Imagining Slipstream: Undefining Reality in Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters

Set in post-Troubles Northern Ireland, Jan Carson’s 2019 speculative novel The Fire Starters depicts a Belfast both real and unreal: summers punctuated by multistory bonfires threaten to reignite old sectarian violence, and mythical sirens stoke chaos. Through speculative fiction studies’ varied claims against strict genre definition and Jacques Lacan’s concepts of glissement , jouissance , and the Real, this paper reimagines The Fire Starters as a slipstream text, disrupting reified notions of reality in Belfast to look towards more various futures. The paper concludes that the genre of slipstream is uniquely positioned for this complex post-Brexit moment in contemporary Troubles literature.