In Pursuit of Omega Fiction

I love slipstream. (AKA Genre-bending) For me, it’s the epitome of imaginative fiction. The idea of ignoring genre boundaries and creating something that cannot be classified in a single genre (like Fantasy or Horror) is incredibly exciting, and I think that it’s not so much the wave of the future as it is a step toward the most profound, enlightening, and beautiful sort of literature the human mind may ever conceive of. I call this as yet unrealized pinnacle of written fiction Omega Fiction, or Fourth-Dimensional Fiction.

To me, two dimensional fiction is fiction that is literally flat. “John flew the aeroplane from Mars to the Moon” is two dimensional, no matter how much poetic metaphor or how many explosions you pen into it. Add a literary meaning to it, hidden messages, a profound intelligence that grows out of the words and takes root in the mind of the reader, and you have three dimensional fiction. Fourth-dimensional fiction takes the whole thing a step further by transcending boundaries, stretching the story to places it never would have gone as a two dimensional or a three dimensional story by making it slipstream through every genre simultaneously, without becoming bogged down or clogged by conflicting chunks that don’t integrate the way they should. That is Omega Fiction. Is it possible to create a Science Fiction / Fantasy / Horror / Mystery / Western / Romance that is both light-hearted and dark, intelligent and flashy, smooth and poetic, but rough and transgressive in all the right places? I think so, and I’ve set proving that it is as one of my many goals as a writer.

Expect more updates as I make my way steadily toward this goal.