big Thing: Slapstickstream
October 1, 2008
When I started the Series Business section, I decided it would be a good excuse to get caught up with Discworld. I was a huge Terry Pratchett fan about ten years ago, and then my obsession gradually ebbed (though I remain very fond of Pterry himself and recently contributed two squares to the Pratchgan, a project of the Ankh-Morpork Knitters Guild). I think Soul Music kind of left me cold, and after that I fell out of the habit of gobbling up each new Discworld book as soon as it came out. So in the name of writing interesting blog posts, I started from The Colour of Magic and began to work my way up.
I gradually became convinced that Pratchett is much more of a horror writer than a humor writer. Usually when you have a happy, peaceful place that suddenly gets invaded by unthinkable creatures from another dimension, it's a horror story, and books like Moving Pictures and Reaper Man are no exception. Having footnotes just makes them well-annotated horror. Reaper Man is easily one of the creepiest books I've ever read. Small Gods is more on the psychological horror end, but there's no question that it's a really rather terrifying story of human ambition and shortsightedness, and I'm kind of surprised that I don't have nightmares about the mad prophet in the desert. Pratchett's stories always have morals, and those morals tend to really be rather grim.
This observation led to a discussion with my husband about humor writing as an aspect rather than a genre, an adjective more than a noun. There's certainly plenty of humorous epic fantasy out there. Humorous space opera is a dying art, but that means it's ripe for resurrection. (The ill-advised attempt at writing a sequel to James Schmitz's The Witches of Karres probably set that resurrection back ten years.) I've seen funny fairy tales and funny hard SF, and of course parody could be considered the original interstitial art.
Newer subgenres tend to be Very Serious when they start out. Over time, those with a little perspective start to work in some sly humor. I think we're right on the brink of this with steampunk. What I'd really like to see, though--and what I'm starting to think might be the Next Big Thing--is a humorous take on slipstream fiction, which I think could use a bit of deflating. My husband, who is brilliant, suggested that it could be called slapstickstream. "Instead of feeling very strange," he said, "it would leave you feeling very funny, like you just ate one of CMOT Dibbler's sausages."
A historical footnote: The other night, media hoaxster and satirist Joey Skaggs was kind enough to join us for dinner, and he mentioned the early 20th century movement of 'pataphysics. I looked up an excerpt of Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue, a noted 'pataphysical work, and was immediately struck by how much it simultaneously resembled both early SF (the comparison that immediately came to mind was David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus) and present-day slipstream, with a delicious self-mocking bent. Those who wish to explore the potential of slapstickstream, or of slipstream in general, might do well to start there.
Posted by Rose Fox on October 1, 2008 | Comments (0)
