Ice

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Anna Kavan’s Ice is a work of literary slipstream, one of the most significant novels of its type. It was the last of the novels she wrote (it was published in 1967, a year before her death), although two other novels, whose manuscripts were found in her papers, appeared later). It is serious, evocative and surprising, unique in its obsessive images of encroachment. It is also unusual for its virtually plotless story, told in scenes of happenstance and coincidence.

The idea of slipstream literature arose in the United States at the end of the 1980s. It was originally an attempt to identify a certain kind of ambitious science fiction, which lay outside the familiar pulp-magazine tropes of space travel, alien invasions, time travel and so on. Science-fiction writers whose work qualified as slipstream included J.G. Ballard, John Sladek, Thomas M. Disch, some of Philip K. Dick and several others. At the same time, other writers, who were outside the science-fiction genre but whose work could conceivably fit into the wider definition allowed by slipstream, were summoned in support. So Angela Carter, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs were some of the writers invoked in this cause. Another notable inclusion was, of course, Anna Kavan.

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