All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.

Slipstream – sorry, infernokrusher – takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the Burroughs treats Interzone....

In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway.

For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at … you know, that stuff we like.

The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of New Sodom, the Sci-Fi freaks scraping kipple and back from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, composting it...

Well, I myself, while sometimes unkempt by nights of drunkenness and debauchery, am quite convinced a man’s good character is marked by his impeccable attire.

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper...

Soylent Brown? It ain’t people, but it comes from them.

But functional was not an aesthetic criterion that Flashjack, as a faery, had terribly high on his list of priorities; it was well below shiny and nowhere near weird.

Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.

Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based in shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those ‘contents’ (errata, nova and chimera) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement,...

I kissed the boys and made them cry … in ecstasy.

I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.

Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility.

So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners.

So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.

–It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF.Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

I’d take you home with me, see, but two of us in the same Behold? Just wouldn’t work, ends up in all sorts of squabbles over interior design; and the human, well, one faery in...

See, you have the choice we didn’t. You wanna think about it though, you do, before you decide to throw your lot in with us. Cause it’s not just about living in society’s stitches, you...

Man, that’s a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we’re not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement...

All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety.

Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.

Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to...

the crescent sun is high, the moon low; life is not for the faint-hearted; so why the fuck should art be?

This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.

Fuck, if only ‘aesthetic idiom’ didn’t sound so damn poncy.

– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw...