by @SarahWeave6

Slipstream is more like a feeling you get from a work, rather than a genre of fiction: while has attributes of blending different speculative fiction genres, it doesn't have to be speculative per say, but rather have a recurring dreamlike feeling similar to magic realism: suppose you lived in an every time suburban neighborhood, and one of your high school bullies is walking casually in front of a car because they're walking on the side of the road. In our world, we might call the cops, or at the very least politely (or slap if you're the sort) talk to the person and try to get them off of the road. But in a slipstream city, due to the nature of the setting, the car might drive right through the person, and the person doesn't know the car is there: they go through it like a ghost and continue minding their own business walking to school one morning.

The reality in a work of slipstream is ambiguous and ill-defined. The nature of reality as we know is not completely clear. Whether the execution is through technology or through magic, generally it is a form of fiction without a particular ideology. Slipstream Science fiction generally is often similar to soft science fiction, although it's possible to write hard science fiction in a slipstream dreamlike setting. Slipstream fantasy, like magic realism, generally tends to be set in our own world rather than a secondary world.

The difference between Urban Fantasy, Slipstream, and Magic Realism/Surrealism is a matter of degree. William Gibson's Pattern Recognition is set in an everyday setting but features a protagonist with skill sets that make it ever so slightly into the territory of science fiction. In Wind Up Bird Chronicle, is it isn't set in a fantasy setting, rather it treats the past as immediate and alive as the present, and features the Tokyo underworld. As a couple of examples. They both have a treatment of the criminal underworld, although Murakami takes it a step further exploring its origin and history since the time of world war II.

I did not pick the label of slipstream or trans realism myself, rather it is one of those feelings that kind of get handed to me by the ghost of fiction's past, perhaps due to father Christmas telling them of the fact that he is merely a character in the story of life. Over Christmas, I had difficulty articulating exactly what it is I'm wanting to write next. For a long time I wanted to write children's stories, but as of yet have some difficulty formulating the plot for the next chapter book series or so. So here I am writing Slipstream Sci-Fi for the time being.

No theme is required for Slipstream fiction. In short, the main difference between Slipstream and fantasy is, fantasy is set in a secondary world, while Slipstream is generally primary world and doesn't have overt fantasy elements.

Example of Slipstream Fantasy on Wattpad:
21ST CENTURY CHARLOTTE
by @SarahWeave6

Synopsis:

In dreams, being naked lies in the uncomfortable midpoint between being in a country where being clothed is expected, and living in a nudist colony. They might flirt with you a little bit, but not because you're naked. But for the most part, people seem to take it for granted, in the sense that although everyone is clothed, they treat it as if they're also naked. You could take a shower just outside the kitchen with the curtains open, and nobody seems to pay it any mind. Charlotte felt naked to certain kind of timelessness.

They say a program can simulate a human, better than a human can simulate an AI. AI, artificial intelligence. You might as well say artificial personality. But in some ways, aren't we all artificial?

Excerpt:

She was 21 Century Charlotte.

Impression: ignorance, malevolence, personality defect. Reprehinsible envies, slowly driven to anxiety. Slowly going downward into a mental spiral, ignorance is everyone's strength besides her own. Her own oblivion, the nocturnal looms on the horizon. In the sand she waits for forever, enternity to come home. She floats inside her own timelessness. One could perform stage tricks, or get a job as a double agent for some three letter agency. She stares at her lcd binary watch, stomps on a cockroach, slipping off a skyscraper. Floating, everthing was thirty thousand feet down, and she wasn't dropping any further. We have the known world, the world we live in today. There are many worlds beyond our own that sometimes bleed into consensus reality.

All the way down, were songs of various pop music bands, although these constantly change decade by decade. All the tunes on the radio bled into a single monotonous noise.

