Writing in the slipstream.

I'm starting to get excited about the ALAN conference. ALAN stands for the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE, and NCTE stands for the National Council of Teachers of English. It's a whole lotta' acronyms. I'll be hobnobbing with English teachers and librarians, and other writers like Barry Lyga, Catherine Gilbert Murdock, and Francisco Jimenez. I'll also be presenting on a panel with the awesome Mary Pearson and PJ Haarsma, with the gracious Angela Beumer Johnson moderating. The title of the presentation is "Slipstreaming Away: Speculative Fiction in Young Adult Literature."

Before I was asked to be on this panel, I really thought of VIBES as primarily a comedy . Sure, I'd borrowed a device or two from Ray Bradbury, but I still wasn't thinking of VIBES as speculative fiction. It really is, though. Kristi is psychic, or at least she might be, and the book plays out how this affects her perceptions of other people and of herself. I had also never heard of the term "slipstream" before, which basically describes fiction that crosses genre boundaries between science fiction and general fiction. So, for instance, while VIBES is about an alleged psychic, which would be an element borrowed from Sci Fi, the rest of the book is fairly conventional young adult literature. The only thing I'm doing differently is I'm using this Sci Fi element to explore rather common themes of fitting in, finding yourself, and dealing with less than stellar parents.

All this has gotten my brain buzzing, and I've been thinking a lot about how VIBES participates in science fiction traditions, which actually makes me feel kind of proud. In my opinion, science fiction has contributed some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. I'm thinking of 1984 by George Orwell, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuinn, and basically anything by Octavia Butler. I think that the fact that devices from Science Fiction are sneaking into mainstream fiction shows that the genre is gaining credence as a legitimate font of truly great literature. I'm glad that VIBES is participating in this blending of genres.