New Book Alert: Slipstream (Book 1 of The Slipstream Series) by Alice Godwin; Strange and Lovely Mixture of Science Fiction and Fantasy Found in Travel Through Cyberspace

 

New Book Alert: Slipstream (Book 1 of The Slipstream Series) by Alice Godwin; Strange and Lovely Mixture of Science Fiction and Fantasy Found in Travel Through Cyberspace

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Slipstream by Alice Godwin is a very odd, strange, but somehow lovely mixture of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Thanks to the ability for one character to travel through dimensions and cyberspace, these genres have the ability to exist side by side, sometimes at the exact same time.

Jo, a detective, is investigating the death of a woman that seems to be connected to the Rapturists, a religious cult that disappeared at the turn of the century but has returned. During Jo's investigation, she encounters Connor, a stranger with a close connection to the deceased.

Meanwhile, Raven, a young woman, is investigating her ability to physically travel through the web. Many can in this book, but what makes Raven different is that she can do it without a device. Because of this, she is sensitive to electromagnetic pulses around her and can see various realities shift around her side by side. She can see figures from what she calls the slipstream when others cannot.

Halo, a Japanese immigrant, just left his family and is settling down with a pushy and persistent girlfriend, Azura.

 While going out, he encounters Raven after one of her slipstream encounters.  Halo learns Raven's backstory that she is considered a "Carnie," an orphan with no familial connections who steals codes and information to earn a living. He is attracted to her and wants to help her.

Eventually, these plots converge and are revealed to be connected. They offer more details to Raven's history and abilities.

By far the most interesting character in this book is Raven. Her powers are explored to their fullest and while Science Fiction in origin seems almost to border on Fantasy and Magic in their presentation. 

One of her travels is to an in-between world that she calls Ghostlands (where she floats around like a spirit). There she encounters a leonine creature that she calls Ceriful. Ceriful acts as a guide through these alternate realities, but his behavior is ambiguous whether he is helping or hurting Raven.

After receiving a tapestry from and growing closer to Halo, Raven has slipstreams in which she encounters fairies and unicorns. It's fascinating that Raven's version of Slipstreaming often involves fantasy and magical characters.

If you think about it, Raven's interest in the fantastic makes sense. She is a young woman with no known family. She was forced to mature at a young age and lives in a futuristic society where magic and fantasy is no longer valued. Slipstreaming is Raven's way of living in a world of the impossible, to capture the magical aspects of fairy tales and legends that she could not find in the physical world. Slipstream helps Raven find a measure of power and control to these narratives that she is deprived from.

In a way, Raven is like a futuristic Anne Shirley, a girl with no biological family and a fully developed imagination who can't always separate fantasy from reality. Though Raven's slipstreaming gives her the ability to interact with them in a way that Anne was unable to.

For the imaginative Bookworm, or Science Fiction or Fantasy geek, slipstreaming would seem like an ultimate thrill. It seems like a way to literally travel through cyberspace and into the imaginative dream worlds that exist in our minds.

However, through Raven's experiences, the Reader learns that slipstream can be a curse. Raven can't always control where she goes or what appears before her. She is sometimes attacked by her own mental demons to the point that she is in danger of succumbing to insanity. 

We also learn her history in which she has been targeted and experimented on from the time that she was born. Even her family has been the target of experiments that resulted in her astronomical powers. 

The end results of the experiments on Raven are a frightened embittered woman with an amazing ability to see into different worlds and dimensions but can't trust her own mind.