She died as she lived, to the tune of her own melody, hymning various tunes from different goth rock bands. Flourescence: Florentine immigrants, licking Italian Ice. Of the flavor of chocolate, slowly the scent comes inside ones nose. Nocturnal fragrance. Coming decades go by, everlasting years going by like seconds in grandfather clock. She woke up in a shock, feeling as if the floor were made of concrete spikes. Pushing herself up, she walks among the various incarnations of her past. Various mirrors into multiple independant manifestations of what we deem to be forever. She had no way of knowing what face of a tesseract was up or down, all she knew was she was floating in an odd blend of wire frame, and symbols from various mythologies throughout the ages. It was then, she remembered, her comment she told her therapist.

-- I feel like I'm living somebody else's novel. It was a comment she heard a long time ago, on some long sense forgotten sitcom. She felt like her own life story was a script written by those with the most morbid of sense of humor, for those who get chuckles out of dead babies in Africa and the Middle East. She felt constantly like an outsider, drifting from culture to culture, from century to century, and now she can't seem to pick, in the translucent void that her manifestation, a new world to call her own. There are only so many ways one can stretch a word, describing its characteristic indirectly, but within herself, with some many ways to describe her past, which she always seemed stuck in, it still felt like a seemingly infinite amount of words.

In life, she collected various Burner phone, acting carelessly about where she dropped them. She would go to the diciest of restaurants, and burn away one hundred dollars she earned every Christmas, while others her age stood on street corners hitching rides from strangers. In many ways, our own modern life has no changed much from the wild west. The only difference was, you could steal somebody's car today as long as you weren't a member of any specific sets of minorities that belonged to the current hate of the week. But people were not erased in this society, although certainly at times she wished to be. Instead there was so much data out there about everyone, she wondered how in the various three letter agencies could sort through it all.

Yet here she was, wandering in the dark.

Waiting for the spark, called life, she waits for the fall.

She waits for a tunnel into the light.

It was a joke specifically about the new generation she happened upon, being reborn into the world of the next. The difference between generation twenty o seven and twenty o eight, was those who graduated in two thousand and eight excluded you from Facebook groups.

Those who graduated just a year before, insist you exclude yourself from Facebook. People underestimate the amount of difference a single year can make within the same generation, both in general rebelliousness, and general tech savvyness. She knew others who graduated a couple of years before she did, that were actually playing coops on gaming PCs, playing retro first person shooters, while she was still working out how she'll go about becoming a programmer for video games. Instead she got into the cryptographic game, developed a triple polygraphic cipher tools, and watched videos on how to crack open safes. Now going on ten years later after high school, already she had almost nothing in common with her own generation, going leaps beyond the cryptographic capabilities of her peers, while others stuck with Solitaire Ciphers and Advanced Encryption Standards distributed by Public Key protocols on the web.

She preferred the rustiness that other techies had long since abandoned, and now in twenty eighteen, was likely the only one still using sneaker net options like old fashioned thumb drives. She would store her cryptographic protocols, and remote viewing meta data tracking inside of a drive previously used to store personal memories inside of an ear ring, but her ear lobe had gotten infected from the weight of it cutting into the cartilage. Now she waits for her wounds to heal, drifting the world of Night time Chattanooga, observing call girls, while what remained of American civil society had a surface level tension that was comparing to the generation of the eighteen fifties. In her bones, she felt that the country, if you could call it that, being more of an Eldritch abomination of nations, was on the verge of a new civil war that was about to become hot.

There was not any bullets flying just yet, but already in moments when she was on the verge of panic attacks, she would momentarily hope out of time, and see a fractured United States. A society where life was cheap, concrete scattered like grains of sand, and then wake up staring at the sky while sitting on the curve, having almost passed out in the cold. To think, that she was only twenty eight, going on twenty nine.

And already, she felt like fifty.

She felt as if she was going on a century and a half.

More on Slipstream:

Slipstream and Genre Crossovers (2000s)| Doug Davis | Hamburg University

https://lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de/en/l2go/-/get/v/13615

William Gibson | Technology, Science Fiction & the Apocalypse

https://youtu.be/4dlvle5YBv4