Country: USA
Genre: Science Fiction/Dystopia
Pages: 324
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Vibrations caused by powerful turbines stirred Kathy from a dream centered around a funeral. Her eyes flicked open, face dry, and she had no idea where she was. In her dream, she saw crystalline silver spiders again, weaving their way through the graveyard, leaving trails of silver webs over corpses, binding them for some unknown purpose in the cold dark earth.
Before I was a crime fiction buff, my thing was science-fiction. I still love it to this day, I just read less because I found another muse. This genre can be split in two categories (whose definition I have skewed a little). Hard science-fiction deals with scientific accuracy and world building. It’s data-happy and unapologetic. Think William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, etc. Soft science-fiction deals with uncanny atmospheres. Some of Philip K. Dick’s speculative fiction such as A SCANNER DARKLY would be soft science-fiction. Michael Offutt’s SLIPSTREAM is unapologetically hard sci-fi.
What you have to know before picking up SLIPSTREAM, is that it’s the first book of A CRISIS OF TWO WORLDS, that will end with OCCULUS in 2013. It’s the story of Jordan Pendragon, all-star high school hockey player with a knack for science. Pardon the euphemism, science is a second nature of him. Mathematics, particularly. After a car accident, life starts getting very strange for him. Due to am interesting twist of fate and a mysterious contraption (things I won’t spoil. Sci-Fi geeks will thank me), Jordan and his sister Kate are sent to a parallel dimension which was created with the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945. Things are SLIGHTLY worse over there than they are in our world as they live under the oppressive rule of a demented Artificial Intelligence who badly needs fixing.
I’ll have to stop there. I know I’m being obtuse here but one of the strongest point of SLIPSTREAM is the fluidity of it. Plot elements are built like Matryochka dolls and whenever something new comes up and clashes with the setting, Offutt does a great job explaining his concept and putting them at use. That’s what good hard science-fiction can do. It messes up with your suspension of disbelief, but only to expand it and build a bigger and bigger world. I’ll admit SLIPSTREAM brutalized me with data here and there. A bit like Neal Stephenson’s CRYPTONOMICON did a few years ago. I’m not comparing the two. SLIPSTREAM is a lot more eclectic (and less focused).
Have I been sleepwalking? he thought. (…) Jordan looked down at his hand and noticed a cut across the top of the knuckles. He made a fist and watched the blood well up, and run in a rivulet across his thin, white fingers. He rolled his hands, watching it.
He experienced no pain.
Chances are, if you’re not a science-fiction fan, SLIPSTREAM won’t change your mind about the genre. It’s a good novel, but it’s not a user-friendly entry door for sci-fi. If you’re familiar with it though and would like a good challenge, this is the book for you. Mike Offutt drops some hard science in this book. You will also find great settings, solid science and a few eerie scenes that will raise the hair from your forearms (like the one I just quoted above). If you’re into cyberpunk and dystopian stories, you will find SLIPSTREAM very satisfying.
THREE STARS
THREE STARS