[ExI] Transrealism (was Re: J. Stanton)

[Damien Broderick]

On 11/22/2010 11:39 AM, J. Stanton wrote:

> One final question, which we can take off-list if it's too tangential:
> how do you consider James Tiptree, Jr. to be transrealist? She's one of
> my favorite authors, but I have a hard time lumping her in with Rucker
> and J. G. Ballard.

Alice Sheldon drew upon her very exotic and unusual experiences in her 
fiction, so I guess that makes her work notionally transrealist--but 
somehow it doesn't have the gnarly Phil Dick/Rudy Rucker zing I 
associate with transrealism (although obviously it did have other virtues).

You comment:

<instead of the transreal approach of "the world is a much stranger 
place than you think" (a valid approach, with great impact when done 
well), I go the opposite direction: "a world you originally understood 
to be fantastic is much more real than you think." >

My understanding of the term is fairly even-handed:

<Following sf writer Rudy Rucker, I call this way of doing things with 
words, images and ideas transrealism, although I extend his original 
coinage. Not only is transrealism writing about immediate reality—or 
your idiosyncratic perceptions of it—in a fantastic way, it is also a 
way of writing the fantastic from the standpoint of your richly 
personalized reality... quite a few writers in and out of science 
fiction have been eddying in the slipstream of science toward a gnarly 
attractor in narrative space (as a physicist might put it), a way of 
combining wild ideas, subversion and criticism of the supposedly 
inviolate Real, together with realistic thickening of the supposedly 
airy fantastic, all bound together in a passionate, noncompliant act of 
self-examination.>

Damien Broderick