Black Gate

McSweeney’s is a quirky quarterly  that  breaks conventional publishing boundaries with each issue devoted to a unique theme, both in terms of editorial content and physical packaging. For McSweeney’s 32, its last issue of 2009, ten contributors were tasked with writing tales specifically set somewhere in the world that take place fifteen years hence in 2024. According to the editors:

…we wanted to hear about where we’d be — to see what the world could look like when things had shifted just a bit , as it seems like they’re starting to, heading into the second decade of the third millennium…and a semitangible future at last seeming imminent.

For the most part, this is a future defined by natural disaster, frequently involving water. Serendipitously, I read this during a record snowfall in which I was homebound for four days before my driveway could be cleared out. While the state declared an emergency disaster, and unlike a lot of Virginians who lost power as well, it didn’t much matter to me that I couldn’t go anywhere since I was comfortable with reading material, heat, food and Internet access. Not Katrina, by any means, but “normal life” did shut down for a short time. In some of these stories, normal becomes not a return following a disaster, but is defined by the disaster.

There was a time when futurist stories were about how humanity overcame its limitations, both in terms of earthbound existence and its evolutionary defects (remember that what was supposed to be so “innovative” about the original Star Trek was that it depicted various races working together in harmony, forgetting that women of any race were stuck in miniskirts and mostly served as subserviant love interest for the captain). It would seem that from the perspective of the oughts of the 21st century, the future does not look particularly bright.

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What’s interesting about a collection of “interfictions,” aka “interstitial fictions,” is that this isn’t just another descriptor  (e.g., new wave fabulism, new weird, slipstream, paraspheres, fill-in-the-blank) made up by an editor or a marketing department or critic that subsequently becomes blogosphere fodder about how inaccurate and/or stupid it is. Rather, interfictions is the self-proclaimed terminology of an actual organization that sponsors not only this second volume of what presumably is an ongoing anthology series, but promotes all kinds of “interstitial” literary, musical, visual and performance arts.

So just what is an interfiction? Henry Jenkins’s introduction opens with the famous quote from Groucho Marx about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him as a member. While it may be true that interfictions don’t fit neatly into traditional categories, there’s considerable irony, if not the essence of interstitiality, about the idea of an organization in which membership is earned by virtue of failing to belong anywhere else.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on defining interfiction (if you’re interested, see my review of the first Interfictions for further deliberation), though it is interesting that the authors themselves, as well as co-editors, Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, aren’t always quite sure, other than to note what it isn’t.

Sherman, for example, says that one rule of thumb for considering what to accept for Interfictions 2 was that if a story more than likely could be something you’d see in a genre magazine, say, Fantasy and Science Fiction, then it probably wasn’t an interfiction (adhering to the “if it belongs to some other club, it can’t be in ours” rubric). It is particularly ironical, then, that Amazon has named  Interfictions 2 as one of the top ten science fiction and fantasy books of 2009!

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